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01 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / www.entrepreneur.com October 1, 2026 Middle East Edition FROM LISTENING LUCIDYA FOUNDER AND CEO ABDULLAH ASIRI ON WHY AGENTIC AI IS REALLY AN ORGANISATIONAL REDESIGN, AND WHAT THAT MEANS FOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN THE GULF TO ACTING SPECIAL EDITION
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03 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / P.05 From Listening to Acting Founder and Chief Executive Officer ABDULLAH ASIRI built a SAUDI AI company on the wager that the region’s four hundred million Arabic speakers deserved technology built for them first, not translated for them later. P.12 SAUDI ARABIA IS BUILDING THE WORLD’S NEWEST AI ECONOMY, AND THE OPPORTUNITY IS WIDE OPEN How sovereign capital, compute and Arabic-first AI are turning the Kingdom into an operating base for the next generation of technology companies P.16 BIG TECH’S FLAGSHIP EVENT LEAVES A GLOBAL LEGACY LEAP: How KSA Built a $250 Million Global Operation Across Three Continents P.20 POWERING THE AGENTIC AI AMBITION Saudi Arabia is building the infrastructure and trust needed for agentic AI to transact, audit and connect autonomously. Contents/Special Edition CEO Wissam Younane wissam@bncpublishing.net MANAGING DIRECTOR Rabih Najm rabih@bncpublishing.net ART DIRECTOR Simona El Khoury EDITOR IN CHIEF Tamara Pupic tamara@bncpublishing.net EDITOR AT LARGE Anil Bhoyrul anil@bncpublishing.net SENIOR FEATURES EDITOR Aalia Mehreen Ahmed aalia@bncpublishing.net JUNIOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Kristine Erika Agustin kristine@bncpublishing.net EDITOR - SPECIAL PROJECT Kasun Illankoon kasun@bncpublishing.net DIRECTOR OF INNOVATION Sarah Saddouk sarah@bncpublishing.net GROUP SALES DIRECTOR – B2B GROUP Joaquim D’Costa jo@bncpublishing.net HEAD OF PARTNERSHIPS Samir Glor Samir@bncpublishing.net BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Andy Soulahian andy.soulahian@bncpublishing.net COMMERCIAL LEAD Anna Chipala anna@bncpublishing.net COUNTRY MANAGER KSA Amjad Fakhouri amjad@bncpublishing.net COLUMNIST Tamara Clarke CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Salman Ansari SUBSCRIBE Contact subscriptions@bncpublishing.net to receive Entrepreneur Middle East every issue COMMERCIAL ENQUIRIES sales@bncpublishing.net ENTREPRENEUR.COM Access fresh content daily on our website All Rights Reserved 2026. Opinions expressed are solely those of the contributors. Entrepreneur Middle East and all subsidiary publications in the MENA region are officially licensed exclusively to BNC Publishing in the MENA region by Entrepreneur Media Inc. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher. Images used in Entrepreneur Middle East are credited when necessary. Attributed use of copyrighted images with permission. All images not credited otherwise Shutterstock. Printed by United Printing and Publishing. PO BOX 502511 DUBAI, UAE P +971 4 4200 506 EntMagazineME Entrepreneur-me ↑ His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM /
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05 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Founder and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Asiri built a Saudi Agentic CX Platform on the wager that the region’s four hundred million Arabic speakers deserved technology built for them first, not translated for them later. M ost technology companies make broad claims about artificial intelligence that amount to little more than marketing language. Lucidya is making a harder one. Lucidya is the Agentic CX Platform that enables organizations to autonomously turn customer and market intelligence into real-time resolution and measurable business outcomes, and its Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Abdullah Asiri, argues that nearly ten years of Arabic-language data, collected before anyone was rewarding that choice, has produced a technical advantage that competitors cannot simply fund their way into. It is a claim that only holds up if the company can prove it outside Saudi Arabia, in markets where nobody cares where the flag comes from. That is precisely the test Asiri has now set for himself. Lucidya was founded in 2016 in Jeddah by Abdullah Asiri alongside Hatem Kameli, Mohamed Milyani and Zuhair Khayyat. Today it serves customers in thirteen countries from banking and government to travel, insurance and logistics, and Frost & Sullivan has named it a category leader in AI-powered customer experience. Its platform brings together social listening, media monitoring, customer profiling, surveys and omnichannel engagement through its OmniServe solution, with proprietary models the company says understand seventeen Arabic dialects, from Khaliji to Maghrebi, and achieve ninety- two percent accuracy. In an extended interview, Asiri walked us through the decisions that built that position, the ones he regrets moving too slowly on, and why he thinks Saudi Arabia’s technology sector is only now being tested for real. FROM LISTENING TO ACTING Written by: Kasun Illankoon Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / 05
06 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition THE COMPANY FORCED HIM TO CHANGE, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND Asiri is unusually blunt about how little of his own leadership evolution was voluntary. “The honest answer is that I have had to become a different CEO roughly every eighteen months, and each time it was the company forcing the change, not me choosing it,” he said. In the earliest years, that meant doing everything himself. “In the early years, leadership meant doing. I was writing the pitch, sitting in the sales meetings, arguing with engineers about model accuracy. That is not a style, that is survival.” The first real break came between 2022 and 2023, when Lucidya had one working product, social listening, and a comfortable path to keep compounding on it. Instead, the company shipped OmniServe, a customer data platform and engagement tools inside roughly twelve months, and revenue grew. But Asiri points to a quieter consequence as the more important one. “I stopped being able to hold the whole company in my head. That was the moment I understood my job was no longer to make good decisions. It was to build an organisation that makes good decisions without me in the room.” That realization also meant embracing a different approach to leadership: bringing in experienced specialists across key functions and trusting them to lead. Lucidya’s chief financial officer previously ran global finance at a company generating seventy times its revenue. Its vice president of engineering helped scale a company through a $3.5 billion IPO. Its chief revenue officer owned revenue in the fastest-growing region for a $100 billion company. “Hiring them was the easy part. Getting out of their way was much harder,” Asiri said. “I had to unlearn a habit I did not know I had, which is walking into a meeting, hearing a problem, and immediately supplying the answer. It feels like leadership. It is not. What happens over time is that people stop bringing you their thinking and start bringing you a decision to rubber-stamp.” He credits Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers with naming the pattern precisely. “I was an accidental diminisher,” he said. “Now I try to walk in with questions instead of answers, and I hold myself to a simple rule. If someone else can make a call at seventy percent of my quality, they make it. My bandwidth belongs to the ten percent of decisions that only I can make.” The third shift, Asiri says, is happening right now, as agentic AI forces Lucidya to reconsider what a customer service organization is, including its own. “It is genuinely difficult to disrupt a product you built and that clients are happily paying for,” he said. “Choosing to do it anyway, while scaling past three hundred people across multiple countries, has demanded a kind of leadership I did not have five years ago. Less certainty, more clarity. Slower on the decisions you cannot reverse, and much faster on the ones you can.” He summarizes ten years in a single line: “I started as the person with the answers, and I am trying to become the person who builds the place the answers come from.” ARABIC AS THE PRIMARY PRODUCT Asked which single decision most shaped the company’s trajectory, Asiri does not hesitate. “The first was deciding that Arabic would be the product, not a feature,” he said. In 2016, the obvious and cheaper path was to build a strong English tool and bolt on Arabic support later. Lucidya went the other way, and paid for it in slower fundraising and harder investor conversations. “What it bought us is the thing nobody can buy back: 10 years of Arabic conversation data, more than ten billion public posts, and models trained on seventeen sub-dialects,” he said. “Today our Arabic models outperform general-purpose frontier models on regional dialect. That gap did not come from being clever. It came from starting earlier and never switching.” The second consequential decision was choosing to earn credibility in the public sector first, against conventional startup advice to chase faster-moving private clients. “We chose the harder path on purpose, because serving ministries forces you to solve data residency, security certification and compliance properly rather than promising to solve them later,” Asiri said. That standard, once met, made the move into banking, telecom, retail and travel a step down in friction rather than up. Lucidya now serves brands across more than ten industries. The third was resisting pressure, once large language models arrived in 2023, to strip out proprietary research and become a thin layer on top of someone else’s API. “We chose a hybrid instead,” Asiri said. 06 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition
07 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / “I STOPPED BEING ABLE TO HOLD THE WHOLE COMPANY IN MY HEAD. THAT WAS THE MOMENT I UNDERSTOOD MY JOB WAS NO LONGER TO MAKE GOOD DECISIONS. IT WAS TO BUILD AN ORGANISATION THAT MAKES GOOD DECISIONS WITHOUT ME IN THE ROOM.” Abdullah Asiri, Founder and CEO Lucidya, at the annual Gamechangers 2025 Event Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM /
08 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition “We use frontier models where they genuinely win, and we keep our own models where Arabic dialect, Saudi context and accuracy actually decide whether a customer trusts the output. If we had outsourced our intelligence layer in 2023, we would be a distribution company today with no defensible position.” Of the four, Asiri singles out Arabic-first as structurally different from the rest. “Arabic-first is the only one of the four that compounds while I sleep,” he said. “Every conversation that runs through our platform makes the models better, which makes the product better, which brings more conversations. The other decisions were good judgement. That one was structural.” He is equally candid about a mistake he says he has repeated. “On senior people who were not working, I have consistently moved too slowly. Every time, the delay cost more than the correction would have,” he said. “I now force myself to answer one question before any significant people decision: in six months, will I regret not having made this call sooner? If the answer is yes, I move within two weeks.” COMPETING ON CAPABILITY For Asiri, Saudi Arabia’s next generation of global companies will be defined by a harder test than the one their predecessors faced. “The previous generation of successful Saudi companies largely competed on access, meaning privileged relationships and a privileged position in a protected market,” he said. “That model produced real businesses, but it does not travel. The moment you leave the Kingdom, access is worth nothing.” What has changed, in his telling, is that global vendors are already inside the Kingdom competing directly. “We do not win those deals because we are Saudi. We win them when our product is measurably better at the thing the customer actually needs, and we lose them when it is not. That pressure is the best thing that has happened to Saudi technology.” Asiri traces his own ambition back to a specific sentence he has carried for fifteen years, since starting his first company in 2011. “When I came back from the United States, the dream was very specific. Not to build a successful Saudi company serving Saudi customers. To build technology made in Saudi Arabia and export it, from the east of China to the west of the United States,” he said. “It sounded unreasonable when I first said it out loud, and I said it anyway, because if you do not name the destination you will never build toward it.” He argues Lucidya’s international claim rests on something narrow and defensible rather than a national story. “Arabic is not a niche language. It is spoken by more than four hundred million people, and until recently it was served by technology built as an afterthought,” he said. The second thing that travels, he says, is the operating standard forced on the company by Saudi regulation. “Building to that standard means that when we sell in the Gulf, in the United Kingdom or in the United States, we are not scrambling to meet requirements we have never seen. We are already above them.” That is no longer theoretical. Lucidya now serves customers across thirteen countries including the United States, with a sales team on the ground building the American market. “It is early and it is hard, and I would rather talk about it honestly than package it as a success story before it is one,” Asiri said. He is careful to separate the exciting parts of the Saudi technology story from the unglamorous ones still being proven. “Not raising money, not launching products, but sustaining retention, holding margin discipline over years, and building management depth that does not depend on the founder. Those are unglamorous and they are what separates a company that scales from a company that has a good few years.” The internal standard he holds Lucidya to is deliberately stripped of national framing. “If we build a company that would be competitive if you removed the Saudi flag from it entirely, then the Saudi flag becomes a genuine advantage rather than an explanation,” he said. “Not ‘impressive for Autonomous AI Agent 08 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition OmniServe
09 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / “I NOW FORCE MYSELF TO ANSWER ONE QUESTION BEFORE ANY SIGNIFICANT PEOPLE DECISION: IN SIX MONTHS, WILL I REGRET NOT HAVING MADE THIS CALL SOONER? IF THE ANSWER IS YES, I MOVE WITHIN TWO WEEKS.” Social Listening a Saudi company.’ Just good.” He returns, unprompted, to what he says he cares about more than any outcome for Lucidya itself. “I want the next generation of Saudi founders to start from a bigger default. Not to build for Riyadh and think about the world later, but to assume from the first day that what they build is meant to leave the country. In five years, I do not want anyone to find it remarkable that a global category leader in AI came out of Riyadh.” FROM ANALYSIS TO ACTION Asiri resists the now-common habit of companies claiming to be Agentic CX without the label meaning very much. “The distinction that actually matters is whether AI is the thing you sell or the thing you added,” he said. He points to three layers that make Lucidya’s use of AI structural rather than decorative: nearly ten years of compounding Arabic conversation data, more than fifty proprietary models running in production alongside frontier models where they genuinely perform better, and a shift from analysis to action that he considers the real turning point. “For most of our history the product answered questions. What are customers saying, what is the sentiment, where is the problem. Valuable, but it stops at the insight and a human still has to do the work,” he said. “Our AI Agent closes the loop. It resolves the case inside the customer’s own systems, under policy controls, with an audit trail, and escalates when it should.” The results from one deployment, run over five months, are specific. “The agent handled around eighty- five percent of eligible cases with no human touch and removed roughly six thousand hours of work from that team,” Asiri said. “That is not a better dashboard. That is capacity that did not exist before.” It is the basis for a line he repeats often, including from the stage at LEAP. “Agentic AI is an organisational redesign disguised as a technology purchase. Companies buy it expecting a tool and discover it changes what their teams are for. The ones who treat it as a procurement decision get a chatbot with a bigger budget. The ones who treat it as a redesign get a different cost structure and a different service standard.” Asked what separates companies that turn AI pilots into real business impact from those stuck in permanent experimentation, Asiri points first to measurement discipline. “Most projects begin with ‘we should be doing something with AI.’ That is how you end up with a demo,” he said. “The companies that succeed start from a specific operational number they are already accountable for. Cost per contact. Backlog. Time to resolution. First response SLA.” The second is resisting the pull toward impressive demos in favor of unglamorous, high- volume work. The third, which he calls the single biggest failure point he sees, is refusing to give AI systems real authority. “Organisations deploy AI that can talk but not act, because giving a system write access to the CRM or the order management platform feels dangerous. So the AI has a nice conversation and then hands off to a human who does the actual work. You have added a step, not removed one.” He argues governance belongs at the start of a project, not as a checkpoint at the end, and that the deepest failure is treating automation as a technology purchase rather than a redesign of work itself. “If you automate forty percent of a process and change nothing else, you keep the same team doing the same workflow with a slightly lighter load, and the savings never appear,” he said. “That is why I keep saying that agentic AI arrives disguised as a technology purchase and is actually an organisational redesign.” On where the industry goes next, Asiri predicts the last three years of generative AI in customer experience will look, in hindsight, like a false start. “Chatbots that finally sounded human. That was a genuine improvement over the scripted decision trees people hated, but it solved the wrong half of the problem,” he said. “A system that apologises fluently and then transfers you to a queue has not helped you.” The real shift ahead, in his view, is the move from conversation to execution, which he says will invert the economics of the entire industry, make service proactive rather than reactive, retire deflection as a metric companies boast about, and make governance a purchasing criterion rather than a compliance checkbox. Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM /
10 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition A DELIBERATE, STAGED PATH ABROAD Asiri is openly skeptical of the instinct that drives most companies to expand internationally. “My honest position is that most companies expand internationally too early, and they do it for the wrong reason,” he said. “Expansion is exciting, it looks good in a board deck, and it is often a way of avoiding harder work in the home market. I have had to talk myself out of it more than once.” Lucidya’s rule, as he describes it, is to stage everything and commit real money only at the final step, moving through phases he calls explore, test, validate and scale. He divides Lucidya’s markets into three tiers. The Gulf is treated as an extension of home rather than a foreign market, given shared language and overlapping enterprise customers. The United States, where Lucidya already has customers and a sales team on the ground, is the market Asiri says he cares most about, precisely because it offers no local advantage to hide behind. “We are going in product-led, letting people use the product, prove value on their own, and pull us in,” he said. “It is a much harder discipline because there is nowhere to hide behind a relationship. The product either wins or it does not. That is exactly why it is the right test.” The rest of the Middle East and North Africa region, by contrast, is demand- led rather than a target for investment ahead of signal. Four questions determine where Lucidya goes next, in order: whether there is genuine market pull rather than a slide showing total addressable market, whether the company can win on capability rather than proximity, whether leadership has the bandwidth to enter without diluting focus on the core business, and whether the move compounds by strengthening more than one part of the company at once. “The best expansion moves strengthen more than one thing at once. Revenue, yes, but also product hardening, credibility, talent access, or the ability to enter the next market more cheaply,” he said. “Earn the right to expand, then expand with conviction. When we go somewhere, I want us to be the best option available to that customer, not the interesting one.” CULTURE DOES NOT DECAY ON ITS OWN Asked how Lucidya protects an entrepreneurial culture while scaling past three hundred employees, Asiri pushes back on the framing itself. “What you are actually protecting is decision speed and ownership, and both of those are killed by specific, identifiable behaviours, most of which start at the top. Culture does not decay on its own. Leaders decay it,” he said. He points to the same seventy percent rule that governs his own decision- making, extended to the rest of the company, and to a discipline of naming, out loud, which decisions are reversible and which are not. “We treat most decisions as two-way doors. Move at fifty or sixty percent confidence, decide now, correct later,” he said. “What kills speed in most scaling companies is applying irreversible-decision rigour to reversible decisions.” He returns again to the risk of accidental diminishing, this time as a company-wide discipline rather than a personal confession, and adds a fourth mechanism: making it safe to kill initiatives that no longer make sense. “We use a simple test: knowing what we know today, would we start this now? If no, we stop it, and stopping it is treated as good judgement rather than failure.” He is unwilling to treat culture as separate from enjoyment of the work itself. “I want this to be fun. That is not a soft point,” he said. “Nobody does their most inventive work while playing defence, and a scale-up that becomes joyless will still hit its numbers for a year or two before the good people leave. High performing and fun is not a trade-off I accept.” WHAT THE ECOSYSTEM BOUGHT, AND WHAT IT STILL OWES Asiri credits Saudi Arabia’s public sector with a role he calls decisive in Lucidya’s growth, though he is precise about which parts mattered most. “The most important thing was demand, not subsidy,” he said. “A first enterprise customer teaches you more than any amount of funding, because it forces you to be genuinely good rather than promising.” He counts regulation, often overlooked as a form of support, among the most valuable interventions the Kingdom made. “Data residency requirements, the personal data protection framework, cloud-first policy, national AI ethics guidelines. From the inside, complying with all of that is expensive and slow, and there were moments it felt like a tax on being Abdullah Asiri, Founder and CEO Lucidya, at the annual Gamechangers 2025 Event 10 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition
11 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / small. In hindsight it was the single best thing that happened to our product.” Lucidya also holds a research grant with the Saudi Data and AI Authority alongside King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, working on training methods for large language models, a form of collaboration Asiri says did not exist when he started his first company. He is careful, though, to draw a hard line around what government support can and cannot deliver. “Government support creates the conditions. It does not create the capability, and it must never become the reason a company exists,” he said. “We have never won a competitive deal because we are Saudi. We win when our product is measurably better and we lose when it is not, and I want to keep it that way, because a company built on protection cannot export.” Looking at what would help most going forward, Asiri argues for fixing procurement rules that inadvertently exclude the scale-ups the Kingdom is trying to build, shifting government and enterprise contracts to pay for measurable outcomes rather than software licenses, and building a public, national benchmark for Arabic- language AI so vendors can be checked against a shared standard rather than making unverifiable claims. He also wants recognition tied to international traction rather than domestic revenue alone. “Local success can be explained by proximity. International revenue cannot. I would rather compete for support on that basis, and I think most serious founders here would say the same.” START FROM THE DESTINATION, NOT THE TASK Asked what has stayed constant across fifteen years and three companies, Asiri returns to a single organizing idea. “The principle that has not moved in my fifteen years of building tech companies is this: start from the destination, not from the task,” he said. “Almost every decision gets tested against where we intend to be, not against whether it is useful this quarter.” He acknowledges the cost of that discipline plainly. “It has a cost. It makes you look stubborn, and sometimes you are simply wrong, in which case you have been stubborn about the wrong destination for two years. But the alternative, optimising for the nearest visible win, produces companies that are busy and going nowhere in particular.” His advice to founders building from the Middle East toward global scale follows the same logic: name an ambition even when it sounds unreasonable, find the advantage that compounds with time rather than capital, refuse to compete on being local, get disciplined about the unglamorous fundamentals of retention and margin, and move quickly on decisions that can be undone while slowing down on the ones that cannot. His closing advice is the most personal. “Expect it to take longer than you planned. Lucidya is ten years old, and it is only now that competing globally is a credible sentence rather than a hope. If you are three years in and it feels harder than it should, you are probably on schedule.” For a founder who has spent years advocating that Arabic would be an advantage rather than the limitation, that patience reads less like caution than like conviction. “I would rather be one of the companies that went first, took the hits, and left a usable map behind, than the company with the best individual outcome,” Asiri said. “If the founders coming up behind us can learn our lessons without paying for them, that is a better return than anything on our balance sheet.” “ IF THE FOUNDERS COMING UP BEHIND US CAN LEARN OUR LESSONS WITHOUT PAYING FOR THEM, THAT IS A BETTER RETURN THAN ANYTHING ON OUR BALANCE SHEET. ” Abdullah Asiri, Founder and CEO Lucidya, with the team Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM /
12 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition SAUDI ARABIA IS BUILDING THE WORLD’S NEWEST AI ECONOMY, AND THE OPPORTUNITY IS WIDE OPEN How sovereign capital, compute and Arabic-first AI are turning the Kingdom into an operating base for the next generation of technology companies S audi Arabia has stopped treating artificial intelligence as a national talking point and started building it as an industry, and for entrepreneurs and investors watching the Gulf, that shift changes the calculation entirely. For years, the global AI conversation belonged to Silicon Valley, China’s technology giants and a handful of European research hubs. Saudi Arabia is forcing its way into that conversation with a playbook none of them used first. Rather than trying to recreate Silicon Valley in the desert, the Kingdom is building artificial intelligence as a national industrial platform, one that fuses sovereign capital, energy, computing infrastructure, government demand, Arabic-language technology and partnerships with the world’s largest technology companies into a single strategy. That distinction is the whole story. In this race, the countries that move fastest are not necessarily the ones inventing every foundational model or every semiconductor. They are the ones that can secure compute, build infrastructure, attract talent, create real demand and deploy AI across their economies at scale. On every one of those measures, Saudi Arabia is now genuinely difficult to ignore. The Advantage Of Moving Early The Kingdom’s AI push did not start with the generative AI boom. Saudi Arabia’s National Strategy for Data and AI was approved back in 2020, setting targets that included placing the Kingdom among the world’s top 15 AI nations, training more than 20,000 data and AI specialists, attracting roughly SAR75 billion in related investment and helping create more than 300 startups in the sector. In 2026, the government raised the stakes further, officially naming it Saudi Arabia’s Year of Artificial Intelligence, an initiative built to accelerate AI adoption across government, business and society and to cement the technology’s place at the center of Vision 2030. That early institutional groundwork explains much of why Saudi Arabia looks so far ahead today. While many His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 12 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition
13 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / governments are still debating how aggressively to respond to AI, Saudi Arabia has spent years building the machinery around it. The Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority, or SDAIA, gives the country a single, centralized body responsible for driving national data and AI strategy, and that has produced a level of coordination between policy, investment and execution that larger, more fragmented economies still struggle to match. But the most consequential move came in 2025. Enter HUMAIN, The Commercial Engine In May 2025, the Public Investment Fund launched HUMAIN, a national AI company built to operate across the entire artificial intelligence value chain, from data centers and cloud infrastructure to AI models and applications. Chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and led by chief executive Tareq Amin, HUMAIN gave Saudi Arabia something most countries still lack: a commercial engine capable of turning national AI policy into infrastructure, products and partnerships. It moved fast. HUMAIN struck a plan with NVIDIA to develop AI factories with a projected capacity of up to 500 megawatts over five years, powered by several hundred thousand of NVIDIA’s most advanced GPUs, with the first phase built around an 18,000-GPU NVIDIA GB300 Grace Blackwell AI supercomputer. A separate collaboration with AMD envisions up to 10 billion dollars of investment to deploy another 500 megawatts of AI compute capacity over the same period. AWS and HUMAIN have announced more than 5 billion dollars of investment in an AI Zone in the Kingdom, combining infrastructure, cloud services and training capabilities, while Qualcomm and HUMAIN are targeting 200 megawatts of AI inference infrastructure beginning in 2026. These are not pilot projects. They are infrastructure scale bets, and they point to what may be Saudi Arabia’s sharpest strategic insight: in the age of AI, compute is becoming economic infrastructure in the same way electricity, ports, airports and telecom networks powered earlier waves of growth. Access to massive computing capacity is starting to determine where the next generation Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM /
14 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition of companies gets built, and Saudi Arabia already understands how to build infrastructure at scale. Decades of executing enormous energy and industrial projects have left the Kingdom with capital, land, energy, connectivity and execution capability that AI companies now need urgently. Saudi Arabia is one of the few places on earth that can offer abundant power alongside land and connectivity at the scale AI now demands. From Compute To Commerce The buildout keeps expanding. In August 2026, HUMAIN and DataVolt announced plans for a new data center at Oxagon in NEOM, with an initial phase expected to deliver around 100 megawatts of capacity. But data centers alone do not build an economy. Saudi Arabia needs companies actually using them, and that part of the strategy is moving just as quickly. Adobe recently became one of the first major global software companies to move regional AI workloads onto HUMAIN’s infrastructure, an early signal that the Kingdom wants to be more than an owner of computing capacity. It wants to be a destination for global enterprise AI workloads. The push toward mass adoption is even more telling. In August 2026, Adobe expanded its partnership with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and HUMAIN in a deal expected to give more than 27 million Saudi citizens and residents a year of free access to selected AI-powered creative tools, including an image generation model built around Saudi culture and Arabic-language prompts. Countries do not become AI economies simply by owning GPUs. They become AI economies when businesses, entrepreneurs, students, creators and everyday consumers start using the technology daily, and Saudi Arabia is trying to accelerate supply and demand at the same time. Where The Real Opportunity Sits For Founders This is the part of the story that should matter most to entrepreneurs. A data center on its own does not create an innovation economy. What gets built on top of it does, and Saudi Arabia already has enormous industries where AI can be deployed at real scale: energy, healthcare, banking, logistics, aviation, tourism, manufacturing, construction and government services. Few companies illustrate that potential better than Saudi Aramco. The company says it generated 1.8 billion dollars in AI-driven value in 2024 alone, having identified 442 AI use cases across its operations and deployed more than 200 solutions by late 2025. Its planned investment in HUMAIN pairs one of the world’s most sophisticated industrial operating environments with Saudi Arabia’s emerging AI infrastructure, a combination few markets anywhere can replicate. AI becomes commercially transformational the moment it moves beyond chatbots and into drilling, engineering, predictive maintenance, manufacturing, supply chains, energy optimization and robotics, and Saudi Arabia has industries large enough to become genuine testing grounds for exactly those applications. For a founder building an industrial AI product, that is a customer base most markets cannot offer. The Arabic-First Opportunity The Kingdom is also betting that AI should speak the language, and understand the context, of the region it serves. HUMAIN’s ALLAM models sit at the center of that ambition, positioned around a market of more than 400 million Arabic speakers. That is a real commercial opening. Arabic remains comparatively underserved by many global generative AI platforms, particularly around dialects, cultural context, local knowledge and specialized enterprise applications. If Saudi Arabia can build models that genuinely perform across Arabic-speaking markets, its addressable market extends well beyond its own borders, and this localization could become one of the Kingdom’s strongest long-term advantages. The next phase of AI will not be decided solely by who owns the smartest general-purpose model. It will increasingly come down to who can apply intelligence to specific languages, regulations, industries and business processes, and that creates real openings for hundreds of new Saudi and regional companies. 14 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition
15 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / H.E. Yasir O. Al- Rumayyan, Governor of Public Investment Fund H.E. Eng. Abdullah Amer Alswaha Minister of Communications & Information Technology Tareq Amin, CEO at HUMAIN Building The Talent To Match The Infrastructure Saudi Arabia is treating talent as part of its infrastructure strategy, not an afterthought. Partnerships involving NVIDIA, KAUST, international universities and global technology companies are designed to develop Saudi developers, researchers and engineers at scale. Aramco alone has committed to training more than 6,000 AI developers, working with institutions including Imperial College, Caltech and KAUST. The early signs suggest the strategy is gaining real traction. Saudi Arabia ranked first in the Middle East and North Africa in Oxford Insights’ 2025 Government AI Readiness Index, and according to SDAIA, the Kingdom also ranked fourth globally for company adoption of AI in the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook 2026. The IMF’s 2026 assessment of Saudi Arabia found that most of the Kingdom’s interim AI targets on workforce development and investment had already surpassed their 2025 goals. The Work Still Ahead, And Why It Favors Builders None of this means the hard questions disappear. Saudi Arabia remains dependent on foreign semiconductor technology, particularly American processors, and gigawatt scale AI infrastructure requires enormous amounts of electricity and sophisticated cooling in a hot, arid climate. Those are real engineering and supply chain challenges, and they are also exactly the kind of problems that create openings for founders building in energy efficiency, cooling technology and infrastructure software. The bigger question is whether Saudi Arabia can convert AI capital expenditure into productivity, intellectual property and globally competitive companies, and that is where the opportunity for entrepreneurs becomes most direct. Will HUMAIN’s computing infrastructure stay genuinely accessible to Saudi startups. Will government entities and major corporations become early customers for homegrown AI businesses. Can local founders build products in Riyadh and sell them across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and eventually the world. Every early signal, from the pace of infrastructure deployment to the speed of enterprise adoption, suggests the answer is trending toward yes. Why Saudi Arabia Could Win That is ultimately why Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions deserve serious attention from the entrepreneurial community. The Kingdom is not placing one bet on artificial intelligence. It is aligning policy, capital, infrastructure, industry and talent around the technology at the same time, and few countries anywhere can mobilize all five at that speed. Silicon Valley still leads the world in frontier AI companies and private investment. The United States remains dominant in advanced semiconductor technology and leading models, and China remains a formidable force in research, infrastructure and industrial deployment. Saudi Arabia is not trying to replace either of them, and it does not need to. Its opportunity is different: to become the place where AI is financed, powered, localized, deployed and commercialized across one of the world’s fastest transforming economies, and then exported to the wider region. For founders, investors and global technology companies, that makes Saudi Arabia far more than another emerging market to watch. It makes the Kingdom a genuine operating base for the next generation of artificial intelligence businesses, and in a race moving this fast, building the infrastructure before everyone else fully understands what it will be used for could turn out to be one of the smartest moves in the industry. Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM /
16 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition W hen LEAP first opened in Riyadh in 2022, it looked like another technology conference chasing a moment. Five years and 17.6 billion dollars in economic impact later, it looks like something else entirely: a working model for how a government and a private company can move at the same speed, one that Saudi Arabia is now exporting to other markets, starting with Hong Kong. That distinction, between an event and an operating model, is the real story behind Tahaluf, the company Mike Champion and Annabelle Mander built with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and the Saudi Federation for Cyber Security, Programming and Drones (SAFCSP), under the direction of Minister Eng. Abdullah Alswaha. BIG TECH’S FLAGSHIP EVENT LEAVES A GLOBAL LEGACY From a five-person startup to a $250 million operation spanning three continents, LEAP’s co-founders explain how Tahaluf turned one Saudi conference into a repeatable model for national growth. 16 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition
17 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / A FIVE-PERSON STARTUP BECOMES A $250 MILLION OPERATION Tahaluf, the joint venture between Informa PLC, SAFCSP and the Events Investment Fund (EIF), started as a five-person team in 2022. It is now a 300-strong global operation generating more than 250 million dollars in revenue, with 35 percent growth in 2025 alone. In under five years, the partnership built four category- defining events: LEAP, Money 20/20 Middle East, Black Hat MEA and DeepFest. Champion, Tahaluf’s chief executive, measures that growth deliberately conservatively. “Across 2023 to 2025 our events generated US$17.6 billion of economic impact, and that is a deliberately conservative number,” he says. “Most organizers use a multiplier of five. We use two. We still added more than US$10 billion of property transactions completed on the show floor itself, and well over a quarter of a million jobs created through our activity over those three years.” He sets that figure against two of the world’s biggest single-moment gatherings. “The FIFA World Cup in Qatar was around US$17 billion and the Paris Olympics around US$11 billion. Those are single moments that then move on. What we are building stays, and it recurs. That is the real measure.” The Market Read Nobody Else Made Neither founder arrived in Saudi Arabia as a newcomer placing a bet on an unproven market. Champion had worked in events since 2010, starting at IQPC before leading Informa’s Saudi operations, where he grew annual revenue from 2 million dollars to 180 million dollars in four years, and 265 million dollars in five. Mander’s path began with a planned two-day stopover in Dubai at 21 that turned into more than a decade in the region, through roles at Dubai World Trade Centre and Informa Markets before she stepped into her first major leadership role at the start of the pandemic in early 2020, convincing internal stakeholders it was the right time to scale in Saudi Arabia. “Quite simply, we saw the opportunity. I have 15 years’ experience working on events in this region and I have never seen a market upscale as quickly as Saudi Arabia,” Champion says. “His Excellency The Minister of Communications and Information Technology Eng. Abdullah Alswaha asked us to build a world-class event for the Kingdom, and we could have built something safe. Instead, we agreed to build something with immediate global impact. The opportunity nobody else had spotted Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / 17
18 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition ANNABELLE MANDER, Executive Vice President of Tahaluf and Co-Founder of LEAP “SCALE IS IMPRESSIVE, BUT SCALE WITHOUT OUTCOMES IS ULTIMATELY JUST A LARGE EVENT.” was simple. If a government is prepared to move at the speed Saudi Arabia was prepared to move, you can compress 20 or 30 years of growth into one or two.” For Champion, the case for Saudi Arabia was never about the money. “When we set out the blueprint for LEAP, the government did not just listen to our private-sector advice, it doubled down on it. It was the first time in my career I had worked with a government that behaved like a partner rather than a regulator,” he says. “Once I saw that, the destination question answered itself. Give a place that kind of coordination and it does not just become a good market, it becomes the market.” BUILDING A CULTURE BEFORE BUILDING A CONFERENCE Champion had already worked alongside Mander for roughly five years before Tahaluf’s founding, long enough to see a great leader with the potential to become an exceptional one. “What Annabelle brings to Tahaluf is somebody that I can trust to build an exceptional and kind culture in which people are rewarded well and fairly, as well as being recognized and enfranchised,” he says. Mander’s philosophy pairs empowerment with high standards. “We give people real responsibility, permission to challenge us and space to make decisions. Innovation becomes very difficult when everything requires permission from the top,” she says. “Mike has always encouraged me to take bigger risks, but equally to remain authentic in how I lead. What makes me proudest today is that so many of the ideas changing LEAP don’t come from Mike or me. They come from people across our team who feel genuine ownership of what we’re building.” Champion points to staff retention as the quieter driver behind that culture. “Staff retention is Tahaluf’s most important driver of growth,” he says, having seen the alternative firsthand at companies where few people stayed on the same event year over year. “I have seen firsthand how this stultifies growth, because you are always having to relearn the same lessons.” At Tahaluf, retaining talent has compounded over time. “Any mistakes made five years ago are repeated much less, and that is a massive contributor to the growth of the events we have.” TURNING AN EVENT INTO AN ECOSYSTEM Mander wanted LEAP to have consequence beyond scale from the very first year. “Scale is impressive, but scale without outcomes is ultimately 18 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition
19 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / just a large event,” she says. “We wanted companies to enter the Saudi market, founders to raise capital, investors to find opportunities and partnerships to exist because LEAP happened.” That thinking shows up in the platform’s design. In 2026, LEAP runs across 16 stages and more than 20 tracks, with live technology on display through the Tech Arena and an increasingly sophisticated investor and founder program. It also shows up in Rocket Fuel, the startup competition Mander and Champion launched with a 1 million dollar prize fund, at the time the largest of its kind in the world, structured to give founders capital and visibility without taking equity. “The new generation of Saudi founders doesn’t ask whether an idea can succeed here; they ask whether it can lead its category anywhere,” Mander says. More than 145,000 unique business tourists have flown in since Tahaluf was founded, many experiencing Saudi Arabia for the first time. “They go home and tell the real story, which is worth more than any campaign we could run,” Champion says. EXPORTING A SAUDI-MADE MODEL The real inflection point came earlier than either founder expected. On the second day of the very first LEAP, Champion and Mander were invited to the Royal Court and told that what they had built was exactly what the Kingdom wanted to replicate across other sectors. After a year of negotiation, Tahaluf was born in January 2023. “That was the moment LEAP stopped being an event and became a blueprint,” Champion says. Today, more than a third of the events named in cabinet meetings chaired by the King or the Crown Prince belong to Tahaluf. That blueprint is now traveling. Taking something built in Riyadh and launching its first international edition in Hong Kong, through LEAP East, marked a defining moment for Mander. “We aren’t exporting a copy of a Saudi event; we’re taking a Saudi- created model into another global market and adapting it intelligently,” she says. Her approach protects the underlying philosophy rather than replicating the format: ambition, ecosystem, commercial outcomes and exceptionally high standards. “Global expansion isn’t about becoming less Saudi. It is about demonstrating that something created here can have relevance and impact anywhere in the world.” Mander connects that expansion directly to the vision that set Tahaluf in motion. “H.E. Eng. Abdullah Alswaha’s vision has always been much bigger than creating a successful technology event,” she says. “It is about building talent, attracting investment and positioning Saudi Arabia as a creator and leader in the global technology economy.” She credits Faisal Al Khamisi, Chairman of SAFCSP and Co-Chairman of Tahaluf, and Muteb Al Qani, CEO of SAFCSP, as central to a partnership that has behaved like a genuine collaborator rather than a conventional client. WHAT LEGACY LOOKS LIKE FROM HERE Both founders measure success less in attendance numbers than in what those numbers leave behind. Asked what he would want to define Tahaluf’s legacy a decade from now, Champion keeps it simple. “I’d like our Saudi government partners to believe we’ve achieved our mission of bringing world class events to the Kingdom and making it a global events hub. And I’d like the colleagues I’ve worked alongside to think of me personally as a good leader and someone they’ve enjoyed working with.” For Mander, LEAP East is proof that legacy is already taking shape, evidence that the Kingdom can export globally relevant platforms and ideas, not simply host them. As content becomes instant and infinite, she argues, the value of physical events lies in what only happens when people share a room: a founder meets capital, a government attracts investment, a technology is experienced rather than described. “The next generation of events won’t simply inform an industry,” she says. “They will be judged by the businesses created, capital deployed, relationships formed and decisions made because that community came together.” That is the measure Champion and Mander are building toward: not another record crowd, but a blueprint, born in Riyadh, that the rest of the world is now watching. Mike Champion, Founding Chief Executive Officer of Tahaluf and Co-Founder of LEAP Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / 19
20 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition POWERING THE AGENTIC AI AMBITION S audi Arabia is no longer waiting for the agentic AI economy to arrive. It is building the rails for it. In Riyadh, four executives from Visa, EY, Nokia and COFE Tech described a shift already underway across banking, audit, telecom infrastructure and enterprise software, each pointing to the Kingdom as the place where autonomous AI systems stop being a concept and start transacting, auditing and connecting on their own. Godfrey Sullivan of Visa called it a tipping point for agentic commerce, where AI agents complete purchases rather than just browsing on a shopper’s behalf, and where Visa’s readiness program is already onboarding roughly 40 regional banks to make that possible. Khurram Mian of EY described a parallel transformation inside auditing, where agentic AI now scans millions of journal entries across 10,000 MENA engagements, freeing human auditors to focus on judgment rather than routine checks. Roque Lozano of Nokia framed the moment in infrastructure terms, arguing that Saudi Arabia’s push into data centers and new connectivity corridors positions the Kingdom not just to consume the AI economy but to generate and export it. And Ali Al- Ebrahim of COFE Tech, fresh off a $178 million funding round, made the case that Riyadh has become the region’s essential proving ground for enterprise platforms built to run on AI-native infrastructure. Different industries, same throughline. Trust, infrastructure and capital are converging in Saudi Arabia at a pace that suggests the country is positioning itself as a genuine contributor to, rather than merely a customer of, the global AI economy. What follows are the conversations that shaped that thesis. Written by: Kasun Illankoon 20 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition Saudi Arabia is building the infrastructure and trust needed for agentic AI to transact, audit and connect autonomously.
21 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / VISA Agentic commerce will not scale on clever technology alone. It will scale on trust, and Visa believes the region is closer to that threshold than most shoppers realize. Godfrey Sullivan, SVP, Products & Solutions, CEMEA at Visa, argues that the shift from AI-assisted browsing to AI-completed purchasing is already underway. Sullivan leads products and solutions across 87 markets in Central Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa, a footprint that shows him how quickly consumers adopt new payment habits. His assessment of the moment is direct. “We’re at a tipping point for Agentic Commerce.” THREE CONDITIONS THAT UNLOCK AGENTIC PAYMENTS His framework has three parts, each owned by a different player in the ecosystem. Banks come first. Issuers must make sure “their payment cards, their Visa cards can be tokenized and safely uploaded into agents.” Visa’s agentic readiness program, now running across about 40 institutions in the Middle East, is helping lenders prepare. Merchants are the second piece, and the friction is real. Sullivan points to a quiet failure happening today: “many of the e-commerce websites we use will not honor those transactions because they think it’s a bot.” Storefronts built for human clicks must learn to welcome delegated buyers. The third piece sits with AI platforms such as OpenAI. Consumers already lean on agents to find products, compare prices and weigh recommendations. What remains is completing the payment inside those same experiences. “And we think we’re going to see that over the next 6 to 12 months.” SIMPLICITY IS THE GROWTH ENGINE Sullivan reads the trajectory from history rather than hype. Every time payments get easier, adoption follows. “We have seen time and time again when Visa and other payments firms makes transactions easy, whether it’s contactless or tap to pay, we see huge customer adoption.” The same logic applies to agents. A shopper who lets an assistant hold a delivery address and securely tokenized credentials removes the most tedious steps of online checkout. “I think consumers are going to find it’s just easier.” For businesses, that ease translates into fewer abandoned carts and a smoother path to revenue, which is why Sullivan frames the opportunity as shared. “It’s that combination of trust and simplicity that’s going to bring the next wave of e-commerce growth.” WHY THE NETWORK MATTERS Payment networks sit at the center of this shift because a new kind of transaction demands a new kind of confidence. The reassurance shoppers feel when they use a card online or abroad is the standard Visa intends to carry forward. “That same level of trust needs to be replicated for agents.” Visa’s ambition is to anchor a trust layer connecting banks, merchants and AI agents, which Sullivan calls the key unlock. A MEASURE OF SUCCESS BEYOND THE METRICS Asked about success, Sullivan steps away from products and volumes. “Success is about how you feel each evening when you go to bed.” He describes going to sleep content with what he has achieved for business, family and the wider world, then waking with anticipation. “That sense of fulfillment, that is what real success is for me.” It is a fitting philosophy for an executive building infrastructure meant to make everyday life easier. 21 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Godfrey Sullivan, SVP, Products & Solutions, CEMEA at Visa
22 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition 22 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition Audit runs on a single currency, and agentic AI is helping the profession strengthen it. Khurram Mian, Managing Partner and Assurance Leader at EY MENA, explained how the firm is embedding intelligent automation into the core of its assurance work. Mian describes the energy at the event as a privilege to witness, and he ties it to the responsibility his profession carries. Capital markets rely on audited statements to raise funds, banks use them to disburse loans, and fiscal authorities lean on them to verify tax provisions. His summary of the mandate is short. “We are all about trust.” ROUTINE WORK GOES TO MACHINES, JUDGMENT STAYS WITH PEOPLE The shift Mian describes is a division of labor rather than a replacement. Technology now absorbs the mundane tasks, and agentic AI builds on that foundation. “The more routine work is now being done by technology and the more complex work is now being focused upon by our humans our professionals.” The quality dividend is significant. Software can examine millions of journal entries across a client’s books, correlating and triangulating patterns at a scale no team could match, while auditors apply judgment where it counts. EY is applying the approach across 10,000 audit engagements in MENA and 160,000 worldwide. Regulators, whose core aim is to keep improving audit quality, have welcomed the direction. CLIENT ZERO AS A CREDENTIAL EY earns credibility by testing its own advice first. “What we are drawing upon is our own experience as client zero.” The firm belongs to the first cohort of 14 organizations selected by Microsoft and Harvard Business School as frontier firms, companies weaving AI through every function with the aspiration of becoming a “human-led agent operated business.” That experience shapes the counsel Mian gives clients. Successful adoption, he argues, spans governance, risk and technology together, and EY supports it with an assurance AI framework for its auditors and nine principles of responsible AI applied across its processes. WINNING THE AI NATIVE GENERATION For Mian, the technology also solves a recruiting question. “Gen Z is the first AI native generation who’s going to enter the workforce.” Graduates expect modern tools, so a profession that embraces AI becomes a more compelling career choice. Internally, EY backs that appeal with training, certifications and badges, and with a culture that invites ideas from every level. “Innovation is not only top down. It can be bottom up.” Structured processes then carry promising ideas through to execution under the responsible AI principles. LEGACY MEASURED IN CAREERS Asked about success, Mian points to what he leaves behind. “Success is all about legacy.” At the strategic level, that means handing over an organization stronger than the one he inherited. At the personal level, it means mentoring young professionals toward partnership, which he treats as his own performance indicator. His reasoning is simple. “They don’t look for a job, they look for a career.” Khurram Mian, Managing Partner and Assurance Leader at EY MENA EY
23 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / NOKIA The next chapter of the AI economy will be won by whoever moves data best, and Nokia believes the Gulf is positioned to lead it. Roque Lozano, Senior Vice President, Network Infrastructure, Middle East & Africa at Nokia, sees a region that wants to shape the technology as well as consume it, with Saudi Arabia setting the pace. Lozano calls the Middle East and Africa “the most inspiring region in the world,” and he organizes the opportunity into three streams: connectivity, regional AI ambition and a new token economy. NEW ROUTES FOR A CONNECTED REGION Connectivity comes first. Operators and governments are racing to open fresh paths for traffic. “Everyone is looking for new and alternative routes to connect locally, regionally and internationally through the seas, through the lands, through the new gateways like Syria or Iraq or Libya.” The demand goes beyond raw capacity. “There is a huge demand for that capacity with a huge emphasis on diversity for resilience and latency.” FROM CONSUMER TO CONTRIBUTOR The second stream is ambition. Gulf states, Saudi Arabia in particular, are investing in power and data center capacity, including what Lozano calls AI factories, to generate and export local content rather than simply translating what global hyperscalers produce. The digital economy, in his telling, flows in both directions. It is “coming to the Gulf is coming to the region but as well is going to be generated through the region for the region and beyond.” A CURRENCY MEASURED IN QUADRILLIONS The third stream is the most striking. Telecom built services around voice, then data, then video. “Now the new currency is the token.” Lozano uses scale to make the point, noting that a quadrillion “is not a billion it’s not a trillion it’s a 1,000 trillion.” He says roughly five quadrillion tokens are managed through the AI economy today, a volume he expects to multiply about 24 times by 2030. “It’s very difficult to visualize a quadrillion but you can imagine how big is big in the AI.” Saudi Arabia’s goal, he argues, is to be “a main contributor of the AI super cycle across the country across the gulf across the region.” TIME AND MONEY, AND A CONCRETE MILESTONE Ambition at this scale brings a practical constraint. Investment is large and returns take time. “So this time and money is probably the biggest challenge.” Nokia’s answer is a holistic approach that lets operators earn revenue from the first phase they build, which reassures the institutions funding the rest. The company has a fresh proof point. Nokia was awarded Saudi Arabia’s data center interconnection project, which Lozano describes as “the largest data center interconnection network in the region and probably one of the top three in the world.” The network will link the country’s new data centers with international gateways, terrestrial and submarine, so traffic now crossing the Red Sea can also transit Saudi Arabia. 6G AND THE MACHINE TRAFFIC AHEAD Lozano expects the Gulf to adopt 6G quickly, as it has with earlier generations. He notes that 5G monetization challenged the industry, but the next wave looks different because “we are going to have traffic which is not generated by people is generated by machine is generated by agents.” Fixed fiber and radio will blur into one infrastructure, and the network itself will sense and adapt. SUCCESS AS PREMIUM CONNECTIVITY Lozano defines success through Nokia’s contribution to the buildout, enabling the AI super cycle with premium connectivity inside and outside the data center, across international gateways, and for users that increasingly include bots, agents and machines. 23 Special Edition / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Roque Lozano, Senior Vice President, Network Infrastructure, Middle East & Africa at Nokia
24 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / Special Edition COFE A funding round this size says something about where the region’s business technology is headed. COFE Tech, the enterprise platform founded by Ali Al-Ebrahim, has closed a round valued at approximately $178 million, and its founder and CEO is using the moment to lay out a thesis for what comes next. Al-Ebrahim positions the company as something like the Salesforce of the MENA region, a platform that runs enterprise operations rather than simply advising on them. He chose Riyadh for the announcement, and the location was deliberate. “Riyadh became now the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.” For any startup hoping to scale, he argues, the Saudi capital has become an essential gateway. A GAP IN ENTERPRISE CUSTOMIZATION COFE Tech’s opportunity started with a gap Al-Ebrahim kept encountering. Enterprises across the region were being handed software that offered advice but little customization, and little help at the operational level. His company set out to manage and work alongside businesses instead. Today the focus is on two products, a procurement engine and a commercial engine. AI now handles CRM work, funneling and marketing positioning, tasks that once demanded heavy manual effort. For Al-Ebrahim, the direction of travel is settled. “Enterprise solution for every business is a must now with AI and we’re the platform that connects this to them.” THREE WAYS THE PLATFORM DELIVERS VALUE Al-Ebrahim describes the payoff in three parts. The first is cost. “We’re lowering a lot the cost from an operation perspective.” The second is visibility into procurement and the supply chain, which helps businesses understand what they truly need. The third is knowing the customer, because retail success extends well beyond online ordering to growth engines and the data layers inside every department and dashboard. Underneath all three sits a structural point that gives the company its edge. Artificial intelligence is only as useful as the data foundation beneath it. “A lot of enterprise need that infrastructure to actually empower AI and help their businesses grow.” THREE TRENDS DEFINING THE NEXT CHAPTER Al-Ebrahim names three forces shaping the region. The first is the arrival of AI inside enterprise systems, which COFE Tech is now building into its own offering. The second is hospitality and commercial development. International hotel towers and commercial companies are moving into the region, and the demand they create ripples through supply chains. “All the mega projects revolve around that.” COFE Tech has already placed itself inside that flow. “We’re one of the biggest suppliers of beverage right now.” The third trend is the beverage market itself. Consumer- facing competition is intense, but the business-to-business side is where he sees the larger prize. “There’s a huge competition but also in the B2B it’s even bigger demand and we’re positioning ourselves to be the lead in that angle.” WHAT THE ROUND SIGNALS The pattern across his answers is consistent. AI, mega- project growth and B2B beverage demand are converging in a market that rewards platforms able to operate at scale. With fresh capital and a foothold in Saudi Arabia’s expanding ecosystem, COFE Tech is betting that the region’s next wave of enterprise growth will be run on data. Ali Al-Ebrahim, Founder and CEO of COFE
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