Building the AI Kingdom for Saudi Arabia’s Digital Future
Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions are entering a new phase. Across government entities, critical industries and private enterprises, AI is moving beyond pilot projects and proofs of concept into the systems that shape daily operations and long-term national competitiveness.
As thousands of technology leaders gather for LEAP 2026, the conversation is increasingly focused on practical questions of implementation, infrastructure, talent and governance.
The question that comes first
With AI seeping into everything technology has to offer, and when the conversation moves to the value of AI, Lakshimi Narayanan, General Manager at Mannai Information Technology Saudi Arabia, shared “The organisations getting real value decided what would change before what to buy.”
Those companies establish performance metrics before implementing, rebuild the process around the technology rather than retrofitting an old process with new technology, and hand it over to the department responsible for the results.
“A decision made multiple times a month is far more valuable than a strategically fascinating one made twice a year,” he said.
What the power feed will allow
Underneath all of the decisions that AI enables sits physical infrastructure, and data centres have their own limits. Sami Alfaraj, MEA Head of Technology at Submer, explains those buildings have outgrown their old category. “When 66 of Vision 2030’s 96 strategic objectives depend on data and AI, the infrastructure running those systems is no longer an IT asset. It is a national infrastructure, and it deserves to be designed like it,” he said.
For decades, facilities were designed first and filled with servers later. “AI inverts this. The accelerator roadmap now dictates the building,” Alfaraj said. One rack of today’s hardware draws over 100 kilowatts, more than ten older racks combined, and throws off heat that air cooling cannot shift.
Where it shows up in the work
Rahul Misra, Senior Vice President and Managing Director for MEA at IFS, works with industries where short delays cost real money. “For the Gulf states, where asset-heavy industries dominate the economy, industrial AI embeds intelligence directly into operational environments, transforming how organisations run their most critical processes. The biggest difference is autonomous operational orchestration,” he said. “Oil and gas, manufacturing, utilities, and logistics operate at scales where coordination delays directly impact margins and reliability.”
Systems that manage suppliers, stocking and maintenance scheduling across connected assets stop small problems from multiplying through a supply network and cut the hours lost due to unplanned downtime.
The same tools have sped up how quickly attackers get in, and Maher Jadallah, Vice President for Middle East and Africa at Tenable, says spotting a flaw is the easy half.
“Discovering a vulnerability is like identifying a symptom, and exposure management is the cure,” he said. The scoring system commonly used highlights up to 60 percent of flaws as high or critical, but only about 3 percent of flaws pose the risk of being exploited by attackers. Attacks are often conducted based on a single flaw and attackers combine minor flaws, open cloud configurations, excessive permissions, then attack something valuable.
“By the time an alert triggers, an automated attacker may have already explored the network,” he said, arguing that the answer is pre-emptive fireproofing.
For most employees, the change will be quieter. Murad Ali, Head of Middle East and Central Asia at Logitech for Business, mentions how office equipment enhances audio and video quality, facilitates setup, and connects people in the room with people at home. “Today’s modern offices are becoming increasingly smarter,” he said, with devices moving beyond their old role as simple accessories toward adaptation. Occupancy and environmental sensors now help manage meeting rooms directly. Cloud-based management systems give IT teams visibility and control over the devices and other details such as meeting frequency, attendance against room capacity and desk utilisation.
“AI should be viewed as a tool to enhance human collaboration and improve employee experiences,” he said, describing work tied to inclusiveness and sustainability as much as efficiency.
Narayanan expects the language to catch up within three years, when nobody will say ‘AI project’. “It will simply be how a specific use case or a task is designed, and that is the moment the technology has genuinely arrived,” he said.