BusinessToday Middle East
Page 1 / 96
BUILDING A NEW MODEL FOR DENTAL CARE O C T O B E R 2 0 2 6 HOW DR. ESSA N. AL ESSA BUILT ASNAN TOWER AROUND A SPECIALIST-LED MODEL, AND WHY HIS REAL TEST OF SUCCESS IS A COMPANY THAT NO LONGER NEEDS HIM. TOP 50 HEALTHCARE LEADERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Villa Luxury, Redefined. When space and setting matter. A villa experience shaped by nature and a calm coastal environment. Thoughtful dining venues and well-appointed wellness facilities support both focused days and relaxed moments, creating a stay that feels balanced and complete. Villa stays starting from AED 3,750. ANANTARA MINA RAS AL KHAIMAH RESORT P.O. Box 4005, Al Huwailat St, Mina, Ras Al Khaimah, UAE | +971 720 42222 | rasalkhaimah@anantara.com ANANTARA.COM
OCTOBER 2026 CONTENTS BIZTODAYME @BIZTODAYME BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST 3 CONTENTS 10 EDITOR’S NOTE 12 NEWS 18 OPINION Why Power, Not Capital, Is the Real Constraint on Gulf AI Growth 20 GEOPOLITICS What the Strait of Hormuz Closure Revealed About Doing Business in the Gulf 22 MARKETING & MEDIA Nedaa Al Mubarak: Reach Is the Easy Part, Relevance Has to Be Earned 24 EDUCATION Inside Alef Education’s Approach to Building for Every Learner 26 COVER STORY Building a New Model for Dental Care: Inside Asnan Tower with Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Essa N. Al Essa 52 FINTECH Botim’s Fintech Playbook: COO Sacha Haider on Building One Connected Financial Ecosystem 56 TECH LEADERS Inside Inception42: Ashish Koshy on Sovereign AI, “Death by Pilot” and the UAE’s Agentic Future 34 LIST 86 HOSPITALITY Novotel Suites & ibis Mall Avenue: The Case for Midscale in a Luxury- Saturated Market 90 SPORTS Formula 1 Returns to Jeddah in March 2027 92 CARS Made in the Emirates: ROX Starts Building Cars in Abu Dhabi 94 LAST LOOK On the Move: TUMI’s Autumn/Winter Edit THE BUSINESS OF REAL AI: A BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST ROUNDTABLE 50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE 60 68 CYBERSECURITY Cybersecurity Enters a New Era of Risk 74 INTERVIEW Hisense’s Jason Ou: From Budget Alternative to Regional Technology Leaders 78 CONSUMER TECH Debo Zhang on Winning Over the Gulf’s Pragmatic Buyers 82 KARINE OBEGI ON BUILDING OBEGI HOME’S SAUDI FOUNDATIONS WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 3
Standard Chartered Bank UAE is licensed by the Central Bank of the UAE Corporate & Investment Banking. Global Markets. Global Banking. Transaction Services. Now is your time sc.com/cib Make growth your next stop Dub Johannesburg New York
London Singapore bai Shanghai
BUILT FOR MOMENTS THAT MATTER EXTRAORDINARY Escape to a home where urban sophistication meets resort tranquility. PRIVATE POOLS | 30+ AMENITIES | PRIME LOCATIONS 800-SAMANA | WWW.SAMANADEVELOPERS.COM
DISCOVER REFINED living *Ranking as per the H2025 1 sales volume data of property monitor for Dubai
SUBSCRIBE subscriptions@bncpublishing.net PO Box 502511 Dubai, United Arab Emirates P +971 4 4200 506 | F +971 4 4200 196 For all commercial enquiries, contact jo@bncpublishing.net T +971 50 440 2706 All rights reserved © 2026. The opinions expressed are solely those of the contributors. Business Today Middle East and its affiliated publications in the MENA region are exclusively licensed to BNC Publishing. No part of this magazine may be copied, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent from the publisher. Printed by United Printing and Publishing | upp.ae Images used in Business Today Middle East are credited where necessary. Copyrighted images are used with permission. All uncredited images courtesy of Shutterstock. CEO WISSAM YOUNANE | wissam@bncpublishing.net Managing Director RABIH NAJM | rabih@bncpublishing.net Group Publishing Director JOAQUIM D'COSTA | jo@bncpublishing.net Editor AYA ZHANG | aya@bncpublishing.net Editor, Special Projects KASUN ILLANKOON | kasun@bncpublishing.net Digital Reporter REEBA ASGHAR | reeba@bncpublishing.net Creative Lead CHRISTIAN HARB | chriss@bncpublishing.net Junior Art Director IKA WAHYUNI Business Development Director ANDY SOULAHIAN | andy.soulahian@bncpublishing.net Commercial Director ANDREA MOCAY | andrea@bncpublishing.net KSA country manager AMJAD FAKHOURI | amjad@bncpublishing.net Marketing Executive AARON JOSHUA SINANBAM | aj@bncpublishing.net Videographers EDUARDO BUENAGUA HARTON OTLANG JOEL AMPARO Contributors LIAM HURLEY MOHAMED BAHAA BIZTODAYME @BIZTODAYME BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST BIZTODAYME BIZTODAYME BUSINESSTODAY.ME 8 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Das gute Licht. Returns darkness to the night BEGA pole-top luminaires with Dark Sky technology direct the light in a highly efficient manner only where it is required. Light pollution of the night sky is avoided. bega.com/darksky
10 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026 Aya Zhang Editor aya@bncpublishing.net Xiaoyue (Aya) Zhang xiaoyuezhangg A t a recent roundtable I moderated, one of our speakers said something that has stayed with me. Asked when he would let an AI agent manage his money, he answered honestly: not yet. He said he would get there, but only once the rules around it had earned his confidence. It struck me because it applies well beyond technology. Every major shift the region is going through, from new industries to new ways of delivering public services, depends less on what is possible and more on what people are willing to accept. Capital, talent and ambition are rarely in short supply in the Gulf. Trust takes longer to build, and it cannot be bought. The companies that seem to understand this move differently. They explain before they launch. They admit what they do not know. They treat regulators as partners rather than obstacles, and they bring their own employees along instead of announcing change from the top. As we head into the final quarter of the year, it feels like the right question for any leader to ask. Not only whether a strategy is bold enough, but whether the people it depends on believe in it. I hope this issue gives you something to think about. LETTER FROM EDITOR EARNING CONFIDENCE
Require formwork and scaffolding? Check out Doka’s extensive list of products and systems, which now includes scaffolding for a variety of applications. At Doka, our philosophy is to provide a broad range of services under one umbrella based on a growing demand for single-source solutions that adhere to the highest standards. One-stop-shop meaapmarketing@doka.com | www.doka-me.com /DokaMEA /company/doka-middle-east-africa /doka_mea
NEWS OSUS BEGINS CONSTRUCTION ON OSUS EYE S audi developer OSUS has begun construction on OSUS Eye, a mixed-use development planned as a “10-Minute City,” where residents and visitors can reach their daily needs within a short, connected area. The project will bring together living, working, hospitality, shopping and entertainment in a single destination. Several international companies are involved, including Hilton as operator of the branded residences and hotel, RMJM on the master design, Cracknell on landscape design, and TRI as the hospitality and entertainment consultant. OSUS says construction is progressing in line with the approved plans and timelines. REAL ESTATE 12 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
HRH Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince, Prime Minister and Chairman of PIF, has unveiled EXOBOT, the first electric vehicles from CEER, Saudi Arabia’s national automotive company. The EXOBOT sedan and SUV were designed, engineered and manufactured in the Kingdom. They are the first of a planned seven models to launch over the next five years, including midsize and compact vehicles with a range of propulsion options. The vehicles will be built at the CEER Manufacturing Complex, which the company describes as the largest automotive production facility in the Middle East. Launched by PIF in 2022 as the first Saudi vehicle brand, CEER is projected to contribute $8 billion to Saudi GDP and $21 billion to trade balance improvement by 2034. SAUDI CROWN PRINCE UNVEILS CEER’S FIRST ELECTRIC VEHICLES PIF has launched Tawrid Company for Financing Solutions, a digital platform offering supply-chain financing to companies across Saudi Arabia, with a focus on small and medium-sized enterprises. The platform connects buyers, suppliers and funders, offering products such as early settlement against approved invoices to help businesses improve working capital and liquidity. Tawrid has received a permit from the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA) to operate within its regulatory sandbox. It has already begun operations, and has signed binding agreements with Gulf International Bank, Saudi National Bank, Banque Saudi Fransi, ROSHN Group and Nesma & Partners. The launch supports PIF’s 2026–2030 strategy to increase private-sector participation in the Saudi economy. PIF LAUNCHES TAWRID TO OFFER SUPPLY-CHAIN FINANCING IN SAUDI ARABIA FINTECH AUTOMOTIVE WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 13
NEWS Eagle Hills has signed a commercial terms agreement with the Government of Maldives to develop Maldives Waterfront and Marina, an integrated island destination in the Ras Malé area, with an overall development scale of around $20 billion across several phases. The project will combine hotels, residences and branded residences, a marina, retail and leisure with education, healthcare and community facilities. At full maturity, it is projected to welcome more than one million visitors a year and generate over $2 billion in annual tourism revenue. Preliminary estimates suggest it could attract more than $30 billion in gross foreign investment and create over 54,000 jobs over its lifetime. The Maldives’ Minister of Infrastructure, Housing and Urban Development, Dr. Abdulla Muththalib, called it “the largest investment programme in our history.” EAGLE HILLS SIGNS $20 BILLION MALDIVES WATERFRONT DEAL UAE E-COMMERCE SET TO REACH AED 67.2 BILLION BY 2030 The UAE’s e-commerce market reached AED 42.2 billion ($11.5 billion) in 2025, up from AED 17.6 billion in 2020, according to the sixth annual e-commerce report from EZDubai Logistics Hub at Dubai South, produced with Euromonitor International. The market is forecast to grow at 9.9% a year to around AED 67.2 billion by 2030, and online sales are expected to exceed 20% of total retail, up from 15.7% in 2025. Apparel and footwear was the UAE’s largest category last year, at AED 11.4 billion. Across MENASA, e-commerce more than doubled between 2020 and 2025 to AED 519.2 billion, and is projected to reach AED 909.3 billion by 2030. E-COMMERCE DEVELOPMENT 14 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
THANI AL ZEYOUDI ADVANCES UAE TRADE TIES AT UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY Dr. Thani Al Zeyoudi, Minister of Foreign Trade, has concluded a week of high-level meetings on the sidelines of the 81st UN General Assembly in New York. His programme focused on increasing trade and investment flows, mobilising development finance and deepening economic ties with international partners. He met Thailand’s Minister of Commerce, Suphajee Suthumpun, Peru’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Tourism, Rogers Espinoza, and Argentina’s Minister of International Trade, Pablo Quirno, to discuss expanding bilateral trade and investment. He also joined roundtables with the Business Council for International Understanding and the UAE Investment Council, and took part in forums hosted by organisations including the UAE-US Business Council. TRADE WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 15
NEWS CHINA AND US AGREE TO CUT TARIFFS ON $30 BILLION OF GOODS ECONOMY China and the United States have agreed to reduce tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods in each direction and to begin discussions on artificial intelligence, following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, Reuters reported. According to a White House statement, the two countries reached a consensus on more favourable tariff treatment for non-sensitive goods. The cuts will apply to US exports to China including agricultural products, wood products and cosmetics, and to Chinese goods entering the US such as small household appliances, toys and decorations. WORLD STANDARD CHARTERED FORECASTS 3.5% GROWTH FOR OMAN IN 2026 AND 2027 Standard Chartered expects Oman’s GDP to grow 3.5% in both 2026 and 2027, driven by resilient non-oil activity, particularly logistics and manufacturing, alongside public investment linked to Oman Vision 2040. The bank has sharply raised its fiscal surplus forecast to 4.6% of GDP in 2026 and 3.6% in 2027, up from 0.5% and 1.0%. It also expects public debt to fall to around 33% of GDP by the end of 2026 and 31% by the end of 2027. As investors reassess regional supply chains, the bank sees Oman’s location, neutral diplomatic stance and relatively low exposure to conflict spillover strengthening the appeal of its ports and logistics infrastructure. “Oman’s advantage is increasingly about connectivity as well as resilience,” said Hussain Al Yafai, CEO and Head of Coverage at Standard Chartered Oman. 16 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa set out his vision for the country’s economic recovery during the opening session of the Arab Media Summit 2026 in Dubai. Following the US decision to lift sanctions, he said Syria had been “born again.” He pointed to DP World’s investment in the Port of Tartus, and its connection with Jebel Ali Port, as an example of growing opportunities for investors, adding that talks on further UAE investment are underway and that Gulf and European investors are showing significant interest. According to Al-Sharaa, Syria’s economy, which fell from around $60 billion to $20 billion, reached approximately $32 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow to $50 billion in 2027. He said it could reach $200 billion by the end of the next decade if regional stability holds. MICROSOFT PUBLISHES DRAFT CODE TO KEEP AI UNDER HUMAN CONTROL Microsoft has released a 37-page draft “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” designed to ensure future artificial intelligence stays under human control and never resists being shut down. The company is inviting feedback on the draft over the next six weeks, and will publish a revised version before the end of the year. The code will guide the development of Microsoft AI (MAI) models in 2027 and beyond, and will be updated through similar consultations over time. “This Code of Conduct is motivated by a single overriding objective: that humans must retain meaningful control over AI,” the company said. INVESTMENT AL-SHARAA PRESENTS SYRIA AS AN INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY AT ARAB MEDIA SUMMIT AI GOVERNANCE WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 17
OPINION WHY POWER, NOT CAPITAL, IS THE REAL CONSTRAINT ON GULF AI GROWTH Power, not capital, is becoming the binding constraint on Gulf AI growth. Energy security and sustainability aren’t competing priorities, but the same planning problem. BY LIAM HURLEY is slowing down, nor should it. While the scale of investment is significant, the challenge facing operators in the Gulf is fundamentally the same as that facing their counterparts in Virginia, Frankfurt or Singapore: how to secure enough reliable power while continuing to advance sustainability objectives. What has changed is the conversation underneath it. For years, the regional energy story was framed as a transition: move from fossil fuels to renewables, on a clear timeline, with clean energy gradually taking a larger share. That framing still matters, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. The more urgent question now is whether there will be enough power, of any kind, to support the pace of AI growth while renewable capacity scales alongside it. A 2026 Wood Mackenzie analysis brings this into focus, projecting that data center power consumption in the UAE will surpass 6TWh by 2030. Crucially, the report notes that even when clean energy is available, regulatory gaps prevent operators from directly buying it at scale, creating a stark lag between digital expansion and clean power procurement. Energy security and sustainability are not in competition. They are the same planning problem, viewed from two angles. The facilities supporting AI growth cannot compromise on uptime, but neither can they ignore growing expectations around emissions, efficiency, and renewable energy adoption. Success increasingly depends on balancing both requirements simultaneously. This is where renewables become operationally interesting - solar offers the cheapest power available when conditions allow, but conditions do not always allow. Wind has the E very region racing to build artificial intelligence infrastructure is running into the same wall. North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East are each pouring billions into hyperscale data centers, only to discover that the ultimate bottleneck is no longer a lack of capital. AI may be built on algorithms, but its growth increasingly depends on access to reliable electricity. Power is emerging as one of the defining constraints of the next phase of digital infrastructure growth. This is because AI chips process data completely differently than traditional Liam Hurley, President, Emerson Middle East and Africa computer servers, requiring vastly more power packed into the exact same physical footprint. According to PwC, AI-focused data centers require up to 10 times more power than traditional facilities, making power availability and consumption critical structural issues. These facilities draw massive, substantial loads with 99.99% uptime needed throughout the year. At the same time, the developers building these projects and the operators running them are under real pressure to decarbonise. Reliability and sustainability are no longer separate objectives but part of the same operational challenge. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have both made AI leadership a national priority, and the infrastructure investment that follows is substantial. Microsoft and G42’s Stargate UAE venture sits inside a planned 5-gigawatt AI campus in Abu Dhabi, AWS and e&’s regional cloud agreement, and du’s hyperscale build with Microsoft are just a few signals of how quickly capacity is being added. Data center power demand in the UAE is expected to double by 2030, and the region as a whole is projected to nearly triple its data center capacity by the end of the decade. None of this 18 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
same character. Add storage and the picture improves considerably, but it does not remove the underlying truth that intermittent power generation behaves differently to the gas and nuclear baseload that hyperscale facilities have relied on. The question facing operators is not whether renewables will take a larger share of the regional energy mix. They will. The question is how a facility keeps its commitments to uptime while that share grows. The same logic extends to backup power. Operators across the region are already finding ways to lower the emissions profile of even their most conventional systems, leading this charge is Khazna Data Centers, the UAE’s largest data center operator. And projects such as Abu Dhabi’s 24/7 renewable energy initiative demonstrate how the conversation is evolving beyond simply adding more solar capacity. The focus is increasingly on how renewable power generation, storage and advanced control technologies can work together to deliver the consistency traditionally associated with baseload power. It pairs more than five gigawatts of solar with nineteen gigawatt-hours of battery storage to deliver a steady one gigawatt of baseload power around the clock. The point is that solar and storage, managed well, can behave like baseload rather than like weather. That is the standard hyperscale operators need their own energy strategies to meet. Furthermore, getting there requires a shift in how facilities are designed. A data center built today has a lifespan of at least 10 years, by which point its energy mix will almost certainly look different to its mix when commissioned. Designing only for today’s grid, with no path to add solar, storage or new power generation later, creates a facility that has to be retrofitted under pressure rather than upgraded on its own terms. Designing for flexibility from day one, with the ability to bring in new power generation, storage and forecasting as they become viable, is the more durable approach. This is what we mean by renewable-ready: not a commitment to any single energy source, but the operational capacity to adopt new ones as they make sense. The challenge is that flexibility becomes harder as energy systems become more diverse. A facility drawing power from a combination of grid supply, renewable assets, battery storage and backup generation must be able to understand and coordinate those resources in real time. Without that visibility, complexity can quickly become operational risk. In practice, that means an operator needs visibility across everything feeding the facility, not just the grid connection. Solar and wind assets, battery storage, backup generation, load-shedding triggers and weather forecasting all need to be readable from one place, so that decisions about where power comes from at any given moment can be made quickly and with full information. Trying to manage this across a dozen disconnected systems is how good intentions turn into operational risk. None of this changes the trajectory the region is on. AI investment will keep arriving. Data center capacity will keep expanding. Renewable energy will keep taking a larger share of how that capacity is powered, supported by genuinely significant regional commitments to clean energy infrastructure. The operators who manage this well will not be the ones who pick a single energy strategy and hold to it regardless of circumstance. They will be the ones who built their facilities to flex from the outset, treating reliability and sustainability as the same objective rather than a trade-off to be managed later. That is the roadmap worth building toward now, while the region still has the chance to build it rather than bolt it on. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 19
GEOPOLITICS chief executive operating in the Middle East today depends on capital, supply chains, regulatory frameworks, customers, investors, and talent drawn from every corner of the world. Each was built separately, and on the assumption that it could be managed separately. That assumption has stopped holding. What changed is visibility. Whether it’s in Africa, Asia, Europe, or the US, a commitment made to a regulator in one market is now read by a co-investor in another. A position taken globally is read locally, and a position taken locally is read globally. Companies that could once run different registers for different audiences are finding that the audiences have merged. The question this creates for leadership is no longer who to influence. It is how to behave when governments, markets, communities and technologies pull in different directions at once. That is the discipline of corporate diplomacy: making sure a company’s operational decisions, WHAT THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ CLOSURE REVEALED ABOUT DOING BUSINESS IN THE GULF Why the Strait of Hormuz closure exposed which Gulf- operating companies were prepared for geopolitical shock, and why managing competing government, investor and public expectations has moved from the sidelines to the centre of corporate strategy. stakeholder relationships and public positioning don’t contradict one another. The remit now runs across capital allocation, supply chains, data architecture, market entry, workforce policy, partnerships and executive communications, which is why the people doing this work increasingly resemble career diplomats. THE INTEROPERABLE ENTERPRISE The trait that survives this pressure is interoperability. An interoperable enterprise can work across competing technology ecosystems without losing control of its data or its compliance position. It can engage governments without becoming an extension of their politics. It can accept sovereign and international capital without conflicting expectations about what that capital buys. It can localise meaningfully while maintaining global standards, and adapt supply chains without undermining long-term national partnerships. This is no longer a matter of tone. Beijing has invoked its Anti-Foreign A Mohamed Bahaa, Managing Director, Private Sector, MENA – APCO BY MOHAMED BAHAA Gulf crude exports fell from 16.3 million barrels per day to 1.2 million following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Sanctions Law for the first time, barring companies from complying with U.S. sanctions and export controls. For Gulf firms that trade with both Washington and Beijing, that’s two sets of legal obligations that can’t be reconciled, and enforcement risk on both sides at once. No amount of careful messaging resolves it. What partially does is the 20 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
operating structure, partnerships and standing relationships that give a company somewhere to move. Companies that treat this as a communications problem discover, usually at the worst moment, that the contradiction was built months earlier by people who were solving for something else. As one global financial services leader put it in APCO’s 2026 Collaborative research, regulators may respect what a company does and still dislike where it is headquartered. WHAT HORMUZ TESTED The closure of the Strait of Hormuz tested this in live conditions. Gulf crude exports fell from 16.3 million barrels per day to 1.2 million, our Mid- Year Geopolitical Radar records, as Saudi Arabia and the UAE rerouted 3.7 million barrels per day through alternative ports. War-risk premiums rose, insurance cover grew more restrictive and uneven across routes and operators, and the Cape of Good Hope became the default Asia– Europe corridor. Firms rerouted logistics, diversified export infrastructure and revised sourcing. In our work across the region, the companies that moved fastest had one thing in common: they already held relationships, permissions and operating options across more than one jurisdiction — established well before they were needed. That is the practical case for corporate diplomacy: keeping options open across jurisdictions that don’t always agree, so a shock in one doesn’t close down the others. FOUR QUESTIONS FOR THE EXECUTIVE TEAM Corporate diplomacy used to sit at the edge of the business. It’s moved to the centre, and the capital flows show why. LSEG Deals Intelligence recorded 1,380 announced M&A transactions with MENA involvement in 2025, an all- time high, carrying a combined value of USD 193.1 billion. Regional outbound dealmaking reached a record USD 101.2 billion while deals involving a MENA target rose 164 per cent to USD 80.5 billion. Capital is moving in both directions at once, and companies here are increasingly exposed to scrutiny in the markets they invest in as well as those they operate in. Sovereign investors anchor much of that activity. The Sovereign Wealth Funds Report 2026 from IE University’s Center for the Governance of Change places Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Qatar’s QIA second and third globally by deal value, within a universe now managing USD 15.1 trillion. Capital that concentrated carries expectations with it, and those expectations are increasingly non-financial. In the Oxford-GlobeScan survey carried in the Global Corporate & Government Affairs Collaborative report, 76 per cent of corporate affairs professionals named geopolitical risk and uncertainty as a short-term risk to global business, ahead of every other category on the list, up from 70 per cent a year earlier. Executive teams can test their own exposure with four questions: • Where do competing political expectations leave us exposed? • Which relationships would sustain our licence to operate through a geopolitical shock? • Can our global values withstand local scrutiny? • And who has the authority to reconcile government expectations with commercial, operational and reputational realities? If the answers sit in four different departments, the company isn’t prepared. The work of the most interoperable enterprises is bringing those departments together before a crisis forces the issue. That makes a business more capable rather than more political, in an environment where politics now sits inside almost every material decision. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mohamed Bahaa is Managing Director, Private Sector, MENA at APCO. He advises multinational and regional companies across sectors on navigating the MENA region’s geopolitical, regulatory, and policy environment, with particular expertise in market access, investment laws, government partnerships, and regulatory strategy. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 21
MARKETING & MEDIA N edaa Al Mubarak’s path to media took an unusual route, through economic advisory roles at three Saudi government ministries before she arrived at the commercial arm of one of the region’s largest media groups. That background shows in how she talks about the industry: less in terms of platforms and placements, more in terms of evidence, audience behaviour and what the numbers actually prove. We spoke to her about the mistakes brands make entering Saudi Arabia’s ad market, what integration really means beyond buzzwords, and the pattern in a year of campaign data that changed how she advises clients. A BRAND DECIDING TO INVEST SERIOUSLY IN SAUDI ARABIA’S AD MARKET FOR THE FIRST TIME. WHAT’S THE BIGGEST MISTAKE YOU SEE THEM MAKE IN YEAR ONE? The biggest mistake is treating market entry as a media buy. Entry to the Kingdom is an audience and content question long before it is a spending one. The familiar instinct is to lift a global strategy, render it in Arabic and trust that what worked elsewhere will work again. A stronger approach starts with Saudi audience data: who the consumer is, what they value, how they consume content and what genuinely shapes their decisions. Strategy, channel selection and creativity should then follow from that evidence. Reach is relatively easy to buy. Relevance has to be earned through precision and a real understanding of how audiences in the Kingdom engage with premium content. That means building around market nuances and relevant cultural moments, music, talent and formats, rather than simply localising global assets. The first year should establish credibility and generate evidence about what works; scale should follow from that. MANY BRANDS STILL APPROACH MEDIA AS A SERIES OF INDIVIDUAL PLACEMENTS. IN YOUR VIEW, WHAT NEDAA AL MUBARAK: REACH IS THE EASY PART, RELEVANCE HAS TO BE EARNED Nedaa Al Mubarak, CEO of SRMG Media Solutions (SMS), on the biggest mistake brands make entering Saudi Arabia, what a genuinely integrated media strategy delivers over standalone placements, and the four questions every brand should ask before trusting a partner’s data. Nedaa Al Mubarak, CEO of SRMG Media Solutions (SMS) 22 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
DOES AN INTEGRATED STRATEGY DELIVER THAT A PLACEMENT-LED APPROACH CAN’T, AND HOW DO THE DIFFERENT SERVICES FIT TOGETHER TO SERVE A BRAND’S OBJECTIVE? Placements remain a legitimate part of any plan, and they are still requested for good reason. The wider opportunity lies in what becomes possible when a placement is set within a broader structure, built around a defined business objective and audience. At SMS, integration means giving each part of the plan a specific job. Audience insight defines who the campaign needs to reach and the evidence behind how that audience makes decisions. SRMG’s premium media portfolio carries the message into relevant, trusted environments. Content and storytelling create different ways for audiences to discover and engage with brands through branded content, video, social storytelling, activations, influencer partnerships and other tailored formats. Events and brand experiences can extend the story into settings audiences choose to be part of. The point is not to use every format, but to use the right combination against a clear objective and metric. The value of that structure becomes clear while a campaign is live. Data from each component can inform the others, allowing performance to be monitored and the plan refined where the format and agreed metrics allow. A brand therefore ends the campaign with clearer evidence of what worked, which can be applied to the next investment. FIRST-PARTY DATA IS NOW CENTRAL TO HOW ADVERTISERS JUSTIFY SPEND. IN PRACTICAL TERMS, WHAT SHOULD A BRAND ACTUALLY BE ASKING A MEDIA PARTNER TO PROVE BEFORE COMMITTING BUDGET? First-party data is no longer a competitive advantage. It is a baseline expectation. The differentiator is the quality and usefulness of that data: where it comes from, how well it is understood and how effectively it can be activated. Four elements help determine the value of first-party data. The first is provenance: where the data originates and on what basis of consent it was collected. The second is composition: what proportion of an audience is directly known and what proportion is modelled. Modelling is a legitimate and often necessary discipline, provided its inputs are sound and openly disclosed. What matters is understanding its weight. The third is activation: whether the resulting segments can be deployed in practice across the partner’s environments rather than merely described in a document. The fourth is verification: how performance will be measured and whether the brand can confirm the result independently. These four questions allow a brand to compare partners on evidence, rather than headline audience size alone. WHAT’S A PIECE OF EVIDENCE OR A NUMBER THAT CHANGED HOW YOU PERSONALLY THINK BRANDS SHOULD BE SPENDING IN THIS REGION, SOMETHING THAT SURPRISED YOU ENOUGH TO CHANGE YOUR OWN ADVICE TO CLIENTS? What changed my thinking was not a single number but the volume of campaigns we ran across SRMG’s portfolio in 2025, and the pattern that became visible at that scale. Looking across that volume challenged the idea that reach alone is the best guide to investment. SMS reaches more than 270 million people through over 25 premium brands, but campaign performance depends on how that reach is used. Three patterns recur. First, coordinated presence across relevant platforms gives brands multiple, complementary touchpoints rather than one isolated exposure. Second, many organisations move on from a message before it has built sufficient frequency among audiences. Third, creative quality and context matter: storytelling designed for the environment in which it appears is more effective than placing the same message unchanged across channels. That evidence changed my advice to clients. Start with the audience, build sufficient frequency and give each part of the plan a distinct role. Reach shows the opportunity; campaign-level data shows whether the brand converted it into attention and response. THE BIGGEST MISTAKE IS TREATING MARKET ENTRY AS A MEDIA BUY. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 23
EDUCATION Alef Education’s Chief Product Officer, Joe El Sebaaly, on why the company’s growth to nearly two million students across three countries has been driven by one principle: the learner comes first, technology second. Joe El Sebaaly, Chief Product Officer, Alef Education INSIDE ALEF EDUCATION’S APPROACH TO BUILDING FOR EVERY LEARNER S ince launching in 2016, Alef Education has grown from a single idea into a company serving close to two million students. Joe El Sebaaly, the company’s Chief Product Officer, attributes that growth to one consistent principle: building scalable learning solutions that respond to the evolving needs of students, educators and education systems, rather than technology built for its own sake. “From the beginning, our focus has been on combining educational expertise with technology to create personalised learning frameworks and experiences that improve student engagement and outcomes,” he says. The results are measurable. Across the UAE, Indonesia and Morocco, students using the Alef Platform have shown clear improvements in academic performance. In the UAE specifically, students using Alef Pathways improved by 5.67 per cent, while those using the company’s AI tutor, Toki, improved by 4.18 per cent. Today, Alef Education reaches approximately two million students and 84,000 educators across 19,000 schools in three countries. The scale of that reach was recognised earlier this year when the company was ranked the number one EdTech company in the Middle East and Africa, and thirteenth globally, in TIME’s World’s Top EdTech Companies 2026 list. “Being ranked the number one EdTech company in the Middle East and Africa region, and thirteenth globally, further validates the impact of our technology driven approach and our commitment to continuous innovation in education,” El Sebaaly says. 24 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Before joining Alef Education, El Sebaaly held leadership roles at Pearson and McGraw-Hill, working across higher education, K to 12 and vocational education. He credits that experience with shaping a principle he now applies at Alef: the learner must come first. “Whether you are building for schools, universities or vocational institutions, the most successful education products are those designed around the real needs of learners, while also empowering educators and institutions to achieve better outcomes,” he says. That philosophy shapes every product decision at the company. “We firmly believe that meaningful innovation doesn’t begin with technology, it begins with understanding the challenges learners and teachers face every day and designing solutions that address them,” El Sebaaly explains. “Technology is simply the enabler.” Those earlier roles also taught him the difficulty of scaling a product without losing sight of individual learning needs, a challenge Alef addresses by pairing its learner first approach with AI and data driven insight. “The goal is not just to leverage technology, but to ensure that every product we develop supports educators, enhances learning and creates value for students, educators and schools,” he says. Artificial intelligence sits at the centre of Alef’s product roadmap. The platform uses data driven insights to track student progress, enable personalised learning and give educators greater visibility into learner needs. Alef AI Tutor, known as Toki, is one expression of that strategy, designed to give students additional support while working alongside teachers rather than replacing them. “By integrating AI thoughtfully into the learning process, we aim to create more engaging, responsive and personalised learning experiences for students,” El Sebaaly says. As the company expands its product ecosystem, through tools including Alef Pathways, Abjadiyat and Arabits, the focus remains on keeping educators at the centre of the learning experience rather than at its periphery. Deciding what to build begins, according to El Sebaaly, with listening. Product development at Alef draws on user feedback, insight from education stakeholders, academic data and technology trends, identifying where the company’s tools can create genuine value. “We continuously refine our solutions based on these insights to ensure they remain relevant, intuitive and effective for the communities we serve,” he says. Operating across the UAE, Indonesia and Morocco has required Alef to balance consistency with flexibility. Every education system carries its own curricula, priorities and classroom realities, and El Sebaaly says the company works closely with local education stakeholders to understand those differences before adapting its technology. “By combining a strong technology foundation with market specific insights, we can support diverse educational communities while delivering effective learning experiences for students and educators,” he says. Asked where he sees AI having the greatest impact on education, El Sebaaly points to personalisation and insight, rather than automation for its own sake. “AI’s greatest opportunity in education lies in its ability to enhance personalised learning, provide educators with deeper insights and enable more adaptive and responsive learning experiences,” he says. The priority, in his view, is building AI capability that is purposeful and responsible, integrated into real classrooms rather than developed in isolation from them. He believes the next phase of AI in EdTech will be defined less by the technology itself than by how it is deployed. “AI and similar emerging technologies should empower educators, facilitating more personalised, engaging and effective learning experiences at scale while helping teachers focus on what matters most,” he says. Alef Education now reaches close to two million students and 84,000 educators across the UAE, Indonesia and Morocco WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 25
COVER STORY 26 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026 26 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
INSIDE ASNAN TOWER WITH CO-FOUNDER AND CEO DR. ESSA N. AL ESSA BY AYA ZHANG How Dr. Essa N. Al Essa built Asnan Tower around a specialist-led model, and why his real test of success is a company that no longer needs him. BUILDING A NEW MODEL FOR DENTAL CARE: WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 27
COVER STORY In early 2009, Dr. Essa N. Al Essa checked his company’s bank account and found KD 7,000 in it. That was nowhere near enough to cover payroll for a team of highly trained specialists who had joined a clinic with little reputation behind it yet. The obvious move would have been to scale down. Instead, Al Essa delayed his own salary, invested his savings and took a loan in his own name. “That would have solved a short- term cash problem by compromising what we were trying to build,” he says. “I believed we had to build the clinical standard first and let the business catch up.” Seventeen years on, that standard is Asnan Tower, a ten-storey, purpose-built dental facility in Kuwait with 103 chairs, a large specialist team and its own laboratory. Al Essa is quick to say the scale was never the objective. “Size was never the goal,” he says. “We wanted to build the kind of dental centre we wished existed: specialist- led, USA standards in the region, uncompromising clinically and exceptional in patient experience.” 28 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
A BRAND BEFORE A BUILDING The company’s origins go back to 2003, when Al Essa bought the domain asnan.com with no business behind it. The site became one of the region’s earliest Arabic-language platforms for dental health education, at a time when reliable Arabic medical information online was scarce, and later expanded into a printed dental magazine. He resigned from his government position in 2007 to pursue the venture full-time, and Asnan Clinic opened in 2008. The cash squeeze of 2009 eased as referrals built. “Eventually, the flywheel started turning,” he says. “Our specialists built reputations, patients referred other patients, and that allowed us to keep investing in people, technology and patient experience.” On 5 May 2012, Asnan Tower opened in Ras Al Salmiya as a dedicated healthcare tower, and in November 2024 the organisation moved into its newest facility. DEPTH OVER PROXIMITY For years, Al Essa was advised to open branches closer to patients. He declined, reasoning that a YOU CAN MAKE MONEY FROM A PATIENT ONCE BY FOCUSING ON THE TRANSACTION. YOU BUILD A HEALTHCARE INSTITUTION BY FOCUSING ON THE RELATIONSHIP. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 29
COVER STORY specialist-led model needs enough volume in one place to sustain a deep team, with specialists available throughout operating hours. “Our advantage wasn’t going to be having an Asnan branch five minutes from your house,” he says. “It was going to be that when you came to Asnan, the right specialist for your problem was there. We chose depth over proximity.” The in-house laboratory follows the same logic. Dentists and technicians communicate directly, technicians can see the patient when needed and adjustments happen quickly, with digital dentistry and same-day workflows tied closely to the clinical side. “For us, the laboratory isn’t simply a supplier,” he says. “It’s part of the clinical process.” SYSTEMS OVER INDIVIDUALS The biggest misconception about healthcare, in Al Essa’s view, is that great doctors alone create great healthcare. At Asnan, specialists are backed by the laboratory, technology, clinical protocols and patient- experience teams. “The goal is to create an organisation where the standard doesn’t depend on any one individual, including me,” he says. “If someone leaves, the knowledge shouldn’t leave with them. And the patient’s experience shouldn’t depend on which day they happen to visit.” That conviction grew partly out of a mistake. Early on, he assumed that because something was obvious to him, it was obvious to everyone. “If something matters, you have to define it, teach it, measure it and repeat it,” he says. “You can’t keep the standard in the founder’s head and call that a system.” LEADING WITHOUT BEING THE CENTRE Al Essa still practises dentistry two days a week, mainly crowns, veneers and cosmetic cases, so he does not lose touch with the treatment room. On the management side, he does not hold one- on-one meetings. The leadership team meets together twice a week for around two hours, working through the key numbers, problems and decisions in one room so that everyone hears the same information and leaves knowing who owns what. Outside those meetings, each leader runs their own department with the authority to act. “If I’m spending my day solving routine operational problems, then we haven’t built the organisation properly,” he says. “A CEO can’t spend the entire week managing what already exists. If you do, you can easily end up maintaining yesterday’s business.” 30 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
IF WE CAN’T REPRODUCE THE STANDARD, I’D RATHER NOT REPRODUCE THE NAME. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 31
Culture needed the same deliberate approach once the company outgrew its early days. “When we had eight chairs, culture happened naturally because everybody was close to the founders. At our size, you can’t depend on that anymore.” He still walks the floors himself. “Numbers tell you a lot, but they don’t tell you everything. At the end of the day, patients don’t experience our strategy. They experience our people.” ETHICS AS A BUSINESS MODEL Al Essa trained at the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine, holds postgraduate qualifications from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and completed the Owner/ President Management programme at Harvard Business School. He describes ethics as the company’s biggest money maker. “I’ve learned that the most ethical decision usually becomes the best business decision if your time horizon is long enough,” he says. “The cheaper material or easier decision might improve this month’s numbers, but compromising quality eventually shows up somewhere: remakes, complaints or lost trust. You can make money from a patient once by focusing on the transaction. You build a healthcare institution by focusing on the relationship.” TAKING FEAR OUT OF THE CHAIR Patients have changed since Asnan opened. Many now research the specialist, their qualifications, cases and reviews before calling, and they expect speed. Yet Al Essa believes fear and anxiety remain bigger issues than many in dentistry realise. Patients may forget the technical details of treatment, he says, but they remember whether someone listened and whether anyone followed up. That is why Asnan talks about guest experience rather than reception. “When someone who has been afraid of dentists for years walks out saying, ‘That was actually fine,’ that means a lot,” he says. “Very often, that patient comes back with their family.” COVER STORY 32 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
A MODEL BUILT TO TRAVEL GCC expansion, for Al Essa, is not a matter of finding another building and putting the Asnan name on it. Any new site would need the same clinical depth, specialist culture, laboratory integration and management systems, with the same staffing philosophy of hiring the right specialists first. “I’d rather expand slowly and protect what Asnan means than grow quickly and dilute it,” he says. “If we can’t reproduce the standard, I’d rather not reproduce the name.” What worries him is not growth but dependency on individuals, himself included. He regularly asks what would stop working if he disappeared for three months. “Every answer exposes a weakness.” In ten years, he hopes to see Asnan operating in more than one market with the same standards. The test that matters more to him is personal. “The ultimate goal is for Asnan to no longer need me,” he says. “If I can step away and the standards remain the same, the culture remains the same, innovation continues and the patient doesn’t notice whether I’m there or not, then we’ve built something meaningful. That’s when you’ve stopped building a company around a founder and started building an institution.” OUR ADVANTAGE WASN’T GOING TO BE HAVING AN ASNAN BRANCH FIVE MINUTES FROM YOUR HOUSE. IT WAS GOING TO BE THAT WHEN YOU CAME TO ASNAN, THE RIGHT SPECIALIST FOR YOUR PROBLEM WAS THERE. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 33
50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE LIST 34 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
F or most of the region’s modern history, healthcare was something governments provided. Hospitals were built, staffed and funded by the state, and the private sector played a supporting role. That model is changing quickly. Across the Gulf, governments are opening the market to private operators and rewriting regulations to attract investment, while hospital groups that began as single facilities now run networks across several countries. Health tech companies, many of them founded within the past decade, are changing how patients book appointments, receive diagnoses and manage their care. The result is a sector that looks less like a public service and more like one of the region’s most important industries. The people running it now carry decisions that reach well beyond their own organisations, shaping who gets access to care, how much it costs and how quickly new treatments reach patients. The Business Today Healthcare 50 recognises the leaders behind that shift. They include ministers and regulators, founders and chief executives, and the investors backing the sector’s next phase of growth. Between them, they are deciding what healthcare in the region will look like for the next generation. As the Gulf invests billions in healthcare, these 50 leaders are building the hospitals, technologies and systems that will define the sector’s next decade. * Leaders were selected based on the scale of the organisations they lead, their influence on policy and the market, their recent achievements, and their contribution to access and innovation in care. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 35
LIST MINISTER OF HEALTH, SAUDI ARABIA SHAISTA ASIF H.E. MANSOOR IBRAHIM AL MANSOORI H.E. Fahad Abdulrahman AlJalajel has been Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Health since October 2021, and is overseeing the transformation of the Kingdom’s health sector. He previously spent five years as Deputy Minister of Health for Planning and Development, helping shape the sector’s transformation strategy and supervising the country’s COVID-19 response and vaccination centres. A central part of the reform he leads is the Health Holding Company, approved by the Council of Ministers in 2022, which delivers services through regional health clusters. Alongside it, the National Health Insurance Center finances those services, separating the regulator from the provider. He is a member of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, President of the Saudi Health Council, and chairs 28 boards and committees, including the Saudi Food and Drug Authority. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science, and an executive certificate from MIT Sloan. Shaista Asif co-founded PureHealth in 2006 and was named Group CEO in December 2023. She now leads a group of more than 110 hospitals and over 316 clinics across the UAE, the US, the UK, Greece and Cyprus. She has overseen a series of acquisitions, including SEHA, the National Rehabilitation Center and Daman, along with a stake in Ardent Healthcare. She also led the purchase of the UK’s Circle Health Group, a deal worth more than US$1.2 billion, a landmark deal for a UAE-based group. She has driven the group’s AI initiatives, including the Pura healthcare companion app and the PureNet healthcare cloud. H.E. Mansoor Ibrahim Al Mansoori is Chairman of the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi and a member of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council. He leads an emirate-wide health system built around prevention, personalised care and digital innovation, and also serves as CEO of G42 International. His board roles include Vice Chairman of Presight, board member of e&, where he chairs the audit committee, and trustee of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence. In 2026, the emirate’s Unified Medical Operations Command Centre played a central role in coordinating care during the regional crisis. H.E. FAHAD ABDULRAHMAN ALJALAJEL CO-FOUNDER AND GROUP CEO, PUREHEALTH CHAIRMAN, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH – ABU DHABI MINISTER OF HEALTH AND PREVENTION, UAE H.E. Ahmed Ali Al Sayegh was appointed the UAE’s Minister of Health and Prevention in September 2025, as part of a federal cabinet reshuffle. He previously served as Minister of State at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2018, where he led the economic and trade portfolio and supported the country’s economic diversification. He has also served on the boards of ADNOC and the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, and was the founding chairman of both Aldar Properties and Masdar. His other past roles include chairing Abu Dhabi Global Market and serving as deputy chairman of First Gulf Bank. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Lewis & Clark College in the US. H.E. AHMED ALI AL SAYEGH 36 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE Nasser bin Mohammed Al-Haqbani has led Health Holding Company (HHC) as chief executive since January 2023, bringing experience from both Saudi Arabia’s private and public healthcare sectors. He previously served as chief executive of Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Medical Services Group before moving to HHC, giving him direct experience of managing a major private healthcare operator. Established in 2022 as part of Saudi Arabia’s healthcare transformation, HHC assumed responsibility for operating 20 regional health clusters as the Ministry of Health shifted towards regulation and supervision. Under Al-Haqbani, the organisation has continued implementing the Kingdom’s move towards integrated, accountable care across its regions. Digital platforms including Sehhaty, which provides services such as appointments and prescriptions, and Seha Virtual Hospital, which connects patients with remote specialist care across all 20 clusters, have become important components of the system. Saudi life expectancy reached 80 years in 2025, ahead of the original Vision 2030 target, while Saudi Arabia ranked sixth globally in the UN’s E-Government Development Index. Al-Haqbani’s role places him at the centre of one of the world’s largest ongoing public healthcare restructuring programmes. NASSER BIN MOHAMMED AL-HAQBANI CEO, HEALTH HOLDING COMPANY PRESIDENT AND GROUP CHIEF EXECUTIVE, DR. SULAIMAN AL HABIB MEDICAL SERVICES GROUP FAISAL AL NASSAR Faisal Al Nassar has led Dr. Sulaiman Al Habib Medical Services Group (HMG) since 2022, taking over as president and group chief executive after more than a decade with the company, including as chief financial officer. He now oversees Saudi Arabia’s largest private hospital network, which reported revenue of $2.7 billion in the first nine months of 2025 and operates more than 22 hospitals and medical centres across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. Under Al Nassar, HMG has accelerated its expansion, opening five facilities in 2024 and moving towards more than 4,000 operating beds, nearly doubling capacity within three years. The group signed contracts in 2025 for three additional hospitals and partnerships with the Red Sea Real Estate Company and AMAALA to operate hospitals supporting Saudi Arabia’s giga-project tourism developments. Technology has also become central to the strategy, with HMG deploying artificial intelligence for breast cancer detection. Alongside expansion, Al Nassar has overseen sustainability initiatives, including HMG’s LEED Gold certification for efforts to reduce medical waste and emissions. SHERIF BESHARA GROUP CEO, AMERICAN HOSPITAL DUBAI Sherif Beshara leads American Hospital Dubai as Group CEO. Under his leadership, the hospital has expanded its centres of excellence, introduced new medical technologies and built its position as a destination for complex surgery and specialist care. His background spans healthcare, legal counsel and corporate governance, and he holds an Executive MBA from Georgetown University and a master’s degree in international law. He sits on the Board of Trustees of the Noor Foundation, which works to eliminate preventable blindness worldwide. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 37
LIST DR. SHAMSHEER VAYALIL FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN, BURJEEL HOLDINGS A radiologist by training, Dr. Shamsheer Vayalil founded VPS Healthcare in 2007 and grew it into a network spanning the GCC, India and Europe. In 2022, its GCC assets were brought together under Burjeel Holdings, which now operates across the UAE and Oman with a growing specialist presence in Saudi Arabia. According to the company, its network includes 112 medical assets, among them 20 hospitals. In 2025 the group expanded its oncology network, launched the Alkalma mental health platform with four centres across the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and acquired a physiotherapy facility in Riyadh under its PhysioTherabia brand. It also formed DOCKTOUR, a healthcare logistics venture with AD Ports Group aimed at remote communities, and gained accreditation for new residency programmes in internal medicine and general surgery. DR. AMER AHMAD SHARIF CEO, DUBAI HEALTH; PRESIDENT, MOHAMMED BIN RASHID UNIVERSITY OF MEDICINE AND HEALTH SCIENCES Dr. Amer Ahmad Sharif is CEO of Dubai Health, formerly Dubai Academic Health Corporation, and President of MBRU. As the university’s founding Vice Chancellor, he has guided it since its inception and built partnerships with institutions including Queen’s University Belfast. He chaired the Dubai COVID-19 Command and Control Center during the pandemic, and has held senior roles at the Dubai Health Authority. He holds an MBBS and a PhD in Public Health from UAE University, and an MSc in Healthcare Management from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He also sits on the UAE Genome Council and the Emirates Research and Development Council. H.E. DR. ALAWI ALSHEIKH-ALI DIRECTOR GENERAL, DUBAI HEALTH AUTHORITY H.E. Dr. Alawi Alsheikh-Ali was appointed Director General of the Dubai Health Authority in May 2025. An Emirati physician-scientist and Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, he is also a member of Dubai’s Executive Council, chairs the Dubai Corporation for Ambulance Services, and chairs the Noor Foundation’s Board of Trustees. He previously served as Provost of MBRU and as the founding Dean of its College of Medicine. A consultant cardiac electrophysiologist, he studied at MIT and earned his medical degree from Tufts University, and is one of only a handful of physicians in the Gulf to be triple-board-certified in the US. Dr. Azad Moopen came to the UAE from Kerala in 1987. In December of that year he opened a single-doctor clinic in Dubai, Al Rafa Polyclinic, which became the foundation of Aster DM Healthcare. Trained in general medicine, he had previously lectured at Calicut Medical College. Under his leadership, the group grew into a network of hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres and pharmacies operating under the Aster and Medcare brands. In 2024 the company separated its GCC and India businesses. A consortium led by Fajr Capital acquired a 65% stake in Aster GCC, while the Moopen family kept 35% and operational control. He remains Founder Chairman, and founded Aster Volunteers, the group’s community outreach programme. DR. AZAD MOOPEN FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN, ASTER DM HEALTHCARE 38 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE H.E. Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Suwaidi was appointed to lead Hamad Medical Corporation, Qatar’s main public healthcare provider, by Amiri decision in November 2024. His priorities centre on specialised care that meets international quality standards, with HMC building advanced treatment pathways in cancer care, cardiology, stroke, and trauma and emergency services. He is also expanding digital access to care, through HMC’s Lbaih app and a growing virtual consultation service. In January 2026, he opened the Qatar Health Congress, which brought together more than 2,000 healthcare professionals to discuss quality, patient safety and patient experience. H.E. MOHAMMED BIN KHALIFA AL SUWAIDI MANAGING DIRECTOR, HAMAD MEDICAL CORPORATION (HMC) H.E. Dr. Hanan Mohammed Al Kuwari was appointed Advisor to the Prime Minister for Public Health Affairs in November 2024, after eight years as Qatar’s Minister of Public Health. As minister, she chaired the national COVID-19 committee and oversaw medical readiness for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. Before that, she spent 17 years as Managing Director of Hamad Medical Corporation, building it into an integrated academic health system of 17 hospitals and centres. She remains a member of the WHO Executive Board, which she chaired from 2023 to 2024, and has served as Vice Chair of the bureau negotiating the operational details of the WHO Pandemic Agreement. In 2024 she received the Best Minister Award at the World Governments Summit. Dr. Georges-Pascal Haber leads Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi and its more than 6,000 caregivers, with a focus on growth, clinical quality and technology-enabled, high-acuity care. A urologist specialising in robotics, he still practises alongside his executive role. Before moving to Abu Dhabi, he chaired the Glickman Urological & Kidney Institute at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which became home to the largest urology training programme in the US. He has led several surgical firsts, including the UAE’s first robotic kidney transplant, and has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers. He trained in medicine, surgical oncology and biotechnology in France, completed a fellowship at Cleveland Clinic, and has attended executive programmes at Wharton and Harvard Business School. DR. GEORGES-PASCAL HABER CEO, CLEVELAND CLINIC ABU DHABI Saeed Jaber Al Kuwaiti has been Group CEO of SEHA, one of the UAE’s largest healthcare networks, since April 2022, leading its closer integration with PureHealth. Part of SEHA since its creation in 2007, he has served as CFO and CEO of Tawam Hospital, CEO of Al Mafraq Hospital, and Regional CEO for Al Ain. He chaired the first insurance and billing committee for the introduction of mandatory health insurance in Abu Dhabi, and led the opening of Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City, where he sits on the board. H.E. DR. HANAN MOHAMMED AL KUWARI ADVISOR TO THE PRIME MINISTER FOR PUBLIC HEALTH AFFAIRS, QATAR SAEED JABER AL KUWAITI GROUP CEO, ABU DHABI HEALTH SERVICES COMPANY (SEHA) WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 39
LIST H.E. Dr. Hilal bin Ali Al Sabti leads Oman’s health sector under Vision 2040, with priorities spanning governance, private sector development, digital health and AI. In 2025, Oman performed its first heart transplant, a milestone that was described as historic for the country’s specialised care. As specialised services have expanded at home, the number of patients sent abroad for treatment fell by around 49% between 2023 and 2025. The ministry’s budget reached RO 1 billion in 2026, and it is preparing to launch a National Centre for Virtual Health. H.E. Mazen Darwazeh leads the strategy and operations of Hikma Pharmaceuticals across the Middle East and North Africa, a remit that has included MENA Injectables since February 2026. He joined the company in 1985 as a medical representative, and has held a wide range of leadership roles over more than 40 years. Founded in Jordan in 1978, Hikma has grown into one of the region’s leading pharmaceutical groups. He is also serving his fifth term in Jordan’s Senate and sits on the board of Rakuten Medical. He holds a business degree from the Lebanese American University and completed the Advanced Management Programme at INSEAD. H.E. DR. JALEELA BINT AL-SAYED JAWAD HASAN MINISTER OF HEALTH, BAHRAIN H.E. Dr. Jaleela bint Al-Sayed Jawad Hasan is Bahrain’s Minister of Health and a family medicine and public health consultant. She previously served as CEO of the Kingdom’s Primary Healthcare Centres, and led its national immunisation programme from 2008 to 2020. During the pandemic, she sat on the national COVID-19 taskforce and supervised testing and vaccination centres. In 2026, Bahrain hosted the GCC Health Ministers Council, and her ministry launched a Genomics Ambassadors programme for young people. TAL HISHAM NAZER CEO, BUPA ARABIA FOR COOPERATIVE INSURANCE Tal Hisham Nazer has led Bupa Arabia for Cooperative Insurance since 2008, overseeing the company’s growth from a Saudi health-insurance provider into one of the Kingdom’s largest insurers. Founded in 1997 and listed on the Saudi Exchange since 2008, Bupa Arabia operates under Saudi Central Bank regulation and remains part of the UK-headquartered Bupa Group, which serves more than 43 million customers globally. Nazer joined Bupa Arabia in 2002 within its finance department before moving through operational leadership roles and ultimately becoming chief executive. His tenure has coincided with the rapid expansion of mandatory employer health coverage across Saudi Arabia and increasing digitisation across insurance services. Bupa Arabia has invested in digital claims processing and preauthorisation systems as its membership base has grown, strengthening the connection between insurance administration and healthcare delivery. Nazer has also held prominent industry roles, including chairing the Saudi Central Bank’s insurance general committee and previously leading its health-insurance subcommittee. His leadership has coincided with a period of significant development in Saudi Arabia’s health-insurance market, as insurers adapt to regulatory reform, growing healthcare demand and the Kingdom’s broader healthcare transformation agenda. H.E. MAZEN DARWAZEH EXECUTIVE VICE CHAIRMAN AND DEPUTY CEO – MENA, HIKMA PHARMACEUTICALS H.E. DR. HILAL BIN ALI AL SABTI MINISTER OF HEALTH, OMAN 40 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE KHALED ATEEQ ALDHAHERI CEO, DAMAN Khaled Ateeq Aldhaheri has served as chief executive of Daman since February 2024, following an acting leadership role and more than two decades working across UAE healthcare finance and operations. He previously held senior positions including chief commercial officer and chief financial officer at Abu Dhabi Health Services and acting executive director for health-system financing at Abu Dhabi’s Department of Health. Established in 2005 as the UAE’s first dedicated health insurer, Daman has expanded into a broader insurance business while remaining focused on healthcare coverage. The company adopted its new legal name, National Health Insurance Company, in May 2025 as it moved beyond health insurance into property and casualty products, following its launch of employee-benefits and gratuity-related services in 2024. As a subsidiary of PureHealth, Daman now serves more than three million members through a network exceeding 3,000 medical facilities across the UAE. Aldhaheri’s appointment also reflects the increasing role of Emirati executives within the country’s healthcare sector. With Daman broadening its product portfolio, his remit now spans a business using its established healthcare network, customer base and data infrastructure to build adjacent insurance offerings while continuing to serve its core health-insurance market. DR. NEZAR BAHABRI CEO, SAUDI GERMAN HEALTH Dr. Nezar Bahabri became chief executive of Saudi German Health in January 2026, following his appointment as chief medical officer after joining the group in 2023. A physician by training, Bahabri now leads Middle East Healthcare Co., the operator behind Saudi German Health, during a significant governance and operational transition. In July 2026, a new seven-member board was elected without members of the founding Batterjee family, marking the first time in the company’s history that its board was not represented by the founding family. Saudi German Health continues to operate nearly 1,500 beds across eight hospitals and two outpatient centres in Saudi Arabia, while the wider Saudi German Hospitals network extends across the UAE, Yemen and Egypt. During 2025, patient volumes increased and the group recruited more than 400 Saudi doctors, while pharmacy and pharmaceutical distribution revenue reached SAR 408 million. Bahabri’s priorities include developing a new 194-bed hospital in Jeddah and establishing centres of excellence in cardiology, oncology and neurology. He is also overseeing ambitions to expand into Morocco and Pakistan as the group reshapes its operations and governance for its next phase. Nasser Sultan Al-Subaie has spent more than three decades at Mouwasat Medical Services, culminating in his appointment as chief executive in January 2026 after years as executive director and vice chairman. Founded in Dammam in 1975, Mouwasat has expanded from its Eastern Province base into Riyadh, Khobar, Jubail, Madinah and Qatif, building a network of hospitals, pharmacies and specialised medical centres. The publicly listed company operates around nine branches covering areas including fertility, dermatology, stroke care, cardiology, nuclear medicine and long-term rehabilitation. Al- Subaie has held senior positions spanning finance, operations and general management, giving him extensive experience across the organisation before taking its top executive role. A graduate of California State University, Long Beach, he joined Mouwasat more than 35 years ago, well before its 2012 listing on the Saudi Exchange. Under his leadership, the company is continuing to invest in technology, including artificial intelligence applications across diagnostics and hospital operations. His appointment provides continuity as Mouwasat enters its next phase, combining its established regional presence with technology-driven expansion across Saudi Arabia’s evolving healthcare sector. NASSER SULTAN AL-SUBAIE CEO, MOUWASAT MEDICAL SERVICES WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 41
LIST Ahmad bin Saleh Babaeer has led Dallah Healthcare Company since 2008, overseeing its evolution from a single Riyadh hospital into a diversified healthcare group. During his tenure, Dallah completed its 2012 initial public offering on the Saudi Exchange and expanded beyond its original hospital into healthcare services, pharmaceuticals, telemedicine and home care. The group now operates six hospitals, four clinics and more than 820 outpatient facilities across its subsidiaries and associated companies, alongside pharmaceutical manufacturing and distribution operations. Dallah’s financial growth has accompanied that expansion. Between 2020 and 2024, the company more than doubled its revenue while shareholder profit increased nearly fivefold. In the first half of 2025, revenue rose 22.3 percent to $504.9 million, while total assets reached $2.3 billion. Babaeer has also overseen Dallah’s diversification into pharmaceutical manufacturing and distribution, creating an additional business line alongside its core healthcare operations. Its investment in home care and remote monitoring reflects the wider shift towards outpatient and preventive healthcare in Saudi Arabia. After nearly two decades at the helm, Babaeer continues to guide Dallah through the Kingdom’s rapidly evolving private healthcare market. David Hadley is CEO of NMC Healthcare. He joined after a 30-year career at Mediclinic International, including 13 years as CEO of Mediclinic Middle East, where he led the company’s growth and expansion across the GCC. He is also a Non- Executive Director at Magrabi Hospitals Group. After completing a commerce degree in South Africa, he earned an MBA with distinction from the University of Liverpool and attended the Oxford Advanced Management and Leadership Programme in 2022. AHMAD BIN SALEH BABAEER CEO, DALLAH HEALTHCARE COMPANY DAVID HADLEY CEO, NMC HEALTHCARE Alisha Moopen joined Aster in 2013 as a director and has risen to lead its GCC business, which spans hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and diagnostic centres across all six GCC countries. When the group separated its GCC and India operations in 2024, she took on the role of Managing Director and Group CEO of Aster GCC, alongside a new consortium of investors led by Fajr Capital. Her priority since then has been expansion, particularly in Saudi Arabia’s primary care and hospital markets. A chartered accountant who began her career at Ernst & Young, she was the first woman to chair YPO’s Dubai chapter, founded the Dubai Healthcare Business Group, and launched Aster’s Women in Leadership programme. ALISHA MOOPEN MANAGING DIRECTOR AND GROUP CEO, ASTER DM HEALTHCARE GCC 42 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE KOSTAS DELIGIANNIS ZONE PRESIDENT, EURASIAN AND AFRICAN GROWTH MARKETS (EAGM), GE HEALTHCARE Kostas Deligiannis leads GE HealthCare’s business across more than 50 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Turkey, Russia and the CIS, overseeing a team of more than 2,000 people. He joined the company in 2003 as Sales Manager for Greece and rose through regional roles in the Balkans, Southeastern Europe and Eastern Europe, before becoming Zone President in 2024. In the role, he focuses on growth through medical technology, digital health solutions and scalable care models. A physicist by training, he holds a PhD in Solid State Physics from the University of Southampton, and earlier carried out superconductivity research at CNRS in Grenoble as a European Union Marie Curie Fellow. DR. MOHAYMEN ABDELGHANY GROUP CEO AND BOARD MEMBER, FAKEEH HEALTH; CEO, FAKEEH UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL Dr. Mohaymen Abdelghany leads Fakeeh Health in the UAE, whose network centres on Fakeeh University Hospital, a 350-bed hospital in Dubai Silicon Oasis, supported by clinics across the city. He became the hospital’s CEO in 2023 and took on the Group CEO role in 2025. An anaesthetist by training, he has more than two decades of experience in hospital management, healthcare quality, mergers and acquisitions, and digital transformation. That includes his work as a physician consultant with Joint Commission International, advising hospital systems worldwide. He holds an MD and two master’s degrees in Anaesthesia and healthcare management, and has completed executive programmes at Harvard and INSEAD. DR. THUMBAY MOIDEEN FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, THUMBAY GROUP Dr. Thumbay Moideen arrived in Ajman in 1997 and built the Thumbay Group into a diversified business spanning healthcare, medical education, research, diagnostics, retail, hospitality and technology. At its core is an integrated academic healthcare system, in which the group’s medical university trains students who go on to work in its own hospitals. Recent projects include Thumbay Medicity, along with a growing focus on AI-driven medical education. The group has announced plans for a psychiatric and rehabilitation hospital in Sharjah, a veterinary hospital in Ajman, more than 1,000 additional clinical beds over the next three years, and 15 colleges in total by 2028. Dimitris Moulavasilis became Group CEO of M42, the Abu Dhabi health company built around AI, technology and genomics, in May 2025, succeeding Hasan Jasem Al Nowais. He also leads M42’s Global Patient Care platform, which brings together the group’s UAE and international healthcare assets: 480 clinics across 26 countries, serving 15 million patients a year. He previously led Diaverum, the global renal care provider M42 acquired in 2023, and before that was Group CEO of Affidea, a European provider of imaging, outpatient and cancer care, from 2012 to 2018. He began his career in sales at GE HealthCare and brings more than 30 years of experience in healthcare services and medical technology. DIMITRIS MOULAVASILIS GROUP CEO, M42 WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 43
LIST H.E. Mansoor bin Ebrahim bin Saad Al Mahmoud was appointed Qatar’s Minister of Public Health in November 2024, succeeding Dr. Hanan Al Kuwari. He came to the role after six years as CEO of the Qatar Investment Authority, from September 2018. His earlier roles include CEO of Qatar Museums and CEO of Qatar Development Bank. He is also Vice Chairman of Qatar Airways and Chairman of Katara Hospitality, and holds a degree in business administration and finance from George Washington University. H.E. MANSOOR BIN EBRAHIM BIN SAAD AL MAHMOUD MINISTER OF PUBLIC HEALTH, QATAR H.E. Dr. Majid Alfayyadh has led King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, one of the Kingdom’s foremost tertiary and quaternary care institutions, since his appointment by royal decree in 2017. He previously held senior clinical and executive posts at the hospital, and was seconded to the Ministry of Health’s Vision Realization Office. Under his leadership, the hospital has become an independent non-profit institution. It has also been ranked first in the Middle East and North Africa by Brand Finance among the world’s academic medical centres. A paediatric cardiologist and electrophysiologist, he trained at King Saud University, Tufts, Columbia and Baylor, and holds a master’s in medical administration from the University of Southern California. H.E. DR. MAJID ALFAYYADH GROUP CEO, KING FAISAL SPECIALIST HOSPITAL AND RESEARCH CENTRE H.E. Dr. Ahmad Abdulwahab Al-Awadhi has served as Kuwait’s Minister of Health since May 2024. He is leading a digital transformation of the country’s health system, including the integration of AI and robotic surgery into clinical care, alongside the opening of new hospitals. In May 2026, a new Undersecretary was appointed to the ministry, and Kuwait has since been active in GCC-wide health coordination, including talks with Bahrain in July 2026 on strengthening bilateral cooperation and developing national healthcare talent. H.E. DR. AHMAD ABDULWAHAB AL-AWADHI MINISTER OF HEALTH, KUWAIT 44 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE Mohammed Saleh Al Hammadi is leading Al Hammadi Holding through a major expansion phase following his appointment as managing director and chief executive in June 2026. The leadership transition, which also saw Abdulaziz Al Hammadi become chairman, retained control within the founding family while creating a clearer operational structure for the Riyadh-based healthcare group. Al Hammadi Holding has operated for four decades, with its original Al Olaya Hospital opening in 1985. The facility, which closed for renovation in 2021, is scheduled to reopen in 2026 with 200 rooms, 120 clinics and centres of excellence focused on oncology and sports medicine. A fourth hospital in Riyadh’s Al Narjis district is expected in 2028, significantly increasing the group’s existing capacity of around 600 inpatient rooms and 180 outpatient clinics. Al Hammadi is also pursuing international healthcare partnerships, including a long-term agreement with AC Milan announced in January 2026 to introduce the club’s MilanLab performance- science model at its next-generation Riyadh hospital. Beyond healthcare delivery, the group operates pharmaceutical distribution, biopharmaceutical and hospital- support businesses, providing a diversified platform for further expansion. MOHAMMED SALEH AL HAMMADI MANAGING DIRECTOR AND CEO, AL HAMMADI HOLDING Faisal bin Juma Belhoul is the founder and Managing Partner of Ithmar Capital, an investor in the Dubai health tech platform Okadoc, which he chairs. He also founded Amanat Holdings, a listed healthcare and education investment company, which he chaired. His healthcare leadership includes chairing the UAE Private Hospitals Council and the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Equipment Business Group at the Dubai Chamber. He also served on the board of a FTSE 250 healthcare company and led its listing on the London Stock Exchange. He is a board member of Dubai Chambers, and holds a degree in manufacturing engineering from Boston University. H.E. FAISAL BIN JUMA BELHOUL CHAIRMAN, OKADOC; FOUNDER AND MANAGING PARTNER, ITHMAR CAPITAL DR. ABDULLAH AL RABEEAH SUPERVISOR-GENERAL, KING SALMAN HUMANITARIAN AID AND RELIEF CENTRE Dr. Abdullah Al Rabeeah has served as supervisor-general of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre (KSrelief) since its establishment in 2015, leading Saudi Arabia’s principal humanitarian aid organisation through a decade of international expansion. A physician and advisor to the Royal Court, Al Rabeeah oversees an organisation whose 2026 operational plan targets 113 projects across 44 countries, reaching more than 12 million people at a cost of SAR 400 million. A separate volunteer programme includes 309 initiatives across 42 countries, delivered in partnership with 11 Saudi non-profit organisations. At the launch of the 2026 plan, Al Rabeeah cited UN Financial Tracking Service figures showing Saudi Arabia ranked second globally and first among Arab countries for humanitarian aid in 2025. KSrelief’s work extends from emergency assistance to healthcare, food security and long- term development programmes. Its operations include mobile clinics in Yemen, central kitchens providing meals in Gaza and the annual distribution of dates through a programme reaching millions of people across dozens of countries. Under Al Rabeeah, KSrelief has developed into a major international humanitarian platform, combining Saudi Arabia’s charitable tradition with an increasingly structured global aid operation. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 45
LIST SALEM KHALEF AL MANNAI GROUP CEO, QATAR INSURANCE GROUP Salem Khalef Al Mannai has served as group chief executive of Qatar Insurance Group (QIC) since 2020, following a career with the company that began in 2001. He has held leadership positions across QIC’s motor, marine, cargo and health insurance businesses, as well as serving as deputy chief executive of QLM and deputy group president and chief executive for QIC’s MENA operations. Founded in 1964 as Qatar’s first domestic insurer, QIC has since developed into a diversified insurance group covering retail, corporate, specialty and reinsurance markets. Under Al Mannai, the group has continued expanding its regional and international operations while developing digital distribution and diversified insurance products. Its wider portfolio includes subsidiaries such as Kuwait Qatar Insurance Company, Oman Qatar Insurance Company and QIC Capital, extending the group’s direct presence across multiple GCC markets. Al Mannai’s tenure reflects QIC’s evolution from a domestic Qatari insurer into a broader financial-services group with operations spanning insurance, reinsurance and asset management. Ayman Tamer, the third-generation chairman and managing partner of Tamer Group, is overseeing the professionalisation of one of Saudi Arabia’s oldest family businesses. Founded in Jeddah in 1922 as a pharmacy, the company has evolved into a diversified group spanning healthcare distribution, consumer products, logistics, manufacturing and e-commerce. Its businesses include Tamer Healthcare, Tamer Consumer, Tamer Logistics, Saja Pharmaceuticals, VitaCare and Mumzworld, the maternal and childcare marketplace acquired in 2021. Over the past decade, Tamer has focused on separating family ownership from professional management. The group operates through a holding structure involving beneficial owners and limited liability companies, while its board includes independent directors, including senior figures from Saudi banking and academia. A non-family group chief executive manages day-to-day operations and reports to the board, reflecting the company’s increasingly institutional governance structure. Tamer has also established a succession framework spanning multiple generations, with third-generation family members working across the business and a fourth generation preparing for future roles. His leadership reflects the challenge facing long-established Gulf family enterprises: preserving family ownership and identity while introducing professional governance and management structures designed for continued growth. AYMAN TAMER CHAIRMAN AND MANAGING PARTNER, TAMER GROUP Majd Abu Zant founded Global Fertility in 2022, a Saudi-Emirati venture building a network of fertility and reproductive genetics centres across the MENA region. The company has raised $60 million in equity, and Dubai Investments took a 34.3% stake in 2024. It has since acquired majority stakes in IVF centres in Riyadh and Jeddah for $27 million, bringing them together under the Bnoon brand. The same year, he co-founded Ovasave, a femtech platform for fertility preservation and hormone care, which raised a $1.2 million pre-seed round in 2025. He was previously CEO of UEMedical, where he launched Danat Al Emarat Hospital and led the group’s sale to Mubadala in 2021. MAJD ABU ZANT MANAGING DIRECTOR AND CEO, GLOBAL FERTILITY; CO-FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN, OVASAVE 46 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE ALI HASHEMI CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, METABOLIC Ali Hashemi is the co-founder and chief executive of Metabolic, the company behind GluCare. Health, a hybrid healthcare platform focused on metabolic health. Hashemi co-founded the business with Ihsan Almarzooqi in 2019, building a model that combines physical clinical care with digital monitoring and technology-enabled interventions for patients managing metabolic conditions. The company operates GluCare.Health and Zone.Health across the UAE and UK and has developed research partnerships with global healthcare and technology companies including Medtronic, Eli Lilly and Dexcom. In 2024, the group became a global clinical partner of Oura for its smart-ring healthcare applications, extending its use of wearable data in patient care. Hashemi previously founded Amana Healthcare, which was acquired by Mubadala in 2019, and has also invested in early-stage healthcare ventures. Under his leadership, the company has continued expanding its clinic network, with operations in Dubai and plans for further international growth. Its model reflects the convergence of clinical medicine, continuous health monitoring and digital therapeutics. Hashemi’s role places him at the intersection of healthcare delivery and technology as metabolic health becomes an increasingly significant focus for providers and patients across the region. Dr. Zulekha Daud arrived in the UAE from Nagpur, India, in 1964, after completing her medical degree at the city’s Government Medical College. She began at the Kuwaiti Mission Hospital in Sharjah, at a time when the region had very few female doctors and access to healthcare was limited. She is widely recognised as the first Indian woman to work as a medical professional and entrepreneur in the country. In 1992 she opened Zulekha Hospital in Sharjah, followed by a medical centre in Dhaid and, just over a decade later, a second hospital in Dubai. Today the group she chairs runs two multi-specialty hospitals, three medical centres and a pharmacy network. Dr. Ayman Al Mutawa has led Al Salam International Hospital as chief executive officer, overseeing the next phase of a healthcare institution whose roots in Kuwait date back to 1964. The hospital is part of Al Salam Hospitals, a subsidiary of Kuwait Finance House, and Al Mutawa has been involved in expanding its footprint and modernising its services. In 2024, he helped lead the opening of Al Salam Al Ahmadi Hospital in Mahboula, a 5,300-square- metre facility developed as part of the group’s expansion strategy. The hospital has 98 beds, nine operating rooms, maternity facilities, paediatric and physiotherapy departments, as well as radiology and laboratory services. Al Mutawa has emphasised the use of modern medical technologies and international standards as the group broadens its services for Kuwait’s citizens and residents. He has also served as chairman of the Kuwait Private Hospital Federation, giving him a wider role in representing the private healthcare sector. Across his leadership, Al Mutawa’s focus has centred on expanding capacity, strengthening clinical capabilities and positioning Al Salam Hospitals for continued growth in Kuwait’s evolving private healthcare market. DR. ZULEKHA DAUD FOUNDER AND CHAIRPERSON, ZULEKHA HEALTHCARE GROUP DR. AYMAN SALEM AL MUTAWA CEO, AL SALAM INTERNATIONAL HOSPITAL WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 47
LIST Ahmad Nasrallah has led Dar Al Shifa Hospital as chief executive officer since 2013, following nine years with the organisation, including his tenure as chief operating officer. Established in 1963, Dar Al Shifa was Kuwait’s first private hospital and has since developed into a broader healthcare provider serving demand for medical services. Under Nasrallah, the organisation has expanded its clinical capabilities while responding to changes in Kuwait’s healthcare system, including private-sector provision through programmes such as Afya, the insurance scheme serving retirees. In 2025, Dar Al Shifa expanded beyond direct patient care by launching a consultancy arm focused on accreditation support and establishing a research collaboration with the Gulf University of Science and Technology. The hospital also developed partnerships with SMART Education, the Applied Behavior Centre and the Kuwait Society of the Handicapped to strengthen services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Nasrallah’s tenure has therefore extended beyond hospital operations into research, accreditation and specialised services, as Dar Al Shifa builds on more than six decades of private healthcare experience in Kuwait while adapting to Kuwait’s changing healthcare landscape. AHMAD NASRALLAH CEO, DAR AL SHIFA HOSPITAL Yahya Aqel is the co-founder and chief executive of Aumet, a healthcare technology company focused on digitising pharmaceutical procurement and supply chains. Founded in 2015, Aumet connects pharmacies, pharmaceutical suppliers, manufacturers and healthcare providers through digital platforms designed to improve ordering, inventory visibility and medicine availability. The company has expanded across Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt and says more than 12,000 pharmacies now rely on its solutions. Aqel’s experience in healthcare supply chains shaped Aumet’s original proposition, addressing fragmented procurement processes and the limited visibility that can contribute to shortages, excess inventory and medicine waste. The company has raised multiple funding rounds, including a $7 million pre-Series A in 2023, and has developed AI-powered tools for demand forecasting and procurement. In 2025, Aumet reorganised its technology into three core products: Pulse for individual pharmacies, Chain for pharmacy groups and Enterprise for public healthcare systems. It also signed a nationwide rollout with Jordan’s Ministry of Health. Aqel continues to lead the company as it expands its B2B healthcare infrastructure, using data, automation and artificial intelligence to connect supply and demand across pharmaceutical markets in the region today. YAHYA AQEL CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, AUMET Ahmed M.A. Jawahery is President of Royal Bahrain Hospital, bringing decades of experience across business, engineering, investment and healthcare to Bahrain’s healthcare sector. A Bahraini entrepreneur and engineer, he is Chairman and CEO of Middle East Trading & Engineering WLL, established in 1975 with interests spanning engineering, energy, oil and gas, logistics, real estate and healthcare. His healthcare journey began in 2004, when he partnered with Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences to establish KIMS Bahrain Medical Center. That partnership helped lay the foundation for Royal Bahrain Hospital, established in 2011. Today, the Salmaniya hospital has 77 beds, 93 doctors and 15 services, spanning orthopaedics, obstetrics and gynaecology, urology, general surgery and cardiology. Jawahery chairs KIMSHEALTH Medical Center in Bahrain. AHMED JAWAHERY PRESIDENT, ROYAL BAHRAIN HOSPITAL 48 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE Jalil Allabadi is the founder and chief executive of Altibbi, one of the Arab world’s largest digital health platforms. Founded to make reliable medical information and remote healthcare more accessible, Altibbi has grown into a regional platform offering medical content, doctor consultations, health questions and digital healthcare services. The company’s Arabic-language platform now provides access to more than 1.5 million medical pages, while its network includes more than 183,000 doctors and its services have supported millions of consultations. Allabadi has built Altibbi around the idea that language and accessibility should not prevent patients from finding trusted medical information or communicating with qualified healthcare professionals. The company has attracted backing from regional investors, including DASH Ventures and Middle East Venture Partners, and has expanded its digital services as telemedicine becomes more established across the region. Allabadi’s leadership has also focused on building a technology platform capable of serving a large Arabic-speaking population, an area where healthcare information has historically been fragmented. With more than 20 million users reported by Altibbi, he continues to oversee the company’s expansion across digital consultations, medical information and technology-enabled healthcare delivery in MENA markets today. Amir Barsoum founded Vezeeta, a digital healthcare platform that grew to more than 1,000 employees serving 30 million patients a year across five countries in the Middle East and Africa. After selling the company to a regional private equity firm, he stayed on as Chairman. He then founded InVitro Capital, a holding company that acquires, builds and scales AI companies in healthcare. Within three years it has grown to more than 170 staff, with operations in California, Boston, Mexico City, Cairo and Panama City. He also runs a family office in the Los Angeles area. He began his career at McKinsey & Company before leading M&A and strategy for AstraZeneca across EMEA, and holds an MBA from MIT Sloan. Khaldoon Bushnaq is the co-founder of Alma Health, a UAE-based digital healthcare platform focused on helping people manage chronic conditions through technology-enabled care. Bushnaq co-founded the company with Tariq Seksek in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, building a direct-to-patient model around conditions including diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and asthma. Alma Health combines virtual medical consultations with prescription fulfilment, medication delivery and at-home monitoring, creating a digital pathway for patients who require ongoing rather than episodic care. The company has targeted the large chronic- disease population across the Gulf, with plans to expand beyond its Abu Dhabi base into Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Bushnaq’s background in software and technology has shaped the company’s emphasis on digital patient journeys, using mobile services to connect medical advice, treatment and monitoring. Alma Health has developed its platform as healthcare systems across the region increasingly seek more convenient and preventative approaches to managing chronic disease. Bushnaq continues to build the company alongside Seksek, focusing on technology that can support long-term patient relationships rather than one-off clinical interactions. Alma Health’s model reflects a broader shift towards digitally managed chronic care, combining virtual medicine, pharmacy services and home-based health monitoring. JALIL ALLABADI FOUNDER AND CEO, ALTIBBI AMIR BARSOUM FOUNDER AND MANAGING PARTNER, INVITRO CAPITAL; FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN, VEZEETA KHALDOON BUSHNAQ CO-FOUNDER, ALMA HEALTH WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 49
LIST Dr. Jaffer Khan spent more than two decades establishing himself as a plastic and reconstructive surgeon in the UAE before expanding his work into longevity and regenerative wellness. He founded AEON Clinic at Atlantis The Royal in Dubai, where he serves patients through a model centred on comprehensive biomarker testing, DNA sequencing and cellular-health profiling. The clinic combines diagnostics with physician-led treatment protocols, including advanced IV therapies and cellular-regeneration programmes, placing it within Dubai’s growing premium longevity and wellness sector. Khan trained at Cork University Hospital in Ireland before developing Aesthetics International, his broader surgical practice, over more than 25 years in the UAE. That clinical background forms a central part of AEON’s positioning as the longevity market attracts an expanding number of wellness operators. In July 2026, the clinic publicly welcomed the establishment of the Dubai Longevity Authority, reflecting its alignment with Dubai’s emerging regulatory framework for longevity, biotechnology and advanced healthcare. Khan is now operating at the intersection of established surgical medicine and a rapidly developing field of preventative and regenerative healthcare. As Dubai builds a more formal longevity ecosystem, AEON represents the physician-led end of a market increasingly focused on diagnostics, personalised interventions and healthy ageing. DR. JAFFER KHAN FOUNDER AND MEDICAL DIRECTOR, AEON CLINIC Wael A. Kabli is the chief executive and co-founder of Cura Healthcare, a digital healthcare company built around making medical services accessible through technology. Cura’s platform allows users to access healthcare services remotely, with its model designed to connect patients and medical providers through digital tools rather than relying solely on traditional physical- care pathways. Kabli founded the company with CTO and co-founder Mohammad Zekrallah, developing the platform around the goal of providing healthcare services whenever and wherever patients need them. Cura has positioned itself around a broad consumer healthcare proposition, combining digital access with services intended to support patients and families across different stages of care. Its development reflects the rapid growth of digital- health adoption in the Middle East, where telemedicine and mobile healthcare platforms have expanded alongside wider investment in health technology. As chief executive, Kabli is responsible for steering Cura’s product development, operations and growth as the company works to broaden access to healthcare through technology. His leadership sits within a regional healthtech ecosystem increasingly focused on convenience, remote consultations and digitally enabled patient experiences. Cura’s approach reflects the continuing shift from healthcare delivered exclusively through facilities towards more accessible, technology-supported models of care. WAEL A. KABLI CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, CURA HEALTHCARE Karim Dakki co-founded Klaim in 2019 with Ghafoor Ahmad to address a long- standing problem for healthcare providers: insurance claims that can take 60 days or more to be paid. The UAE-based fintech buys providers’ pending claims, giving them working capital upfront. In March 2025, it raised $26 million, combining a $10 million Series A led by Saudi Arabia’s Mad’a Investment with $16 million in financing, to expand into Saudi Arabia and Oman and serve larger hospital networks. KARIM DAKKI CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, KLAIM 50 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
50 BUSINESS TODAY HEALTHCARE WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 51 The World’s Largest AI-First Expo & Summit The New Intelligence Order from Abu Dhabi, the AI Capital of the World SAVE THE DATE AIEverythingAbuDhabi.com #AiEverythingAbuDhabi GET INVOLVED DESTINATION PARTNER ORGANISED BY GLOBAL PARTNER HOST PARTNER 1113 MAY 2027 ADNEC CENTRE
Sacha Haider, Chief Operating Officer at Botim FINTECH BEHIND BOTIM’S FINTECH PLAYBOOK: COO SACHA HAIDER ON BUILDING ONE CONNECTED FINANCIAL ECOSYSTEM Botim COO Sacha Haider on turning a messaging app into a regulated financial platform serving 8.5 million users in the UAE, and why the next phase is Botim Business. B OTIM HAS EVOLVED INTO ONE OF THE UAE’S LEADING FINTECH PLATFORMS. WHAT HAVE BEEN THE BIGGEST OPERATIONAL SHIFTS BEHIND THAT TRANSFORMATION? HOW HAS YOUR INVESTMENT BACKGROUND HELPED SHAPE THE WAY THE BUSINESS HAS BEEN BUILT? Botim’s evolution has really been driven by the problems we’re trying to solve for our customers. As people’s financial needs have evolved, we’ve had to evolve our capabilities alongside them. What started as a communication platform has grown into a regulated financial ecosystem because we saw opportunities to remove friction from people’s everyday financial lives. 52 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
The simplest way I’d put it is that investing taught me to recognise what a great business looks like, and operating taught me how to build one. Across my career I looked at hundreds of companies and sat on more than fifteen boards, and that trained me to pattern-match, to understand what enables a business to scale sustainably. What’s interesting from the inside is how many of the problems you were sure about as an outsider turn out not to be the actual constraints. So we work from first principles in any given moment, what are we solving for? Is it a regulatory issue, is it the competitive landscape, or is it the user? And if it’s the user, how are we genuinely making their life better? That question keeps everyone anchored to what matters while the tactical matters shift around us. First principles have been the common thread across both halves of my career. As an investor, it was how I identified potential. As an operator, it’s how we build it by being honest about what we’re solving for and never losing sight of the customer or the trust they place in us. That discipline matters even more at our scale. We serve a large, diverse global user base, including 8.5 million people in the UAE, so every decision we make must translate into a reliable outcome for customers as we continue making financial services simpler and more accessible. BOTIM HAS EVOLVED FROM A COMMUNICATION PLATFORM INTO A FINTECH PLATFORM OFFERING PAYMENTS, REMITTANCES, CARDS, CREDIT, SAVINGS AND INVESTMENT SERVICES. HOW DO YOU ENSURE THOSE PRODUCTS WORK TOGETHER AS ONE CONNECTED FINANCIAL EXPERIENCE RATHER THAN SEPARATE SERVICES? The focus starts being clear on what Botim is actually building. We don’t think about our products as separate ambitions. They’re one connected platform designed to make daily financial participation simpler for individuals and businesses. Some days that’s easier to hold onto than others, but the anchor is always who we’re solving for: we’re creating one combined ecosystem for our users, not a set of siloed product experiences. So a lot of our thinking starts with the customer journey. When someone comes onto the platform, how should one feature naturally lead to the next? Someone might begin by opening an IBAN to receive their salary, then use it to send money home, build a credit history, and eventually start investing. As their needs evolve, the platform should evolve with them. That’s the thinking behind capabilities like Split Pay. When users need to make a larger purchase, we built the flexibility directly into their existing debit card, allowing them to switch to instalments whenever they need to. Every new capability should create one connected financial experience rather than a collection of standalone products. We constantly ask ourselves how we grow with our users over time and empower them at each stage of their financial journey. Behind that experience is significant operational complexity. It comes down to having the right teams, processes and governance in place to keep product, technology, compliance, risk and partnerships moving together. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 53
We work with organisations that bring world-class capabilities because that’s how we can deliver more value to customers, faster than we could on our own. The principle underneath all of it is that complexity is our responsibility, not the user’s. The customer should experience one familiar, intuitive platform, while we carry everything behind it, from governance to the resilience needed to serve them at scale. BOTIM IS BUILDING A PLATFORM DESIGNED FOR LONG-TERM SCALE. AS YOU CONTINUE EXPANDING YOUR FINANCIAL ECOSYSTEM, WHAT PRINCIPLES GUIDE DECISIONS AROUND WHICH PRODUCTS AND CAPABILITIES TO BUILD NEXT? Working across diverse high- growth markets taught me that the right products don’t start with the product itself, they start with context. Customers may share needs around access, affordability and cross-border movement, but trust is earned locally. Regulation, financial behaviour, infrastructure and the role of established institutions all shape not only how you enter a market, but which capabilities are genuinely worth building in the first place. That perspective is especially useful because of where we sit. The UAE is a unique home market. It’s the second-largest global remittance hub, and enormous flows of capital move outward from here every day. A big part of our model is following those flows downstream, back into the corridors and home markets they’re connected to. We have users from each of those markets already within our base here, given the expat population, so we’re not guessing about demand. We can see it, learn from it, and follow it to its source. That experience shapes how we expand. We apply consistent discipline rather than a fixed template. We identify a genuine need, understand where the friction is, build with credible local partners, and adapt the experience to how people manage money within that specific corridor. Two things make this work: we’ve learned real lessons from what has and hasn’t worked in each market, and our relationships with partners across those global markets help us understand users from the perspective of their home market, not just their life here. Within Botim, eligible users can already access personal IBANs, cash deposits, local transfers through peer-to-peer payments and AANI, and remittances to more than 170 countries. That breadth gives us a strong foundation, but sustainable expansion takes more than making the same services available everywhere. When we launched our investing suite, we didn’t start by offering the broadest range of investment products. We started by asking what would make someone who had never invested before feel comfortable taking that first step. That’s why we launched fractional gold investing from as little as AED 10, a familiar, lower-risk way to begin building wealth. It gave users an early win, built confidence and created a natural pathway towards more advanced investment options over time. FINTECH 54 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Today, 70–80% of our investment users are first-time investors, reinforcing that lowering the barrier to entry can open investing to an entirely new segment of the market. That’s how we decide what to build next. Botim’s scale and regulated capabilities provide the foundation, local partners provide context and trust, and customer needs determine the experience. SERVING MORE THAN 160 MILLION USERS MEANS EVERY PRODUCT DECISION HAS TO WORK AT SCALE. HOW DOES THAT INFLUENCE THE WAY BOTIM DESIGNS AND DELIVERS NEW FINANCIAL SERVICES? Scale changes how you think about impact. People already rely on Botim to stay connected with the people who matter most to them, and that trust creates a responsibility. Every financial service we introduce has to feel just as intuitive, reliable and easy to use as the communication experience people already know. Our user base also gives us a unique perspective on customer needs. Through Botim AI, we’re creating more personalised experiences while generating insights that help us understand where customers experience friction, where barriers exist, and how we can simplify their financial journeys. Those insights help shape our product strategy, informing how we design the platform, prioritise new capabilities, and creating more natural progression from one financial service to the next. Remittances are a good example. Because we serve more than 170 destinations, we have a unique understanding of how people move money across borders and where friction still exists. That insight helps us continuously improve speed, affordability and expand payout options in the markets that matter most to our users. But we don’t just design for the sender. We also think about the family members on the other side, ensuring they can access their funds quickly, conveniently and in the way that best fits their local market. WHAT IS THE ONE THING ABOUT BOTIM’S NEXT CHAPTER THAT YOU THINK THE MARKET IS NOT YET PAYING ENOUGH ATTENTION TO? What the market is still underestimating isn’t any single thing we’re launching. It’s the model underneath it all. What we’re building addresses that challenge. Rather than adding more standalone products, we’re bringing together payments, remittances, credit, savings, investments and other everyday financial services into one trusted platform people already use. A big part of who we’re building it for is the underserved population in the UAE, people the incumbents aren’t really set up to serve. We can give them functionality the traditional players can’t from accessing wealth products to taking out their first loan. The point of the ecosystem is to actually meet people’s needs and help them make progress toward their financial goals, not just to give them more things to click on. The same challenge exists for businesses. SMEs are often juggling payroll, WPS compliance, merchant acquiring, POS, payments, and business banking across multiple providers. That complexity takes time away from running and growing the business. I’d watch Botim Business. We’re applying the same philosophy we’ve developed on the consumer side by bringing together the financial services businesses use every day into one connected experience. Ultimately, the opportunity isn’t simply to digitise financial services, it’s to remove operational friction so people and businesses can focus on growth. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 55
TECH LEADERS INSIDE INCEPTION42: ASHISH KOSHY ON SOVEREIGN AI, “DEATH BY PILOT” AND THE UAE’S AGENTIC FUTURE Ashish Koshy, CEO, Inception42 56 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Inception42 CEO Ashish Koshy on rebranding under G42, why sovereignty isn’t a trade-off against capability, and what’s really needed to hit the UAE’s target of 50% AI-agent adoption across government. Exactly that, G42 is an ecosystem, and Inception42, is the intelligence layer that sits on top of the group’s infrastructure and data capabilities. For example, Core42 brings the sovereign cloud and compute infrastructure. Other entities across the Group bring data, connectivity, sector-specific expertise. Each one has its own specialisation. Ours is turning all of that, the compute, the data, the capabilities sitting across the ecosystem, into applied AI in the form of agentic AI products and solutions: agents and platforms that governments and enterprises can actually deploy, not just infrastructure they have to build on themselves. That’s what turns the foundation into something institutions can trust and rely on, to scale with confidence and make decisions on. YOU DRAW A CLEAR DISTINCTION BETWEEN AI ASSISTANTS AND AGENTIC AI. FOR A SENIOR EXECUTIVE WHO IS WORKING OUT WHAT THAT MEANS FOR THEIR ORGANISATION, HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE DIFFERENCE IN PRACTICAL TERMS? Simply put, an AI assistant helps people do work. An AI agent does work on behalf of people. An assistant waits for a prompt at every step. An agent acts on its own toward a goal and only comes back to a person when judgment is genuinely needed. For an executive, the difference can be explained between an analyst and a chief of staff. When asked, an analyst can execute a task. In contrast, a chief of staff can prepare for a board meeting by gathering multiple data points and inputs, put together the presentation and prepare an executive brief. Agents operating with autonomy and keeping people accountable I NCEPTION JUST REBRANDED AS INCEPTION42. WHAT DOES THAT SIGNAL ABOUT WHERE THE COMPANY IS HEADED AND WHAT IT IS LEAVING BEHIND? We started as a research institute, and that heritage still shapes how we work today: the science, the rigor, the way we think about problems. What has changed is what we built on top of it. We now design sovereign AI for governments and enterprises, with agents and products running inside the biggest institutions in this country, trusted with decisions that genuinely matter. The name change to Inception42 makes our relationship with G42 more prominent and recognises the role we play within G42’s Intelligence Grid. What we’re leaving behind is the framing of an early-stage research lab. What we’re stepping into is a company built to carry institutional responsibility at national scale, AI-native, human-led. INCEPTION42 IS POSITIONED AS THE INTELLIGENCE LAYER OF THE G42 ECOSYSTEM. WHAT DOES THAT ACTUALLY MEAN IN PRACTICE? Standing (left to right): Ji-eun Park, Senior Director, Solution Engineering, Inception42 - Ibrahim AlJallaf, COO, Inception42 - Anthony Withers, Vice President, Inception42 Seated (left to right): Ashish Koshy, CEO, Inception42 - Rima Semaan, Director of AI and Enterprise Solutions, Microsoft WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 57
for outcomes becomes a design requirement, not an afterthought. That’s the real shift executives need to plan for: moving from tools that speed up individual tasks to systems capable of running whole functions at scale. DOES CHOOSING SOVEREIGNTY MEAN SETTLING FOR A LESS CAPABLE AI? WHY? No, and that assumption is exactly what needs correcting. Sovereignty is not a constraint bolted onto capability, it’s what makes real institutional adoption possible in the first place. It rests on three things holding at once: where the data is processed, who governs the agent, and whether every action can be audited afterward. A model can be brilliant in a lab and still be unusable in a regulated environment if it can’t clear those three conditions. What sovereignty gives an institution is the ability to deploy at scale, in front of a regulator or a board, with full confidence in where their data lives. YOU HAVE SPOKEN ABOUT “DEATH BY PILOT,” THE PHENOMENON WHERE AI PROJECTS GET KILLED BEFORE THEY REACH PRODUCTION. WHAT IS ACTUALLY BEHIND THAT, AND HOW DO ORGANISATIONS GET PAST IT? Death by pilot happens for a simple reason: an agent gets dropped into a process built for humans, and the process itself never changes shape. Steps still happen one after another, waiting on each other, just faster. That’s not transformation, that’s automation with a ceiling. The organisations that get real value do something different: they rebuild the workflow around what agents can actually do, work running in parallel instead of in sequence, agents handling multiple parts of a process at once, flagging exceptions, escalating only what genuinely needs human intervention or judgement. You can’t get there with technology alone. It takes people who know the workflow well enough to take it apart and put it back together differently, and those same people are the ones who end up governing it once it’s live. SERAJ IS YOUR ARABIC- LANGUAGE ENTERPRISE MODEL. WHAT GAP DOES IT FILL THAT EXISTING FRONTIER MODELS HAVE NOT ADDRESSED, AND HOW SIGNIFICANT IS THAT FOR ENTERPRISE ADOPTION ACROSS THE REGION? Frontier models have gotten genuinely strong in English while continuing to show real gaps in Arabic: dialect comprehension, cultural context, safety handling. That gap has quietly limited deployment across sectors where Arabic accuracy and trust are critical in sectors like government, legal, education, financial services. Seraj closes that gap. Built jointly with Microsoft using targeted Arabic mid-training on curated linguistic and domain data, it delivers frontier reasoning without compromising Arabic accuracy or English performance. For enterprise adoption, this matters more than it Ibrahim AlJallaf, COO, Inception42 during his speech at the Agentic AI workshop for government held on June 10th TECH LEADERS Ashish Koshy, CEO, Inception42 at Make It In The Emirates 2026 58 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
sounds: an institution can’t deploy AI at scale in a market where it can’t fully trust the model’s Arabic output. Seraj removes that tradeoff entirely. THE UAE HAS SET A TARGET OF 50 PER CENT OF FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS USING AI AGENTS WITHIN TWO YEARS. IS THAT ACHIEVABLE, AND WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN FOR IT TO BE REAL RATHER THAN ASPIRATIONAL? Yes, it’s achievable, and the UAE is already well underway to make it real. Getting there is about empowering people with AI and giving organisations what they need to scale it: training people to lead with AI, to build and supervise agents themselves, and helping institutions move past fragmented systems so that capability can actually reach every team, not just one showcase project. That’s exactly what we did recently with Microsoft. Connecting Catalyst, our agentic operating platform, with Microsoft 365 Copilot means AI agents are available inside the tools people already use every day, Outlook, Teams, Word, so scaling doesn’t mean asking every employee to learn a new interface. People can start using agentic AI in the flow of their existing work, and organisations can extend that from one workflow to the next without rebuilding each time. That’s the combination that gets the UAE to 50%: people empowered to lead with AI, and organisations equipped to scale it fast. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 59
ROUNDTABLE THE BUSINESS OF REAL AI: A BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST ROUNDTABLE At a Business Today Middle East roundtable, leaders from Pemo, Shaffra, Cisco and SUSE agreed the technology is ready. What companies still have to build is trust. 60 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
O ver the past two years, almost every company in the region has experimented with AI. Far fewer have made it pay. At The Business of Real AI, a Business Today Middle East roundtable held at Sofitel Dubai The Palm, four leaders set out to explain why. They were Alessandro Duri, Co-Founder, CFO and COO of Pemo; Alfred Manasseh, Co-Founder and COO of Shaffra; Swami Sekar, Global Director of Cisco’s AI Software and Platform Group across EMEA and Asia-Pacific; and Shady Khattab, Director of AI Sales, Architecture and Solutions at SUSE. None of them blamed the technology. “Today, technology is capable of full automation,” Manasseh said. What held back almost every deployment they described was trust: employees trusting the tools, boards trusting the numbers, regulators trusting the safeguards, and users trusting machines to act on their behalf. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 61
TRUST STARTS WITH ACCEPTING IMPERFECTION Most pilots never reach daily operations, Manasseh argued, because they are built in a bubble. They avoid the legacy systems, the security reviews and the people who have done the same job for 15 years. Waiting for perfect conditions is not the answer. “You need to accept that organisations are not going to be perfect and not going to be 100% AI- ready,” he said. Duri has seen what happens when pilots stay isolated: they deliver “a nice report, and then it dies there.” A year ago, Pemo took a different route. It started with its data, then made AI “an everyday mini-target for everybody.” Adoption followed “without us forcing it on them.” For Sekar, it comes down to one question: “Are we willing to fail in order to succeed?” THE STAKES RISE WHEN AI STARTS TO ACT Failing, though, has become more expensive. Generative AI mostly produced answers, and a human decided what to do with them. Agentic AI takes action itself. “An AI that acts and then does something wrong, it’s an operational nightmare,” Sekar said. The costs can escalate quickly too. He described a company that opens agents up to its developers, only for the CFO to face a $1 million bill for a single day of token usage. That is why accountability dominated the discussion. AI is becoming a resource that works alongside people, Manasseh argued, but responsibility must stay human: “There should always be the human in command, not just the human in the loop.” Ownership, Sekar added, has to run in both directions. The decision to adopt AI comes from the CEO, but real adoption spreads from the bottom up. At Cisco, every employee, in any role, now faces the same question: “What are you building?” TRUST IS BUILT ONE RUNG AT A TIME Manasseh compared deploying AI to hiring. “You don’t give that new employee full autonomy,” he said. “You need to build trust, and trust comes on a ladder.” The region’s regulators, the panel agreed, are building that ladder deliberately. Under the central bank’s current framework, Duri noted, AI agents may take on some tasks but cannot yet move money. “Jumping the gun will not help anybody,” he said. Sekar credited regulators with balancing innovation and safety through sandboxes, in contrast to the US approach of driving “as fast as you can towards the wall.” ROUNDTABLE 62 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Khattab described the effect from a user’s point of view. “Today, I don’t trust the agent to take care of my money,” he said. “But I know that there are regulators that are protecting that.” As the rules evolve, so will his willingness to hand over control. “Too open will be too risky, and too closed will avoid innovation.” That balance, Sekar believes, gives the region a real edge. The world’s biggest AI companies may still come from the US or China, but the UAE and the wider Gulf could become the fastest adopters anywhere. PROVING IT TO THE BOARD Boards need their own evidence. Duri argued the real return goes beyond efficiency to agility. “It’s like you were driving a car at 30 kilometres per hour, and now you’re able to drive, with the same driver, a car that can go at 300.” Khattab added the other side of the ledger. Some projects lift productivity but cost more in tokens and compute than they return, so every project must be qualified and quantified before it goes live. SO WHERE SHOULD COMPANIES START? The panel’s answer to the risk was not to wait, but to control how much autonomy AI gets. Taken together, their advice amounts to a playbook: Start with the simple use cases, not the most complex. “If you’re going to go for the most complex use case, usually you’re going to fail,” Manasseh said. Treat AI like a new hire. Give it clear role descriptions, KPIs and objectives, then expand its access only as it proves itself. Keep a human accountable for every action it takes. Know your cost of failure before you go live, including the token bill. Show employees, don’t tell them. Let them see AI remove the tedious parts of their job. THE LAST WORD Duri called AI possibly “the most democratic thing that has ever been shipped to the world,” a technology that can make a 60-year-old executive “a killer resource, rather than a pre- retirement resource.” And for CEOs who still haven’t started, Sekar’s advice was blunt: “Congrats on retirement!” WINNING OVER THE WORKFORCE Inside organisations, the harder trust gap is often with employees. Duri pointed to a wave of negative hype: the fear of a “job apocalypse.” His answer is to show people, not tell them. He described sitting beside an employee buried in a tedious task and running her work through an AI tool together. “I remember her face of shock,” he said. Months later, she is one of the company’s most empowered people. Khattab warned against the opposite kind of hype too: vendors promising that agents will run a business within two weeks. “Agentic is not hype,” he said. Those timelines, he suggested, are. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 63
ROUNDTABLE Swami is a technologist, investor and serial entrepreneur who leads Cisco’s AI Software and Platform Group across EMEA and Asia-Pacific. He previously held leadership roles at Intel and VMware in Asia-Pacific. For more than nine years, he has built for a conversational AI-first world, and his work has earned recognition from Amazon, Microsoft, General Electric and Enterprise Singapore, among others. He holds a Master’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an MBA from MIT. RAPID-FIRE One AI skill every executive should learn: Building Sector transformed within three years: Logistics Build or buy? Build Advice for a CEO who hasn’t started: “Congrats on retirement!” SWAMI SEKAR GLOBAL DIRECTOR, AI SOFTWARE AND PLATFORM GROUP, CISCO EMEA AND ASIA-PACIFIC MEET THE SPEAKERS 64 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
SHADY KHATTAB Based in Dubai, Shady helps enterprises move AI from pilot to production on open, secure and cloud-native infrastructure. With more than 16 years in IT, he began as one of the top ten Cisco and VMware trainers worldwide, then held roles at VMware, Red Hat and Nutanix before joining SUSE. He is also a hands-on AI builder, developing production AI applications and multi-agent systems, including a 12- agent autonomous business operating system. He is a regular speaker across the region, including at LEAP in Riyadh. RAPID-FIRE One AI skill every executive should learn: Agility Sector transformed within three years: Finance Build or buy? Build and buy Advice for a CEO who hasn’t started: “Jump fast.” MEET THE SPEAKERS DIRECTOR OF AI SALES, ARCHITECTURE AND SOLUTIONS, SUSE WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 65
Alfred co-founded Shaffra, a GCC-based AI company building autonomous AI teams for enterprises and governments. He is one of the region’s emerging voices on the shift from AI as a tool to AI as a workforce. An industrial engineer by training, he has worked across construction materials, infrastructure, procurement and operational leadership. At Shaffra, he focuses on helping organisations move beyond AI experimentation into governed, measurable deployment. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Concordia University in Montreal and is a member of the World Metaverse Council. RAPID-FIRE One AI skill every executive should learn: Prompting Sector transformed within three years: Human resources Build or buy? Build Advice for a CEO who hasn’t started: “Jump on the boat fast.” ROUNDTABLE ALFRED MANASSEH MEET THE SPEAKERS CO-FOUNDER AND COO, SHAFFRA 66 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
MEET THE SPEAKERS RAPID-FIRE One AI skill every executive should learn: Prompting Sector transformed within three years: Finance Build or buy? “Build the context, buy the models.” Advice for a CEO who hasn’t started: “Hurry up.” ALESSANDRO DURI Alessandro has helped launch and scale Pemo, which has secured more than $19 million in funding and processed over 300,000 transactions for customers last year. He has spent his whole career in emerging markets across Asia and the Middle East. His roles include Chief Commercial Officer at International Ecommerce Holding and five years as Regional Operations Director at ZALORA Group in Singapore. In 2017, he was named Young Supply Chain Professional of the Year in Asia. He holds a Master’s from Fudan University and Bocconi University. CO-FOUNDER, CFO AND COO, PEMO WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 67
CYBERSECURITY CYBERSECURITY ENTERS A NEW ERA OF RISK Artificial intelligence is reshaping cybersecurity at a pace that is forcing organisations to rethink how they protect data, identities, infrastructure and critical systems. BY KASUN ILLANKOON A t GISEC 2026, that shift was a recurring theme across conversations with some of the companies and cybersecurity experts shaping the region’s response to an increasingly complex threat landscape. From AI-powered attacks and non-human identities to vulnerability management, supply chain exposure and the protection of enterprise systems, the discussions highlighted a common challenge: organisations are being asked to defend against threats that are becoming faster, more automated and harder to predict, while continuing to manage the human and technological risks that have always existed. For Egnyte, the focus is on building trust around AI adoption, with data governance, sovereignty and controlled environments becoming increasingly important as organisations experiment with AI agents and large language models. Group-IB, meanwhile, highlighted how AI is giving attackers greater speed and reach, allowing social engineering and reconnaissance to begin long before a traditional attack takes place. At Paramount, the conversation centred on the role of AI in security operations and the protection of enterprise resource planning environments, while SANS Institute examined how organisations can use AI defensively as attackers adopt the technology to increase the speed and effectiveness of their operations. Saviynt brought another dimension to the discussion, focusing on identity security and the emergence of AI agents as a growing class of non- human identities operating across enterprise environments. Together, these perspectives point to a cybersecurity landscape where traditional defences remain important, but are increasingly being supplemented by real-time controls, automation, stronger governance and greater visibility across digital environments. At GISEC 2026, Kasun Illankoon, Editor, Special Projects, conducted exclusive interviews with executives and cybersecurity leaders from Egnyte, Group-IB, Paramount, SANS Institute and Saviynt to explore how organisations are responding to this changing environment. The conversations reveal a sector moving beyond the question of whether AI will transform cybersecurity. The more immediate question is how organisations can ensure that the same technology accelerating innovation does not create new vulnerabilities faster than they can secure them. 68 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Mohammad Alfaour MD for MENA, Egnyte E gnyte’s inaugural exhibit at GISEC 2026 surfaced a consistent worry among Gulf enterprises: they trust artificial intelligence less than they trust the vendors promising to govern it. “This is actually our first year exhibiting at GISEC. We’re extremely glad that we did so,” said Mohammad Alfaour, Managing Director of MENA at Egnyte. “We had hundreds of conversations with both partners, authorities, existing clients, and prospects. It was extremely beneficial. We met a ton of students as well, so some of the folks that will be joining this sector in the future.” A TRUST DEFICIT, NOT A TECHNOLOGY GAP Most of Alfaour’s conversations returned to one word. “A lot of the things that we’ve been hearing have been around trust, actually,” he said. “Whether that trust is with regards to deploying AI solutions, whether that trust is with keeping up with all the regulation and keeping up with all the threats that are coming out there. A lot of the conversations have been really centred around building that trust and keeping a human in the loop, whether that’s from an AI perspective or from a cybersecurity protocol perspective.” That framing extends to how Egnyte positions its own role. “We’re stewards of our clients’ content, whether those are documents, PowerPoints, Excel files, personal identification, you name it,” Alfaour said, describing the company’s recently announced regulation-to- audit capabilities. SANDBOXES AS A SOVEREIGNTY ANSWER The anxiety, Alfaour argued, is less about whether to adopt AI than about how tightly to fence it in. “One of the biggest things that we’ve been learning and hearing is that a lot of clients are worried about the governance behind that artificial intelligence deployment,” he said. Egnyte’s answer is containment. “We actually empower our clients to deploy AI, whether those are large LLMs or building out agents on their content, in an enclosed kind of sandbox environment. So, it’s protected. A lot of people have that reassurance now to go ahead and start to engage and deploy their artificial intelligence and automation aspirations.” That containment logic tracks a broader regulatory shift across the UAE and the wider Gulf. “There’s been a lot of requirements around data residency, data sovereignty, keeping that data closer within the country,” Alfaour said, adding that regional threats are “starting to accelerate” alongside the region’s digital ambitions. Egnyte’s response leans on the same technology it is asking clients to trust. “One of the ways that we do that is actually by deploying artificial intelligence capabilities within Egnyte to arm them with being able to do more to counter any of those types of attacks,” Alfaour said, “whether that’s detecting malware, snapshot recovery capabilities, or deploying various agents and security policies to ensure that they’re staying on top of all of their cybersecurity requirements.” For a company built on content governance rather than headline AI models, GISEC validated a quieter thesis: in a region racing to adopt artificial intelligence, the vendors who win may be the ones selling restraint. As Alfaour put it, describing the response from prospects, “it’s what they’re craving.” EGNYTE WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 69
A s cyber threats become more complex, security teams are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to accelerate threat detection, investigation and response. At Paramount, Chief AI and Security Officer Pradeep Menon says the company is showcasing two solutions focused on addressing key gaps in enterprise security operations. “We are showcasing two important products as of now. One is called SOCMate, which is a Security Operations Centre enablement with artificial intelligence underpinning the entire analysis phase, making it much faster to triage, analyse, and recommend actions to any attacks or threats.” The second solution focuses on protecting enterprise resource planning systems that underpin critical business decisions. “The second one is SecurityBridge, which is an SAP-based security solution to protect major decision- making ERP solutions from any adversarial attacks and monitor them continuously in real-time,” Menon says. Pradeep Menon, Chief AI and Security Officer at Paramount According to Menon, the challenge facing security operations can be understood across three stages, beginning with the signals generated by different technologies and systems. “If you really look at it, there are three phases. The first phase is in terms of signals you get from various technologies and estates. Think of it like you’re in a physical security world, with various sensors giving you signals that there are threats and alerts happening.” The second stage involves security professionals investigating those signals and determining where an attack originated and how it moved through an environment. “The second side is the security guard or somebody who must decide where it is coming from and where the breach has occurred. They must pivot between multiple tools and solutions to understand where the ingress happened, where the egress is, etc. So that is completely human dominated currently.” Menon believes this human- driven analysis represents a major bottleneck for security teams, particularly as organisations deal with growing volumes of alerts and increasingly sophisticated attacks. “Then you must take action to close it or isolate a system, etc. We work in the middle point, which is the bottleneck where there is a human reliability issue.” SOCMate is designed to address that challenge by reducing the cognitive burden on security teams while helping them investigate threats more consistently. “SOCMate actually operates to take the cognitive load off and provide much deeper and reliable triaging and information for operations.” Menon also highlights the importance of securing SAP environments, particularly across industries where enterprise systems support major operational and financial decisions. “In larger environments and enterprises, organisations use SAP. From manufacturing to oil and gas, critical decisions are based on the information they get from SAP.” He says protecting these systems is critical because a successful attack could have consequences far beyond an individual application. “It’s very important because adversaries who try to attack these larger systems will have a significant impact. We need to make sure systems are providing informed decisions and that you get proper decisions from these systems.” SecurityBridge is intended to provide an additional layer of visibility and protection. “But the challenge is if there is an attack happening, there is no way currently to monitor, detect, and bridge it. That’s where SecurityBridge comes into the picture so we can understand, monitor, and contain the attacks in real-time.” Menon says the urgency is particularly pronounced across the region, where organisations are facing a rapidly changing threat environment. “Especially in this region, because of conflicts, data shows there’s almost a 300% increase in terms of attacks.” With threats increasing across critical sectors, he argues that organisations need to strengthen their defensive capabilities even when security resources are limited. “We are seeing a huge increase in attacks, which is why organisations need to make sure, even if they don’t have resources, they use technologies like AI to put up a very active defensive front against these attacks.” PARAMOUNT CYBERSECURITY 70 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Ashraf Koheil, Vice President of Sales, META and ANZ, Group-IB A rtificial intelligence is not just accelerating cybercrime, it is rewriting the timeline of an attack, according to Ashraf Koheil, Vice President of Sales for META and ANZ at Group-IB. “AI is probably widening a lot the spectrum right now,” Koheil said. “Because what is AI doing? AI, the first thing right, is doing a lot of discovery.” In the past, fraud used to be a fraudulent transaction from a transfer to a transfer or a bank to a bank. “Now when we see fraud, fraud happens actually six months before the event because there’s a lot of social engineering. They check social media, they build fake KYC data, they create fake accounts, and so forth.” FUELLING THE NEXT GENERATION ATTACK Koheil traced the shift to how easily attackers can now weaponize everyday carelessness. “Many employees, if they don’t know how to use AI, they would copy and paste certain confidential material like email with client correspondence or a presentation, upload it somewhere on whatever AI platform that they want to use,” he said. “This data is already leaked. So, imagine AI with its speeds today, it basically looks and analyses different data from different angles and basically creates which ones I can attack faster and easier.” The same openness that helps company research itself cuts both ways. “If you want to research your own company today and get a lot of data from public social media, who’s the CEO, what’s their social media profile, what’s their preferences, who are they connected to,” Koheil said, “the very same information will be available to somebody who has a different kind of intent for your organisation.” SUPPLY CHAINS ARE THE SOFT ENTRY POINT Remote access habits formed during the pandemic left many organisations exposed, Koheil said. “The first couple of years until 2022 was the panic mode, let’s give employees remote access through VPN or whatever, and then let me look at the data classification, what kind of data we need to give access to, and so forth.” “Giving access was not catching up with the restrictions because we wanted not to disrupt the business,” he said, noting that contractors were often granted network access simply to upload invoices. “The attackers are looking for any vulnerability, any door that can get them in,” Koheil said. “Sometimes we think if they’re not coming through the door or the window, then we are safe. But no, they can come through the kitchen, they can come through the bathroom. This is why supply chain attacks are easier than going after the main doors of the organisation, because main doors are usually assumed to be well guarded.” Asked what builds resilience against that expanding surface, Koheil pointed to three habits. “Understanding and always being up to date on your threat landscape,” running exercises “like fire drills” to test organisational readiness, and “having the right partnership, because I always assume technology will fail at some point,” he said. “We have seen so many attacks where technology was bulletproof, it was a very expensive technology, but the users did something that they shouldn’t have done, and then the attack went through.” Keep redoing this exercise every quarter, he added. “These are the three key elements for cyber resilience.” GROUP-IB WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 71
A rtificial intelligence is not necessarily creating an entirely new cyber threat landscape, but it is changing how quickly and effectively attackers can operate. For Jan D’Herdt, SANS Certified Instructor at SANS Institute, the growing use of AI by attackers means defenders need to adopt the same technology to strengthen their own security operations. “The threat landscape itself is not changing, per se, from my point of view. What is changing, however, is the speed and the effectiveness of the threats that are out there,” D’Herdt says. “Attackers are still going to attack us in a very, very same way as before, but they’re now leveraging AI.” That shift is making it increasingly important for organisations to use AI as part of their defensive strategies. “For me, it’s more important that we also use AI to protect ourselves, just like the attackers are using AI to attack us,” he says. “I don’t really see the threat landscape is changing; the speed at which or Jan D’Herdt, SANS Certified Instructor at SANS Institute the effectiveness of attacks are just increasing with the use of AI.” One area where the pressure is becoming particularly visible is vulnerability management. Organisations have long struggled to keep every system fully patched, and the growing volume of vulnerabilities is adding another layer of complexity. “Vulnerability management has been a concern for quite some time within the cybersecurity space. We’re always fighting a war, which is number one because we’re always behind,” D’Herdt says. “I honestly don’t know any company who says like, ‘We have patched all of our systems; everything is up to date at this moment.’” AI is also contributing to a higher volume of vulnerabilities being identified, creating an even larger remediation workload for security teams. “With AI coming into the picture right now, we see an increase there of the volume of vulnerabilities which are detected and which will need to be fixed,” he says. “The problem is, indeed, patching all of those things is not something we do easily.” Rather than attempting to fix everything simultaneously, D’Herdt believes organisations need to prioritize their most important assets. “I think it’s even more important now to prioritize certain elements,” he says. “Which assets are now more important to us than others that we need to make sure that they are patched up to date?” A tiering model can help organisations determine where remediation efforts should be concentrated. “These are my external-facing assets, for example. The threat landscape is bigger than an internal- facing asset, so the likelihood of something being compromised is higher on those assets,” D’Herdt says. “You need to figure out where which asset sits, and then based on that, you will need to address them faster or slower.” Cloud adoption presents a similar need for strategic decision-making. While cloud environments offer scalability and efficiency, D’Herdt cautions against assuming migration automatically reduces costs. “The speed on which we can have resources is very nice. It’s better than what we have on-prem traditionally,” he says. “However, I don’t agree with the cost aspect per se.” From a security perspective, cloud platforms can offer extensive capabilities, but organisations still need to control consumption. “The cloud does come with a lot of benefits because you now have security features available to you at the click of a button,” D’Herdt says. “It’s going to be important for companies to make sure they only take what they actually believe they need.” Critical infrastructure is another area facing heightened attention as geopolitical tensions continue to shape the security environment. “You can see critical infrastructure is being targeted,” he says. “That’s physically being targeted, but also cyber being targeted.” D’Herdt says organisations operating critical infrastructure therefore need to maintain a strong focus on cyber protection as attacks against these environments increase. “We have seen an increase there in some attacks going onto these critical infrastructures, and I believe this is what was expected as well, based on our current political climate.” SANS INSTITUTE CYBERSECURITY 72 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
A rtificial intelligence is forcing organisations to rethink how they approach identity security as AI agents increasingly operate across enterprise environments. Kamel Heus, Vice President of Sales, MEA, at Saviynt, says the traditional approach to identity management is no longer sufficient for systems that can make decisions and act autonomously. “AI is fundamentally changing the way we do identity security. Before, for 20 years, identity security was answering just one simple question. You hire one person, you give them a set of permissions within a role, and you review this once a year, once a quarter.” That model is changing as organisations deploy AI agents, copilots and automated processes that can act dynamically. “Now actually, it’s changing to: what has access to my environment, and what can they do? So, the question is no longer periodic; it must be done at runtime.” For Heus, the unpredictable nature of AI agents makes runtime controls particularly important. Unlike traditional automated processes that follow predefined scripts, AI agents can adapt their behaviour based on the task they are given. “An AI agent is non-deterministic by nature. You give it a task, and it will take a different path to do this task,” he says. “The agent is supposed to adapt, it’s simple to innovate, it’s simple to learn. So, you cannot from the beginning predict what this agent can be doing.” This makes runtime authorization a central component of AI security, allowing organisations to assess whether an agent should perform a particular action now as it attempts to do so. “Runtime authorization is the most important operation; it cannot be done from the beginning, it has to be at runtime,” Heus says. “Is this agent supposed to do what it is doing now? Is it doing it considering the intent and the purpose? Is it in line with the intent and the purpose of this agent?” The scale of the challenge is also changing rapidly. Heus points to the growing number of non-human identities operating within enterprise environments. “We have to know now non-human identities, and specifically AI agents, are outnumbering human identities by almost 144 to 1 now,” he says. “They will be even more. Some people predict to be a couple hundred to 1 in a couple of years’ time.” The speed at which agents can be created and retired creates another challenge for conventional governance processes. “An agent can be created, do the task, and be retired within five minutes. So, if you do these periodic reviews, governance reviews, access reviews, or account reviews quarterly, you have missed this agent.” Heus says organisations need to start with visibility, accountability and least privilege. “The first important thing is discovery: you have to discover all the agents you have in your environment,” he says. “The second most important thing as well is to assign an agent to a human identity, so somebody has to be accountable for the actions of this agent.” The next step is limiting what those agents can do. “Don’t give an agent standing privileges; you have to check at runtime if this agent is allowed to do this action based on the intent and the purpose of the agent.” Heus also sees identity becoming increasingly important as organisations move workloads to the cloud and face growing regulatory requirements around data. “Identity is becoming really the control plane in terms of artificial intelligence for AI,” he says, while also highlighting data residency as a key consideration for organisations operating in regulated markets. For the Middle East, he says the regulatory environment provides a strong foundation for identity security. “The Middle East is one of the most advanced regions in the world in terms of regulations,” Heus says, pointing to frameworks including the UAE Information Assurance Standards, SAMA requirements in Saudi Arabia and the National Cybersecurity Authority’s Essential Cybersecurity Controls. “For regulated industries, they have the mandate to put identity as the core of cybersecurity,” he says. “As these regulations talk about humans more generally, we have to push this and use this for AI as well.” Kamel Heus, Vice President of Sales, MEA, Saviynt SAVIYNT WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 73
INTERVIEW H ISENSE HAS BEEN EXPANDING RAPIDLY ACROSS THE GCC, WHAT DOES THE CURRENT MARKET SHARE AND GROWTH TRAJECTORY LOOK LIKE ACROSS THE REGION COMPARED TO FIVE YEARS AGO? Over the last five years, Hisense has experienced consistent year-on-year growth, significantly enhancing both its market share and brand equity throughout the GCC. At Hisense, we combine strong manufacturing capabilities with a deep understanding of consumer needs and local markets. Our innovation is driven by technology, but always shaped by how people live, interact, and use our products. We focus on one simple principle: every innovation must translate into a better user experience. This trajectory is marked by a strengthened retail presence and a notable rise in consumer consideration, transitioning the brand’s image from a value-driven option to a global technology leader recognised for quality and innovation. This growth is particularly evident in premium segments, such as large-screen televisions, Laser TV, RGB MiniLED, and smart home appliances, where the company now delivers advanced technological reliability. WHICH GCC MARKETS ARE YOU PRIORITISING FOR INVESTMENT RIGHT NOW, AND WHY? Rather than viewing the GCC as a series of isolated markets, Hisense treats the region as an interconnected strategic block. The regional headquarters in the UAE serves as the central hub for R&D, product strategy, and marketing. While the UAE and Saudi Arabia are prioritised as primary growth engines due to their scale and rapid technology adoption, the company continues to invest in Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. The objective is to maintain comprehensive regional coverage through strong partnerships with leading distributors while tailoring execution to meet the specific requirements of each local market. FROM BUDGET ALTERNATIVE TO REGIONAL TECHNOLOGY LEADER Five years ago, Chinese electronics brands competed on price. Today, Hisense is competing on innovation, and winning. Jason Ou, President of Hisense Middle East, Africa and India, on the region’s shifting perception of Chinese technology, and what comes next. BY AYA ZHANG Hisense’s Jason Ou: 74 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Jason Ou, President of Hisense Middle East, Africa, and India WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 75
WHAT HAS BEEN THE BIGGEST OPERATIONAL CHALLENGE IN SCALING DISTRIBUTION AND AFTER-SALES SERVICE ACROSS SUCH A GEOGRAPHICALLY FRAGMENTED REGION? The primary challenge lies in maintaining a uniform consumer experience across various markets that have differing regulations, distribution structures, and service capabilities. Scaling the brand involves much more than sales; it requires a sustainable focus on product availability, installation quality, and responsive after-sales support. To address these gaps, Hisense is establishing consistent regional service standards and strengthening local technical teams to ensure that consumers receive reliable support throughout the entire product lifecycle, regardless of their location. ARE THERE PLANS FOR LOCALISED MANUFACTURING OR ASSEMBLY IN THE REGION? Localisation is a cornerstone of the long-term regional strategy. Hisense already manages manufacturing facilities in South Africa and Algeria and has announced the development of a major facility in Egypt, alongside localised R&D in Dubai. These investments are designed to bring production closer to the end consumer, which improves supply-chain efficiency and supports local employment. Our recent export milestone from Algeria into Egypt and Tunisia shows that the region is not only a consumption market, but increasingly part of a broader industrial and supply-chain ecosystem. The company remains committed to evaluating further localisation and assembly opportunities that provide sustainable operational value and allow for a more effective response to regional demand. HOW DOES HISENSE’S PRODUCT STRATEGY FOR THE MIDDLE EAST DIFFER FROM ITS APPROACH IN EUROPE OR SOUTHEAST ASIA? While maintaining consistent global quality standards, the product strategy in the Middle East is specifically adapted to local environmental conditions and lifestyles. Consumers in this region prioritise high-performance cooling, energy efficiency, and durability in extreme temperatures, along with a preference for larger product capacities and expansive home entertainment. Consequently, global innovations like RGB MiniLED are INTERVIEW 76 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
integrated with locally relevant features, content partnerships, and interfaces to ensure the technology provides meaningful value within Middle Eastern homes. CHINESE ELECTRONICS BRANDS HAVE MOVED FROM “BUDGET ALTERNATIVE” TO SERIOUS COMPETITORS AGAINST SAMSUNG AND LG IN THIS REGION. WHAT DO YOU THINK CHANGED CONSUMER PERCEPTION TO MAKE THAT POSSIBLE? The shift in perception is largely due to increased consumer access to information, allowing buyers to prioritise performance, reviews, and specifications over a brand’s country of origin. Chinese tech companies have moved beyond price-based competition by investing heavily in R&D, premium design, and global sponsorships. By leading the way in original technologies like Laser TV and AI-powered appliances, brands like Hisense are no longer just following established competitors; they are actively defining the industry’s direction and setting new standards for value and reliability. WHERE DO YOU SEE THE CEILING FOR CHINESE BRANDS IN THIS REGION? There is no predetermined ceiling based on a brand’s origin; rather, a company’s potential is defined by its ability to innovate and build trust. Having already proven their ability to compete in both mainstream and premium segments, the next stage of growth for these brands will depend on leadership in AI, original technology, and connected consumer ecosystems. Companies that continue to invest in localised service infrastructure and high- quality products are well-positioned to become long-term market leaders and shape the future of the industry in the region. WHAT’S NEXT FOR HISENSE IN THE MIDDLE EAST? The next phase of evolution involves transitioning from a manufacturer of hardware into an AI-driven technology company. The focus is shifting toward connected AI scenarios where televisions and home appliances act as intelligent companions that understand user habits and adapt to daily routines. Alongside this technological transformation, Hisense will continue to deepen its localisation efforts, refine its premium positioning, and strengthen its regional manufacturing and after-sales capabilities to build a comprehensive technology ecosystem for Middle Eastern consumers. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 77
CONSUMER TECH Debo Zhang DEBO ZHANG ON WINNING OVER THE GULF’S PRAGMATIC BUYERS 78 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
W hen HONOR entered the GCC, it came in as a challenger. By the first quarter of 2026, according to the company, it had become the second-largest smartphone vendor in the Middle East, with year-on-year growth of 73%. Debo Zhang, CEO of HONOR GCC, is keen to stress that the brand now sees itself as more than a phone maker. “We are not merely a hardware company,” he says. “We are leading as a global AI device ecosystem company.” The biggest shift he has seen is in what consumers are buying. Tech-savvy users, he says, are “increasingly migrating straight from budget tiers into our premium flagship lineups.” That trend has shaped HONOR’s strategy in the region. The company says its Magic V6 took 50% of the GCC foldable segment within two months of launch. Beyond smartphones, HONOR is extending AI features across tablets, wearables and smart home devices, with the aim of creating a single experience across devices. On the ground, the company has expanded its retail presence in the UAE, Oman and Qatar, and began operating in Bahrain last year. AI THAT HELPS RATHER THAN REPLACES With almost every smartphone brand now leading with AI and cameras, Zhang argues that HONOR’s difference lies in how it approaches the technology. “What genuinely sets HONOR apart is our commitment to practical, privacy-first innovation rather than superficial software gimmicks,” he says. The company’s AI features, he explains, are designed to support everyday users “as opposed to creating a threat of replacement.” HONOR says it has committed $10 billion to AI research and development. Among the results are on-device deepfake detection, which protects users’ security, and real-time AI subtitles for communication. On cameras, the focus is on hardware first: large sensors and high-resolution optics such as 200MP arrays, combined with AI-powered colour science tuned to reproduce natural skin tones. HONOR devices can also share files and sync notifications with iPhones and Macs, which Zhang sees as a way to win over users of competing platforms. BUILT FOR GULF CONDITIONS Zhang describes GCC consumers as highly tech-savvy, with high expectations and a demand for real value. Rather than relying on incremental updates, he says, HONOR tailors its hardware to local conditions. The Magic V6 pairs a 6,660mAh silicon-carbon battery with an 8.75mm body, carries IP68 and IP69 ratings, and includes hinge protection designed to guard against sand. The region’s population is another factor. Because HONOR’s products are tuned for a global market, Zhang believes they appeal naturally to the GCC’s multinational residents. Alongside that, the company invests in building local relationships instead of applying one-size-fits-all global templates. THE NEXT PHASE OF GROWTH Zhang sees the move into premium devices as HONOR’s main growth driver. Consumers in the region are looking for better design, longer battery life and foldables that solve everyday problems, he says, and demand for the Magic series reflects that. According to the company, shipments of the Magic8 Pro have risen 48% across the GCC. Beyond phones, HONOR is scaling up its connected tablets and wearables, and moving into business customers. One of its first enterprise products is an AI-powered smart safety helmet. A MISUNDERSTOOD CONSUMER If there is one thing Zhang believes global brands get wrong about the region, it is the idea that Gulf consumers are tied to traditional brand loyalty or status symbols. “In reality, regional buyers are among the most pragmatic, research-driven tech adopters in the world,” he says. They compare AI capabilities, battery life, durability and camera quality before they buy, rather than relying on a brand name alone. That pragmatism, he argues, is what has allowed HONOR to grow so quickly. “When a product delivers tangible engineering breakthroughs, GCC consumers show a remarkable willingness to switch platforms.” HONOR GCC CEO Debo Zhang on the brand’s rise in the region, and why he believes Gulf consumers are far more willing to change brands than global companies assume. BY AYA ZHANG WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 79
DESIGN & INTERIORS H OW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE OBEGI HOME’S JOURNEY IN SAUDI ARABIA SO FAR? Challenging, but exciting. Saudi Arabia is a market that is unique in all aspects, with a business culture that is all its own. Learning and adapting to this business culture were our main priorities. As with any project, we have had to face unexpected hurdles and delays, but that has given us the time to lay an even stronger foundation in the Kingdom. WHAT DOES OBEGI HOME’S PRESENCE IN SAUDI ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE TODAY, IN TERMS OF SHOWROOMS, TEAM AND SERVICES ON THE GROUND? Our team in KSA, headed by Pamela Dagher and Joseph Yazbeck, has been on the ground and operational since 2024 when we began planning our entrance into the market. We are now opening our first showrooms for KARINE OBEGI ON BUILDING OBEGI HOME’S SAUDI FOUNDATIONS OBEGI Home CEO Karine Obegi on entering Saudi Arabia’s evolving luxury interiors market, choosing brands bold enough for local taste, and why patience beats speed. BY AYA ZHANG 82 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
Edra and Paola Lenti, which is an exhilarating feeling. To see physical spaces come to life in a market we have been studying and investing in for years was a proud moment. It was also wonderful to begin with such iconic brands. Edra and Paola Lenti both have their own distinctive design styles, which are appreciated by the refined Saudi home owners. HOW HAS DEMAND IN SAUDI’S LUXURY INTERIORS SPACE CHANGED IN THE PAST COUPLE OF YEARS, AND IS IT GROWING FASTER OR SLOWER THAN YOU EXPECTED? It is growing slower than expected, but that’s not a negative thing. When markets are growing quickly, the foundational work that goes into succeeding long term is often not done properly. A slower market gives us time to learn, strategise, and implement with patience and intention. WHAT MADE NOW THE RIGHT MOMENT TO INVEST FURTHER IN THE SAUDI MARKET? Saudi Arabia has been a market of interest for OBEGI Home for many years. When we learned of KAFD’s plan to create a design district, we knew it was the right location and moment. The market is nascent, with European design furniture still amounting to a small slice of the interiors industry, but we see a growing interest in contemporary furniture. Entering the market at this stage is ideal for us, as we can participate in this evolving conversation and support the development of the contemporary lifestyle brands in such an interesting market. WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR WHEN DECIDING WHICH BRANDS ARE THE RIGHT FIT FOR THE SAUDI MARKET? The Saudi consumer greatly appreciates brands that are artistic and visually striking. Our specialty is European contemporary brands, but the design language of many of those brands is too restrained for the Saudi market. When making the selection of brands to partner with, we actively selected those that had distinct brand identities and memorable aesthetics. Some of those brands we have had long term relationships with, such as Poliform and Lualdi, and others are newer relationships that we are excited to build. IS THERE A PROJECT, COMPLETED OR IN PROGRESS, THAT BEST CAPTURES OBEGI HOME’S APPROACH IN SAUDI ARABIA? Over the past two years, Obegi Home has established a growing presence in the Saudi market, contributing to a selection of distinguished hospitality and luxury developments across the Kingdom. Among those projects are The Chedi Hegra Boutique Hotel in AlUla, the Four Seasons Hotel Jeddah, the Raffles Jeddah, and the Rosewood Amaala, alongside a number of private villas and palaces. These developments reflect the remarkable transformation taking WHEN MARKETS ARE GROWING QUICKLY, THE FOUNDATIONAL WORK THAT GOES INTO SUCCEEDING LONG TERM IS OFTEN NOT DONE PROPERLY. Paola Lenti, Kiori Poliform, PHOENIX WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 83
place across Saudi Arabia’s hospitality, tourism and luxury residential sectors. From the cultural and natural heritage of AlUla to the emerging luxury destinations of Amaala and the evolving urban landscape of Jeddah, each project contributes to the Kingdom’s vision of creating world- class destinations and experiences. For OBEGI Home, being part of these developments represents an important milestone in its Saudi journey. Over the past two years, the company has built valuable relationships within the Kingdom and gained a strong understanding of its dynamic and rapidly evolving luxury market. HOW INVOLVED ARE YOUR ITALIAN BRAND PARTNERS IN THE SAUDI MARKET, AND WHAT’S THEIR READ ON IT? The brands that we work with all have highly involved management teams, and this is undoubtedly an important part of their success. They are optimistic about KSA and sense the beginning of a real market boom, which is evidenced by the growth in real estate projects and global investments. As part WHEN WE LEARNED OF KAFD'S PLAN TO CREATE A DESIGN DISTRICT, WE KNEW IT WAS THE RIGHT LOCATION AND MOMENT. You can sense the energy shift in Saudi Arabia, and it’s clearly linked to the ambitious goals of Vision 2030. What we’ve noticed is not only the incredible investment that is happening in the country, but it’s also clear that the youth are far more engaged and active in the workforce, which aligns exactly with the pillars of “Thriving Economy” and “Ambitious Nation”. We see this particularly with young Saudi women, who are highly engaged with creating a brighter future for their nation. of the go to market strategy, they participated in Salone del Mobile – Riyadh, the first ever edition of the historic design exhibition outside of Italy. That experience allowed them to understand the market more deeply and engage with local design professionals, who provided great insights. THERE’S A LOT OF TALK ABOUT VISION 2030 DRIVING THE MARKET. HOW MUCH OF THAT IS REAL, IN YOUR EXPERIENCE? DESIGN & INTERIORS Paola Lenti, Santorini 84 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
There is a particularly strong connection between Vision 2030 and the premium interiors and design sector. Saudi Arabia is leveraging architecture, hospitality, culture and urban development as tools to transform the country’s image and economy. This creates demand for internationally recognised design brands, sophisticated interiors, and high-quality craftsmanship. The Vision 2030 investment strategy is also creating a remarkably large pipeline of hotels, branded residences, private residences, restaurants, cultural institutions and mixed-use developments. All of these projects have created great opportunities for both local development and foreign investment. LOOKING AHEAD, WHAT’S YOUR VISION FOR OBEGI HOME IN SAUDI ARABIA? My vision is for OBEGI Home to become a trusted reference for exceptional interiors in Saudi Arabia, as we are now in the United Arab Emirates. We want to build lasting OFF THE CLOCK If not interiors, then what? Hospitality. A small hotel full of character would appeal to me; somewhere I could bring together my love of beautiful spaces and the pleasure of looking after people. Trends: in or out? Style is personal, and our advice to clients is to not pursue trends but instead to choose what will make you happy for years to come. What can't you get enough of right now? Functionality not coming at the expense of beauty, and vice versa. Your Saudi wish list? Rather than one particular brand, I'm excited to bring distinctive design to discerning clients in Saudi Arabia. relationships with homeowners, architects and designers, bringing together distinctive international brands and a deep understanding of how our clients wish to live. Our showrooms are the starting point: places where people can experience the collections, discover materials and imagine possibilities for their own homes. As we grow, we will continue to refine our offering, listening carefully to our clients and developing our local team. Edra, Getsuen Armchairs Lualdi, L7 Bi-folding WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 85
HOSPITALITY THE CASE FOR MIDSCALE IN A LUXURY-SATURATED MARKET Ghaith Dalati, General Manager of Novotel Suites & ibis Mall Avenue Dubai, discusses how midscale hospitality has evolved beyond affordability, why he sees the segment gaining ground even as Dubai’s luxury pipeline grows, and how the two hotels under his leadership maintain distinct identities while sharing facilities. M idscale hospitality has spent the past decade defined mostly by what it isn’t: not luxury, not full-service, not expensive. Dalati pushes back on that framing entirely. Speaking to Business Today Middle East, he outlines how the category itself has changed, from a value proposition guests settled for into one they’re actively choosing, and explains why he thinks Dubai’s saturation with premium openings makes the case for midscale stronger, not weaker. HOW DO YOU DEFINE “MIDSCALE” TODAY VERSUS HOW THE CATEGORY WAS UNDERSTOOD A DECADE AGO? The definition of midscale has evolved significantly. A decade ago, it was largely associated with affordability and functionality. Today, guests expect much more. They want thoughtfully designed spaces, seamless technology, genuine service and experiences that feel personal all while delivering excellent value. Today’s travellers also expect hotels to understand their individual needs. Whether they’re staying for one night, a week, travelling with family, or visiting for business, they value flexibility and service that feels tailored rather than transactional. Midscale hospitality has become less about what you remove and more about what you deliver in a smarter, more relevant way. WHAT DOES “DELIVERING LIFESTYLE EXPERIENCES” MEAN IN PRACTICE FOR A NOVOTEL OR IBIS GUEST? Lifestyle isn’t defined by luxury, it’s defined by how effortlessly a hotel becomes part of a guest’s journey. For us, it starts with location. Being just steps from Mall of the Emirates and directly connected to the Dubai Metro means guests can explore the city’s business districts, shopping destinations, attractions, and beaches with ease. NOVOTEL SUITES & IBIS MALL AVENUE: BY AYA ZHANG MIDSCALE HOSPITALITY HAS BECOME LESS ABOUT WHAT YOU REMOVE AND MORE ABOUT WHAT YOU DELIVER IN A SMARTER, MORE RELEVANT WAY. Ghaith Dalati, General Manager, Novotel Suites & ibis Mall Avenue Dubai 86 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
It’s also about understanding why guests are travelling and creating experiences that complement their lifestyle. A business traveller may value a seamless check-in and a productive workspace, while a family might appreciate spacious suites and easy access to attractions. Our role is to anticipate those needs and make every stay feel intuitive and personalised. Whether guests are meeting friends at McG’s by McGettigan’s, enjoying a relaxed meal, or simply unwinding after a day in the city, we aim to create spaces and quality dining, or service that feels personal and attentive. Often, it’s the small details remembering a returning guest’s preferences or understanding the purpose of their visit that leave the biggest impression. Maintaining accessibility is equally important. Every decision we make is guided by one principle: will this make the guest experience better while still delivering exceptional value? That’s how we create stays that feel elevated without moving away from what midscale hospitality stands for. DUBAI’S HOSPITALITY MARKET IS SATURATED WITH PREMIUM AND LUXURY OPENINGS. DO YOU SEE MIDSCALE LOSING GROUND, OR IS THERE A STRUCTURAL ADVANTAGE YOU’RE LEANING INTO? I actually think we’re entering the golden age of midscale hospitality. People are travelling more frequently than ever before. They’re extending business trips, travelling with families, working remotely, and exploring cities differently. They’re not necessarily looking to spend more, they’re looking to get more from their stay. Our role is to make Dubai incredibly easy to experience. experiences that feel welcoming, social, and genuinely connected to the way people travel today. WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE BETWEEN ADDING LIFESTYLE VALUE AND PROTECTING THE ACCESSIBLE PRICE POINT THAT MIDSCALE GUESTS RELY ON? For us, lifestyle isn’t about adding unnecessary extras, it’s about adding meaningful value. We focus on investing in experiences that genuinely improve a guest’s stay, whether that’s intuitive technology, vibrant social spaces, Novotel Suites & ibis Mall Avenue Dubai sits directly connected to the Dubai Metro, steps from Mall of the Emirates. Novotel Suites and ibis maintain distinct identities while sharing facilities under one leadership. WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 87
From our location to personalised service that adapts to every guest, we remove friction from the journey. That’s something many travellers value more than traditional luxury. For me, the future belongs to hotels that are relevant, connected, and genuinely understand their guests and that’s exactly where the midscale segment excels. NOVOTEL SUITES AND IBIS MALL AVENUE SHARE CONNECTING FACILITIES UNDER YOUR LEADERSHIP. HOW DO YOU ENSURE EACH BRAND MAINTAINS ITS OWN DISTINCT IDENTITY? While the two hotels complement each other operationally, each brand has its own personality and guest proposition. Novotel Suites is designed for guests seeking more space, flexibility, and comfort, making it ideal for extended stays, families, and business travellers who appreciate suite-style accommodation and a more residential feel. ibis, meanwhile, is vibrant, energetic, and designed for travellers who value simplicity, efficiency, and smart design. Although each brand delivers a distinct experience, what connects them is our service philosophy. Regardless of which hotel a guest chooses, our teams focus on understanding individual needs, delivering genuine hospitality, and ensuring every stay feels personal. Behind the scenes, our shared facilities and collaborative teams allow us to deliver consistency and efficiency while preserving each brand’s unique identity. LOOKING AHEAD, WHAT’S THE NEXT PHASE OF GROWTH OR INNOVATION YOU’RE PLANNING FOR THIS PROPERTY SPECIFICALLY? Hospitality is no longer just about providing accommodation, it’s about creating relevance. Our vision is to position Novotel Suites & ibis Mall Avenue as the first choice for travellers who want to experience Dubai effortlessly. That means combining intelligent technology with genuine human connection, offering personalised experiences rather than standardised service, and creating spaces that appeal as much to the local community as they do to our guests. We’re fortunate to be in one of Dubai’s most connected locations. Our next chapter is about making that accessibility even more valuable through curated local experiences, meaningful partnerships, and a service culture that anticipates guest needs rather than simply responds to them. The future of hospitality isn’t about adding more amenities; it’s about creating smarter, more intuitive experiences that give guests exactly what they need, when they need it. That’s the direction we’re taking evolving from being a place to stay into a destination that connects people, places, and experiences in a way that’s seamless, authentic, and memorable. LIFESTYLE ISN’T DEFINED BY LUXURY, IT’S DEFINED BY HOW EFFORTLESSLY A HOTEL BECOMES PART OF A GUEST’S JOURNEY. HOSPITALITY The property caters to business travellers with dedicated workspaces and seamless check-in. 88 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 89
SPORTS The Formula 1 STC Saudi Arabian Grand Prix will return to the Jeddah Corniche Circuit next year, taking its familiar place as the second race of the season. FORMULA 1 RETURNS TO JEDDAH IN MARCH 2027 90 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
F ormula 1 is heading back to the Red Sea. The Saudi Motorsport Company (SMC) has confirmed that the Formula 1 STC Saudi Arabian Grand Prix will take place at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit from 19 to 21 March 2027. The date was announced as part of the provisional 2027 FIA Formula 1 World Championship calendar. The Jeddah weekend returns to its usual slot as the second race of the season, and will be the sixth time the championship has raced on the Kingdom’s Red Sea coast. SMC says its focus is on delivering another event of international standard, welcoming fans from across Saudi Arabia and around the world. THE FASTEST STREET CIRCUIT ON THE CALENDAR The Jeddah Corniche Circuit is both the fastest and the longest street circuit in Formula 1, with drivers reaching average speeds of up to 252 km/h. Since its debut in 2021, it has built a reputation for close racing, dramatic overtakes and strategic battles, including moments that have decided championships. Much of that comes from the layout itself. High-speed corners, barriers that sit close to the track and a night- race setting make it one of the most demanding venues for drivers, and a favourite with fans. MORE THAN A RACE The weekend has also grown into a major entertainment event. Previous editions have featured performances from Justin Bieber, Alicia Keys, Pharrell Williams, Calvin Harris, Black Eyed Peas and Jennifer Lopez, and another line-up of international music acts will perform across the 2027 race weekend. THE AMBITION FOR 2027 HRH Prince Khalid Bin Sultan Al Abdullah Al-Faisal, Chairman of the Saudi Automobile and Motorcycle Federation and the Saudi Motorsport Company, said: “We are delighted to welcome Formula 1 back to Jeddah in 2027. The Jeddah Corniche Circuit has earned a reputation for producing some of the most thrilling and unpredictable racing in Formula 1, creating unforgettable moments for drivers and fans alike. “As we prepare to host Formula 1 STC once again, we look forward to welcoming the teams, drivers, partners and visitors from across the world back to the Kingdom. Our ambition is not only to deliver another exceptional race, but to create a truly world-class experience that showcases the very best of Jeddah and Saudi Arabia through elite racing, premium live entertainment and activities for fans of all ages.” WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 91
CARS T he first three ROX ADAMAS vehicles have rolled off the production line in Abu Dhabi, each carrying the “Made in the Emirates” mark. They are the first output of ROX’s newly completed Advanced AI Manufacturing Centre, and mark a new stage in the company’s localisation and expansion in the emirate. The facility builds on ROX’s partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO), and supports the company’s plans to localise its supply chains, technology and design. It is backed by the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology under the Make it in the Emirates initiative, and supports the goals of Operation 300Bn, the UAE’s National Strategy for Industry and Advanced Technology. FROM 20,000 TO 300,000 VEHICLES The new facility is expected to have an initial production capacity of 20,000 vehicles in 2027, with plans to increase this to 300,000 vehicles With its first locally built vehicles off the production line, ROX is turning Abu Dhabi into the base for its global expansion. MADE IN THE EMIRATES: ROX STARTS BUILDING CARS IN ABU DHABI 92 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
a year by 2030. Output will serve the domestic market and support exports to regional and international markets. Covering 10,000 square metres within the Khalifa Economic Zones Abu Dhabi (KEZAD Group) industrial ecosystem, the plant goes well beyond final assembly. More than 80 types of vehicle components are sub-assembled on site, alongside complete vehicle assembly, calibration, rain testing, road testing and final inspection before delivery. Hasan Jasem Al Nowais, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology, said the start of production “reflects the objectives of national initiatives such as Operation 300bn and Make it in the Emirates, and demonstrates the UAE’s ability to attract and localise advanced industries, spanning production and assembly, design, research and development, and artificial intelligence applications.” Mohammad Ali Al Kamali, Chief Trade and Industry Officer at ADIO, described ROX’s progress as “a clear example of how industrial investments can translate into local production, deeper industrial capability and global growth.” He added: “Abu Dhabi gives manufacturers the infrastructure, connectivity and partners to establish, scale and compete globally from a single base.” DESIGN AND AI, BUILT LOCALLY Production is only one part of ROX’s plans. Since establishing its global headquarters in Abu Dhabi last year, the company has continued to expand its operations there, and has now unveiled an AI LAB and a Design Studio in the emirate. The AI LAB will serve as the development base for the ROX AGENT AI platform, while the Design Studio brings together designers from the UAE, China and around the world. The studio’s first project is the ROX ADAMAS – Abu Dhabi Edition, developed with the Design Commission – Abu Dhabi and Al Khaznah Leathers. Its design is inspired by Khoos, the traditional Emirati craft of weaving palm fronds. ROX plans to unveil it in Abu Dhabi in March 2027 as its first UAE-designed vehicle. To showcase its locally built cars, ROX is also launching the second season of its GRAND TOUR. Two vehicles from the first batch of UAE- manufactured ADAMAS will drive from Abu Dhabi across West Africa, from Nigeria to Mauritania, before finishing in Casablanca, Morocco. A BASE FOR GLOBAL GROWTH For ROX, Abu Dhabi is now the starting point for its international expansion. “The opening of the new manufacturing centre represents an important step in ROX’s journey and a starting point for expanding our presence from Abu Dhabi into international markets,” said Jarvis, Founder and CEO of ROX. “We look forward to establishing the UAE as a key part of our global growth journey and building a company that the UAE can be proud of and that contributes to its economic ambitions.” WWW.BUSINESSTODAY.ME 93
LAST LOOK T UMI’s Autumn/Winter 2026 collection takes its cue from the mountains, with a palette of alpine green, camouflage and earthy neutrals. 19 Degree Collection: sculptural, lightweight luggage inspired by alpine landscapes, now in the new Deep Pine and Salt colourways. It’s available across carry-on, checked and trunk styles. Voyageur Q Tote: reimagined in supple leather with refined hardware, a tote designed to move easily between travel, work and weekends. ON THE MOVE: TUMI’S AUTUMN/WINTER EDIT Alpine colours and a refined leather tote lead TUMI’s Autumn/Winter 2026 travel edit. 94 BUSINESS TODAY MIDDLE EAST | OCTOBER 2026
PROPERTIES solproperties.ae 800-765-1 Learn More
hermanmiller.com Designed with everyone in mind Gemma puts people first, designed to meet the needs of every individual within a healthcare setting. Advanced Business Care x MillerKnoll stand : H2A.H10 at Global Health Riyadh, 26-29 October. © 2026 Herman Miller Explore tickets