5G is on a roll. This new mobile broadband
technology generation is set to cross the
one billion connections mark this year.
This would mean 5G penetration is faster
than 3G and 4G, and according to GSM Association,
there are currently 200 live 5G networks in the
world. The Mobile Economy report from GSMA says
there would be 60 million 5G connections in MENA
by 2025, and $70 billion will be spent in the region
on infrastructure rollouts. While the pandemic has
slowed down 5G rollouts elsewhere, it’s been a
different story in our part of the world. The mobile
operators in the Gulf have continued to invest in
the technology with the governments ensuring
effective management of the spectrum.

As we wrap up 2024, it’s impossible not to reflect on the
incredible strides the tech industry has made this year.
From groundbreaking advancements in space exploration
to the resurgence of cryptocurrency as a transformative
force in finance, and the continued evolution of
connectivity with the expansion of 5G and the emergence
of 6G networks, this year has truly been eventful.

As Vision 2030 drives the Kingdom toward
a knowledge-based, tech-driven economy,
opportunities for growth and innovation are vast. The
foundation built so far—in areas like cybersecurity,
artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructure—
positions Saudi Arabia to become a future hub
for global technology, drawing in investment and
talent from around the world. With a digitally-savvy
population, ambitious national projects, and a strong
commitment to developing the tech landscape, the
Kingdom is on track to lead the Middle East in digital
advancement and cybersecurity.

October is an exciting month for the tech industry
in the region. As we kick off the month, GITEX
GLOBAL takes centre stage, promising to be
a leading platform for showcasing the latest in
technological innovation.

As the summer unfolded, it brought a series
of noteworthy events. The CrowdStrike
outage reminded us of the ever-evolving
challenges in cybersecurity. Meanwhile,
OpenAI’s launch of SearchGPT is set to shake up
the search engine arena, challenging Google’s
long-standing dominance. Closer to home, the
unveiling of the Oracle Cloud Region in Saudi Arabia
marks the third such establishment in the country,
underscoring the Kingdom’s commitment to
becoming a digital powerhouse.

In today’s fast-paced world, technology is more
than just a tool for innovation; it’s a catalyst
for sustainability. Recently, I had the privilege
of speaking with industry leaders who shared
their insights on how the tech sector can lead the
charge toward a greener future.
Energy efficiency is at the forefront of this
green revolution. Companies are developing
cutting-edge hardware and software that
consume less power, leading to lower greenhouse
gas emissions. Data centres, which have
traditionally been energy guzzlers, are now being
redesigned with innovative cooling systems and
powered by renewable energy sources.

AI is swiftly transforming the ICT
landscape, bringing unprecedented
changes across industries. A recent
Gartner survey highlights that GenAI
has emerged as the most frequently deployed AI
solution in organisations, surpassing traditional AI
applications like optimisation algorithms and natural
language processing.
GenAI, exemplified by tools such as Microsoft’s
Copilot for 365 and Adobe Firefly, is now the
primary method for addressing AI use cases in
organisations. This trend underscores AI’s growing
integration into existing business applications,
driving both innovation and efficiency. The ability
to generate new content, automate processes,
and enhance decision-making is redefining how
businesses operate and compete.

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend
the Kafka Summit in London, which was all
about real-time data and data streaming
technologies. I was hosted by Confluent,
which made some interesting announcements
during the summit, including integrating
operational and analytical estates and the
availability of Apache Flink, the stream processing
framework, on its cloud.

Earlier this month, I was in Riyadh to
attend LEAP, which has grown bigger
and better since its debut three years
ago. If this is a barometer of what is
going on in the digital landscape of the Kingdom,
LEAP cements KSA’s position as the largest IT
market in the region. Held at a sprawling venue
at Malham, some of the announcements made
at the show have made the world sit up and take
notice. Drawing close to 175,000 visitors over
four days, around $11.9 billion in new investments
were announced at LEAP, including a new AWS
cloud zone and a data centre by Datavolt. IBM,
which recently announced its plan to set up
its regional HQ in the Kingdom, plans to invest
$250 million in a global software development
centre. ServiceNow will pump in $500 million
to localise its services, and develop local talent.
Dell Technologies will open a manufacturing and
fulfilment centre, while HPE showcased servers
made in Saudi Arabia at the show.

You must have read the news about a
multinational company headquartered
in Hong Kong recently losing
$25.6 million in a deepfake scam.
Utilising sophisticated deepfake technology,
cybercriminals digitally cloned numerous
employees, including senior company executives,
within a virtual video conference setting to pull
off this elaborate scam. Now, this is a sign of
things to come. AI has opened a whole new array
of attack vectors that enterprises are not ready
to deal with yet. In fact, Gartner has recently
noted that deepfakes can crack face biometrics,
and many companies may have to rethink their
identity verification and authentication methods.

As is customary, at the beginning of
every year, I stick my neck out and
make predictions about what is going
to be hot in tech. Make no mistake;
this year is going to be all about AI. Though the
hype has reached a crescendo, you can expect
to see some real-world use cases emerging this
year. Generative AI is already being widely used
in enterprises in the region, and the emergence
of localised LLMs will further accelerate adoption.
However, many vendors are now trying to cash in
on the hype and exaggerate AI capabilities in their
products. These days, the AI label is being applied
to just about everything, and users will have to
beware of these tall claims.

Attending COP28 for the first time
was an eye-opener for me in many
ways. The 28th edition of the global
climate change conference will go
down in the annals of history as the one that
signaled a transition from fossil fuels to clean
energy sources and meaningful action around
climate finance. If I remember correctly, only
two previous editions – Paris and Japan – have
witnessed such tangible outcomes. On the
sidelines of the conference, I had the privilege of
talking to global sustainability officers, and they
all told me that this was probably the first time
the role of technology came under the spotlight
in the context of sustainability. This was evident
from the two huge technology pavilions at
COP28.

Last month, I had the privilege of attending
two major conferences – Lenovo’s
TechWorld in Austin and SAP TechEd in
Bangalore. Both of these events were
dominated by demonstrations and discussions
around GenAI. In my recent memory, I can’t think
of any other technology that has generated as
much interest as GenAI. The term AI was coined
67 years ago, and this is the third wave of AI,
which large language models are largely driving,
sometimes called foundation models.

Over the past decade, we have seen the
confluence of three transformative forces
set the stage for a new era in AI: massive
data proliferation, scalable compute
capacity availability, and innovation in machine
learning (ML) techniques.
Together, these factors have created a tipping
point for generative AI, ushering in a wave of
creativity and potential that promises to reshape
industries and transform processes.

Artificial intelligence is being touted as
the silver bullet for our security woes.
Given the woeful skills shortage and
increasing cyber-attack sophistication,
many enterprises now see AI as a formidable arsenal
in the fight against cybercrime. Undoubtedly, AI
and ML can detect and react to threats much faster
and will play a pivotal role in cybersecurity in the
coming years. Very soon, we will see AI-powered
autonomous security systems that can identify,
mitigate, and even prevent attacks without human
intervention.

Organisations in the region are adopting
multi-cloud strategies to unlock the
full potential of their IT infrastructure
and fast-track digital transformation
initiatives. Multi-cloud adoption is driven by a
myriad of factors – vendor flexibility, scalability, and
improved performance.

Recently, Geoffrey Hinton, widely considered
the godfather of AI, quit Google, warning
us computers could soon become smarter
than humans and how AI could create false
images and texts. Celebrated author Yuval Noah Harari
wrote that AI-driven misinformation could change the
course of events and threaten the survival of human
civilization. Despite all this debate about the potential
negative impacts of AI, there is a lot of buzz around
generative AI, with new use cases emerging. Reams of
newsprint have already been devoted to popular tools
such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. It is said that general
AI can potentially learn programming languages and
write code; large language models are already being
used to design microchips and drugs. While the usual
discourse is around the impact of generative AI on
visual art and content creation, not many people have
paid attention to its impact on IT departments.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm.
This large language model-based
AI chatbot has already become the
fastest consumer application ever, and
businesses are starting to use the technology to
automate mundane tasks. Microsoft has recently
announced plans to help companies create
their own chatbots using the OpenAI ChatGPT
technology. As the hype around ChatGPT has
reached a crescendo, recently, the Italian privacy
watchdog has temporarily banned the AI chatbot
over data privacy concerns, and other EU members
are expected to follow suit. How much of a security
risk is ChatGPT? According to a recent report
from Cyberhaven, employees are feeding sensitive
company data into ChatGPT. This ranges from
source code to patient medical records, which
could potentially be revealed to a third party. AI
chatbots such as ChatGPT remember and use
content people feed into it as training data to
improve the technology. Its implications could be
far-reaching from a cybersecurity perspective.

The cost of cybercrime is predicted to
cost the world $8 trillion this year,
according to Cyber Security Ventures.
Although we have seen a dip in the
volume of ransomware attacks, it continues to
be the top attack vector. Last year, we saw some
high-profile ransomware attacks make headlines,
making the world sit up and take notice because
of their sophistication. Personally, I know of some
large business conglomerates in the region that
have fallen prey to cybercriminals, bringing their
systems down for weeks. Unfortunately, in our
region, stigma puts off companies from reporting
cyber-attacks, unlike developed markets where
companies are mandated by regulations to divulge
such information.

In the last two to three years, we’ve seen
how regional enterprises implemented new
technologies and processes to improve
business operations and add value to
customers. The adoption of digital technologies
has sped up as organisations rethink how they use
technology, people, and processes to create new
business models and new revenue streams. This
month, we hosted the fifth edition of the CXO 50
Awards, which have become a gold standard for IT
innovation and business transformation.

It’s that time of the year again when I gaze
into the crystal ball and make predictions
about tech trends shaping 2023. As they say,
prediction is always difficult, especially about
the future. Last year, many businesses reimagined
and transformed their strategies to build resilience.
With the threat of global economic recession
looming, the new mantra for businesses this
year will continue to be digital resilience. Earlier
this month, we organised a CXO roundtable with
Splunk to discuss why digital resilience is now more
critical than ever and ways to build it. There is no
doubt that technology is key to fighting business
disruptions, and many companies, regardless
of size, are investing heavily in modernising and
securing their IT systems to drive positive business
outcomes. The pandemic has taught us that
operational resilience is the only way to thrive in
dynamic market conditions and fend off business
disruptions. The technology leaders who joined us
for the discussion unanimously agreed that the only
way to build resilience into business is to simplify
and increase the visibility of their IT environments,
which has become a challenge in this age of multicloud
and cloud-native applications.

As curtains fall on 2022, it’s time to
pause and reflect on the lessons we
need to take from this year and what
we can do to prepare to make 2023
a better year. We have seen the IT sector limp
back to normalcy after a brief pandemic-induced
lull, and digital transformation initiatives started
yielding rich rewards for companies of all sizes.
However, on the flip side, the threat landscape
evolved equally fast, with damaging ransomware
attacks keeping IT executives awake.

Last month was one of the busiest for
us here at CXO Insight ME, with two
major awards programmes and the
biggest ever Gitex on record. Our ICT
and GovDX Leadership Awards were a big draw
among the whole IT ecosystem in the region.
While selecting the winners, I was surprised at
how deep-rooted digital innovation has become
in enterprises here – be it the private or public
sector.

Billed as the biggest tech event in the
world, GITEX GLOBAL is back with
some staggering numbers. This year’s
show will open doors to more than
5000 exhibitors over two million square feet
of space and attract 100,000 visitors. True to
its tagline of ‘enter the next digital universe’,
the event will showcase some developing
technologies such as Metaverse, Web 3.0, and
6G. Interestingly enough, the organisers claim
GITEX will be an ideal platform to attract new
companies and set up shop in the region, as 40
percent of exhibitors this year do not have a
base here. Another first this year would be the
largest developer meetup of 10,000 coders and
the Middle East’s python-centered conference
launch.

At the beginning of the year, I’d picked
AI as one of the trends to watch
out for this year and beyond. This
transformative technology may not
have lived up to the hype, but tech behemoths
like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are pouring
billions of dollars into AI research. A recent
Gartner survey found that organisations are
evolving the use of AI as part of their automation
strategies and some of them are ‘shifting
away from a purely tactical approach to AI and
beginning to apply AI more strategically.’

Cloud is not a hard sell these days.
Enterprise businesses are aware
of the advantages of using cloud
architecture. We have seen an uptick
in adoption, especially in the last two years, as
companies sought to mobilise their workforce
and keep the business running in the wake of the
pandemic. Many CIO surveys suggest that the
cloud will see the biggest spending growth this
year, and the SaaS model has already taken off
in a big way in the region while IaaS and PaaS
are slowly gaining traction. However, the public
sector has been slow to embrace the cloud as
many government entities are still evaluating
their options in the face of stringent regulations
around data privacy. This is why the sovereign
cloud is a hot topic today. Sovereign clouds are
architected to ensure all data, including metadata
stays localised, and users have more control over
security and access. This is expected to solve
many compliance hurdles that public sector
entities face today.

Is there any limit to what AI can do today?
This giant technological leap is transforming
virtually every industry, creating intelligent
business processes and smarter services. To
state the obvious, AI is not just one technology,
but, as Accenture puts it, ‘a constellation of
different technologies working together to enable
machines to sense, act and learn with human-like
levels of intelligence.’

The term digital transformation has
become part of the business lexicon
now. There is a huge appetite for new
digital technologies, and no doubt,
technological innovations have redefined
business models and processes, especially
in the last couple of years. However, in this
feeding frenzy, cybersecurity is often neglected.
Digital transformation without cybersecurity
transformation is a recipe for disaster. Many
enterprises in the region don’t have a clear
picture of their current risk posture while the
attack surface continues to expand.

A recent Gartner study has caught my
attention, highlighting the shifting
sands in enterprise technology buying
patterns. The study reveals that 74
percent of technology purchases are funded, at
least partially, by business units outside of IT. In
addition, Gartner’s research found that “41 percent
of employees today are business technologists,
creating technology or analytics capabilities for
internal or external business use and reporting
outside of IT departments.” It adds that high-tech
providers need new approaches to identify whom
to engage and how to engage B2B buyers.

Earlier this month, I’d the opportunity to
travel to Saudi Arabia to attend LEAP. For a
debut event, I was impressed by the scale,
participation, quality of speakers, and of
course, the number of visitors. LEAP has cemented
Saudi’s position as the largest digital economy
in the MENA region and was a testament to the
country’s accelerating digital revolution. The event
witnessed some major announcements, including
a $6.4 billion investment in future technologies
and entrepreneurship by the Saudi minister for
communications and information technology. This
includes Aramco Venture’s $1 billion Prosperity7
fund, NEOM’s first cognitive metaverse, and
the incumbent telecom operator stc’s $1 billion
investment to boost regional connectivity and
infrastructure to support Saudi’s rapidly expanding
and cloud sector.

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