The Future Of Customer Experience In The MENA Region Will Be Built Closer To Home
Ahmed Zaghmouri, Vice President of Revenue at Maqsam, explains how the region's homegrown companies are building Arabic AI that global platforms cannot replicate, simply because they are native to the market.
For a long time, customer experience (CX) technology followed a simple rule: bigger was better.
More features. More markets. More scale.
I spent over two decades working in that world, including roles at companies like Cisco, Avaya, and Genesys, helping build and deploy large enterprise platforms across regions. That experience shaped how I think about customer experience. But it also made something increasingly clear to me: that model is reaching its limits. Not because it failed, but because the world around it is changing.
A New Type Of Customer Has Emerged
The biggest driver of change in customer experience today is the change in customer expectations, not just the evolution of the technology surrounding CX. We are serving a different kind of customer today than we were just a few years ago, one shaped by ChatGPT and artificial intelligence (AI)-native experiences. They ask things differently. They expect faster, clearer, more human answers. They are more informed, less patient, and far less tolerant of rigid, scripted interactions.
This everyday-AI-era customer has a completely different relationship with information. They are used to conversational intelligence, instant context, and systems that adapt to them.
Still, so much of today’s customer experience technology was built for a pre-AI customer. That gap is becoming impossible to ignore.
AI Is Reshaping CX, Not Enhancing It
AI is already transforming contact centers, but what is still misunderstood is the scale of the shift ahead.
Over the next few years, between 50 percent and 70 percent of what we currently consider traditional customer experience systems will be replaced or fundamentally reimagined using AI-driven approaches.
Too many companies still treat AI as a generic layer, and bolt it onto existing workflows and hope for efficiency gains. That approach misses the point, and a more thorough approach is needed where tools are rebuilt from the ground up on AI technology.
AI forces us to ask harder questions. What should machines do better than humans? What should always remain human? Where does automation genuinely improve experience, and where does it quietly damage trust?
The Hardest Problem In AI Is Not Language, It Is Meaning
The most difficult challenge in AI-powered customer experience is managing unspoken customer expectations, like understanding meaning through cultural context, while current tech is still dealing with the most basic problems of speech recognition and translation.
To deliver great customer experience, AI must understand not just what customers say, but how they say it, why they say it, and what they expect in return.
This is why many global platforms struggle to get new tools adopted in every region, because customer experience is not a singular, universal thing that can be treated by one-size-fits-all technology.
Why CX Technology Is Becoming Regional Again
Customer experience has always been local, and nowhere is this more obvious than in Arabic-speaking markets. Arabic is not one language. It has many dialects, tones, and cultural signals layered on top of each other. You cannot train AI to understand that from a distance, you have to train it natively on the Arabic language, and not rely on clunky translations.
This is why regional, AI-first companies are pulling ahead. They are not adapting AI for the region, but have been building it for the region from day one. They understand the mother tongue, local customer behavior, and are training AI on real conversations.
The Next CX Leaders Will Not Be The Biggest Ones
The next generation of customer experience companies will look very different from the last.
They will be significantly more agile.
When your engineering foundations are built around AI from day one, you move faster. You ship capabilities faster. You adapt faster to how customers actually behave. Large global platforms, burdened by decades of legacy technology and processes, cannot do this without disrupting themselves in the process.
For AI-native companies, AI is not a disruption. It is the foundation.
That difference matters more than most people realize.
Why I Chose To Make The Move
I did not leave the enterprise world because it stopped working. I left because I could see where the real momentum was coming from.
A new generation of companies is emerging that are closer to customers and the real problems that need solving.
In markets like the MENA, this shift is already happening. Homegrown companies are building Arabic AI that global platforms cannot replicate, simply because they are native to the market.
Image courtesy Maqsam.
Why Now, And Why Maqsam
The timing matters.
AI adoption in customer experience is accelerating, yet many enterprise platforms are still trying to adapt foundations that were never designed for this moment. The enterprise I work at today, Maqsam, does not have that constraint.
It is built for speed, adaptability, and depth of understanding. Built with AI at the core, and language as a first-class input, not an afterthought.
What excites me most is Maqsam’s AI agent, an Arabic-native product designed to understand dialect, nuance, and context in a way global platforms simply can’t replicate. It is AI built from the ground up for Arabic customer conversations, not as an afterthought, and certainly not like a global model trying to approximate the language through translation.
For me personally, this moment aligns perfectly. After years of operating at scale, this is where experience can have the greatest impact. Customer experience is being redefined in real time. AI is no longer theoretical, and regional players are not playing catch up, but leading the market.
What Comes Next
The winners will be companies that build technology with cultural intelligence that know when to automate and when to step back, and that respect the human side of every interaction.
The future of customer experience belongs to the agile, the AI-first, and the regional.
And that future is already being built, closer to home.
About The Author
Ahmed Zaghmouri is the Vice President of Revenue at Maqsam, an Arab technology company creating AI-powered solutions for customer service in the region and beyond. Their two flagship products are the Arabic-native AI agent, a culturally intelligent virtual teammate that provides instant, human-like support, and the customer service software, a complete platform for managing calls, messages, and conversations. Together, these products empower businesses to transform every customer interaction into an experience that builds trust, loyalty, and growth.
Pictured in the lead image is Ahmed Zaghmouri, Vice President of Revenue at Maqsam. Image courtesy Maqsam.
This article first appeared in Inc. Arabia's February 2026 edition. To read the full issue online, click here.
