Middle East prepares for AI acceleration

Key points

The new space race is AI.

• While early AI investment was generally motivated by a desire to move ahead, today's focus is increasingly on attaining competitive parity—ensuring that a company does not fall behind. 
• As a result, regional leaders, particularly those in the Middle East, are realizing AI's rising importance and incorporating it into national economic plans, organizational structures, and culture.

AI is a job creator.

• Despite widespread media coverage of AI's potential to replace workers, actual data gathered by the IBM Institute for Business Value over several years refutes this claim.
• Executives from throughout the world. Executives throughout the world, including those in the Middle East, regularly tell us that they are focusing their efforts on revenue, sales, and experience-related areas rather than cost takeouts.

Trusted AI sets itself apart

Concerns regarding AI's trustworthiness, privacy, and transparency, if left unaddressed, might stymie adoption. If organizations want to preserve consumer confidence in AI-enabled services, processes, and activities, they must be addressed directly.

The following are the guiding principles for implementing trust and transparency successfully:

• Human enhancement, not a replacement, is where AI's value resides.
• AI systems will not become aware of sentient, but will instead be incorporated into the world's processes, systems, and interactions.
• Human decision-making, judgment, intuition, or ethical decisions cannot and will not be replaced by AI.
• Organizations that use AI must be prepared to explain how their algorithms came up with their suggestions.

Emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trends in the Middle East

IBV polled 200 business leaders from around the area (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar) In 2016, 20% of Middle Eastern CEOs said they were not exploring AI for their company. The remaining 63 percent were either thinking about it or analyzing it. A comparable AI poll of 6,050 people was performed in 2016.

The UAE is a regional leader in embracing AI's potential.

Across all industries, the UAE is employing four strategic levers: 

• Establishing leadership and governance around AI to increase public trust and confidence in emerging technology.
• Increasing AI capacity while focused on talent and skills 
•  Increasing AI capacity while focused on talent and skills 

There is no AI without data.

Data-driven cities are on the rise.

• Investments in new initiatives, programmes, and strategy alignment have increased throughout the Middle East.
• According to IBM's C-suite research "Build Your Trust Advantage" for 2019, early adopters of smart cities are seeing the benefits of investing in key new technologies.
• The Torchbearers possessed three times the amount of reliable and actionable data as their counterparts. They did it by integrating their business and data objectives, coordinating them throughout the C-suite, and establishing a distinct data culture.
• Improved speed to market and the acceleration of AI initiatives were the constant outcomes. It's all about c in the new AI world.
• Convergence can occur due to new technology, data, or skills.
• According to Torchbearer CxO, if businesses in the Middle East are to benefit from this exponential surge in potential, they must improve consumer confidence in their companies.

Taking notes from AI pioneers

• A group of corporate leaders from around the world scored very well on various AI-related measures. 
• They are concerned about the scarcity of AI capabilities in the labor market but are confident in their capacity to recruit and develop them.
• The group of innovators in our sample is very small, accounting for around 10% of all CEOs polled internationally.
• Ninety-four percent of Middle Eastern innovators believe that as AI technology advances, staff skills will need to alter. In the Middle East, 100% of AI innovators said they already had the requisite skills in-house to apply AI within their companies.
• By enhancing individual client connections and allowing staff to focus on higher-value tasks, AI may help enhance customer happiness and retention.
• From sales and marketing to finance and IT, thirteen company functions were evaluated.
• Within each of the 13 overall functions, we looked at sub-functions.
• When used to information security, AI can help detect fraud faster and more reliably.

Business executives may use a three-phase approach to boost AI adoption in their businesses.

• Phase 1: Visualize
• Phase 2: Come up with new ideas
• Execution is the third phase