Artificial intelligence driving IT spending in UAE

Spending on IT across the UAE has been witnessing a steady increase, driven by businesses looking to increase efficiency, improve performance, and reduce costs, by investing in artificial intelligence systems, experts said.

"We are definitely seeing a significant increase in AI adoption in the UAE," Ali Hyder, group chief executive officer of Focus Softnet, told Khaleej Times.

"AI is changing the way we use technology and conduct business, communicate with our customers/vendors and analyse our data. It has the potential to bring change on a wide scale to organisations, where customer and operational data is primary to the business. AI presents organisations with tremendous opportunities to augment human capabilities across industries and this technology is transforming systems through creativity and agility."

Experts noted that the UAE is expected to scale up investments in AI and blockchain solutions - a trend that should lead to more growth opportunities for businesses.

"On the industries front, AI brings in so much quality and accuracy into processes," said Hyder. "With its inherent capability of automation and machine learning capabilities, AI helps in multi-tasking, helps people with different abilities perform like others, and increases workload many times over as compared to the normal way of doing the same task. Image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing and machine learning are a few of the commonly-applied AI technologies."

Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, product manager at Zoho Labs, noted that while AI will make an impact across all sectors, the technology sector has, unsurprisingly, been one of the early adopters of AI.

"A substantial amount of AI technology has been applied in the IT management space and is effectively improving productivity," he said. "AI can predict outages, forecast demand, present actionable insights from service desk tickets, enable better customer satisfaction via chatbots, and much more. AIOps, which essentially means leveraging AI for your IT operations, is catching up fast.

"The Internet of Things and AI continue to play a pivotal role in shaping our strategy towards an ecosystem that enables productivity and drives digital transformation - whether it be for an office building, a hospital, or a university," added Ahmed Khashan, president of Gulf countries at Schneider Electric. "Collaborative efforts between government and private bodies have been vital in fast-tracking digital transformation initiatives and building sustainable, secure and reliable urban communities especially in the UAE."

Gartner predicts the use of AIOps in business will rise from 5 per cent in 2018 to 30 per cent in 2023. It's only a matter of time before AI is adopted across critical business functions like credit approval, money laundering detection, and much more. AI is here to stay and will help us achieve better employee productivity and customer satisfaction.