The Gulf’s oil and gas sector is being transformed by AI

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The Pitch

Welcome to EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation

AI is just too hard to use, and it isn’t your fault. What you can do with it, which model is on top, and what works best — it all changes by the week, sometimes even faster. And don’t get me started on how challenging it is to think through what the technology could mean for your life, family, career, or business. (H/t Walt Mossberg.)

AI is shaping up to be the business story of our generation — and it’s also getting a lot of hate. You’re not alone if you feel fear, uncertainty, or doubt. I’m worried about AI, too. But I’m also aware that (a) I don’t have the power to stuff this genie back into the bottle and (b) the last time I was this excited about technology, I was a nine-year-old kid assembling a Sinclair ZX-81 from a kit. It had 1 KB of RAM. Today, I use a smartwatch on my wrist to talk to an AI agent.

Yes, AI could threaten our jobs, upend our businesses, or change the future our kids are preparing for. But it could also help all of us here in MENA+ build things we could never have built before: AI is helping researchers identify promising cancer-drug candidates. Farmers are using it to slash their use of some herbicides by nearly 50%. Banks are using it to make it easier for us to do business with them. Even journalists have found a use for it — here at EnterpriseAM, it’s helping us build podcasts, tear through piles of data, and build tools we use to produce the newsletter you’re reading right now.

So, uh, Patrick? What am I reading? This is the first issue of EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation.

Our mission is simple: To look past the boosterism and doomerism and give you the tools you need to figure out which threats and opportunities are real, what works, and what doesn’t. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we’ll bring you AI news from MENA and around the world; reporting on how it could change our economies; and deep coverage of how businesses across our region are using the technology — including their successes and failures.

And because technology is about a lot more than LLMs, we’ll be going deep into the region’s budding innovation economy — from chip design to biotech.

EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation is produced by a team of journalists led by Joseph Marks. Based in Amman, Joe was previously the lead writer on the Washington Post’s Cybersecurity 202 newsletter and covered the cyber industry for Politico. Many of you will meet him in a few hours’ time when he joins me on stage in Cairo at this year’s EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum: The AI Edition.

Last, but far from least, I’m delighted that our friends at MNT-Halan have come on board as our anchor partner for EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation just a few days after announcing their plans to list their Egyptian unit on the Egyptian Exchange. MNT-Halan shares a lot of DNA with Enterprise: A young, market-leading digital native that’s figuring out what AI is and how to grow across our region at the same time. We’re honored to have them along for the ride — and look forward to having MNT-Halan CEO Mounir Nakhla on stage with us this morning to talk about his IPO — and an AI named Apollo.

And now, here’s Joe. –Patrick

We’re in for one helluva ride

Hello, everyone, and welcome to EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation. We’re in for one helluva ride.

This week starts with a split screen that should spark anxiety in even the most even-keeled tech watcher. In Washington, the Trump administration is in full seriously-just-trust-us mode as it confronts an artificial intelligence industry that is both the most transformative and potentially most dangerous thing to hit the internet since its inception.

The Trump approach in a nutshell: No to new regulations. No to anything that could stifle AI’s growth — or give Chinese AI firms an edge over US hyperscalers. Yes to the industry self-regulating. And yes to some other government mechanisms for enforcing good behavior, like the threat of Justice Department prosecution or investigation by existing regulatory bodies.

Most significantly: The Federal Trade Commission opened a broad investigation last week into the safety of AI systems built by OpenAI and Anthropic, The Washington Post reports. The scope of the investigation remains unclear. So at least there’s some federal muscle reining the industry in.

But remember: This is the same agency that took 16 months to punish Facebook for improperly harvesting data from 87 mn users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, ultimately fining the company USD 5 bn in 2019. That was a record-breaking fine, but also just about one month of the company’s sales revenue at the time. That’s not exactly the regulatory muscle or the timeline you’d be hoping for when a botnet taking over the entire internet — or even chemical or biological weapons attacks — might be in play.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, the dangers of the Trump administration’s hands-off approach are racking up by the day:

OpenAI agents may have tried to bypass security or have otherwise negatively impacted the websites of 100 or more organizations, the company acknowledged last week. That’s far more than was previously known — and a strong indication that the company isn’t capable of ensuring its agents routinely follow rules and laws.
In at least some cases, the rogue AI agents hadn’t been instructed to hack anything. They just chose to do so when they couldn’t find the information they were after by legal means.
The company also fired three human researchers for allegedly sharing company information with an AI safety group, per the Wall Street Journal.

To their credit, leaders of many top frontier model developers have called for a slowdown in AI development to improve safety procedures and urged more government involvement than Trump is offering. But in the absence of those guardrails — and with multi-USD tn IPOs at stake — it’s easy to imagine safety concerns taking a backseat.

What does this mean for MENA+? A more dangerous internet, for starters. The less rigorous the US government and frontier companies are about pre-release testing and auditing, the more likely there are to be rogue agents launching cyberattacks and generally raising the cost of doing business for everyone.

There’s also a heightened risk of AI making geopolitical conflict far worse. Iran-backed hackers are already using AI to hypercharge their cyberattacks against Gulf nations in the current conflict. Imagine what they could do with a new generation of hacking tools that far outpace current cyberdefense capabilities.

The cost of inaction: Trump described his opposition to regulating AI this way during a speech at the UN: “I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution.” But as the costs of non-regulation grow, we may look back and think the cost of regulation would have been much less than the cost of inaction.

Now let’s get to today’s Lede, a deep dive into how AI is transforming the oil and gas industry here in our part of the world. –Joe

Gulf oil and gas firms seek big advantage from AI

The Gulf’s oil and gas sector has been transformed by AI advances during the past few years, marking a dramatic technological shift in an industry that comprises a huge share of the region’s GDP.

That reflects a global adjustment: Worldwide, Rystad Energy estimates that AI and digitalization will save upstream oil and gas companies close to USD 500 bn between 2026 and 2030 through a mix of greater efficiency, reduced drilling downtime, and increased oil recovery.

But the shift is especially prominent in the Gulf, where gargantuan state-run oil companies and vast energy reserves are paired with rapidly expanding national AI champions and governments that are banking on AI as the next big driver of their economies.

“We have a slogan: ‘energy for AI and AI for energy.’ We don’t look at these as two separate things,” Saravan Penubarthi, chief technology officer at AIQ, tells EnterpriseAM. “Our AI systems optimize energy output, while, at the same time, energy runs our AI systems.”

The biggest test case: AIQ is a joint venture between Abu Dhabi’s national oil company, ADNOC, and Presight, a listed unit of the UAE’s AI champion, G42. It’s perhaps the clearest example of the symbiosis Gulf nations are trying to create between their historic economic driver — fossil fuels — and their big new investment — AI.

The company’s broad premise: That it can pilot large-scale AI systems at ADNOC, which has a crude oil production capacity of about 4.85 mn barrels per day, then sell those systems to other companies, confident that they’re already producing results at one of the world’s largest oil firms.

It’s done that with several AI products during the six years since the company launched, including RoboWell. The system automates well processes, including the amount of gas that’s injected and the amount of oil that’s extracted from wells. RoboWell has been deployed at roughly 550 wells worldwide, resulting in increased operating efficiency of about 5% per well, Saravan says.
In another move, AIQ and ADNOC’s gas division announced an agreement with Gecko Robotics to deploy AI and robotics across ADNOC gas facilities. The companies expect the program to generate over USD 300 mn in cost savings over the next five years through predictive maintenance, fewer shutdowns, and other efficiency improvements.

Big picture: AI allowed ADNOC to make new oil and gas discoveries totaling more than 1.2 bn barrels of oil equivalent, per a report from its board.

Coming soon: AIQ is currently testing a new product called Genesis on ADNOC systems, which Saravan describes as its most industry-shifting AI technology to date. While previous AIQ products have focused on automating particular aspects of oil production, Genesis is capable of automating data extraction, analysis, and visualization across an entire company, Saravan says.

“It pretty much does the entire orchestration for the energy industry to automate your analysis and visualization and help you with better decision-making,” he says, adding, “I believe two years from now, the entire analysis and visualization [across the oil and gas sector] will be automated with AI.” Saravan declined to get more specific about Genesis’s capabilities ahead of the product’s public launch at Abu Dhabi’s annual ADIPEC conference in November.

AIQ reflects the Gulf’s strategic advantage when it comes to linking AI with fossil fuels. But it’s not the only player.

Saudi state-run oil firm Aramco captured USD 1.8 bn in value from AI in 2024, the company says. It then went on to record what it says was USD 5.3 bn in value from AI and other technologies in 2025, according to its annual report. Aramco declined to comment for this story.

BY THE NUMBERS-

Aramco has identified a total of 442 uses for AI, more than 200 of which it had already addressed with AI tools by late 2025, the company says.
Among other processes, it’s using AI to analyze drilling operations and examine geological data “to simulate reservoirs and help engineers make better-informed decisions.”
Aramco and the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund took the first step toward Aramco becoming a significant minority shareholder in Saudi Arabia’s AI champion Humain in October 2025. The agreement envisions Aramco sharing its AI assets with Humain and ultimately using Humain’s AI infrastructure to build industrial applications.

SOUND SMART- Saudi ❤️ Chinese AI? While UAE AI players have been forced to turn their backs on Chinese AI tech as a condition of getting access to the latest US chips, Aramco’s venture unit, Prosperity7, hasn’t faced the same pushback. P7 is an investor in Zhipu AI, since rebranded as Z.ai, which made headlines this summer with GLM-5.3, held out by many as China’s closest rival to the US frontier labs in AI coding and cybersecurity — for a fraction of what Claude and ChatGPT sell for. Prosperity7 wrote a USD 30 mn check in early 2024, becoming the first known foreign backer of a major Chinese AI lab. It still holds about 1.1% of the company, according to our math, following Z.ai’s listing in Hong Kong this past January. After a wild run in the stock, that stake is still worth north of USD 800 mn on paper. Z.ai shares are down about 75% since June and P7 is locked up until January 2027.

“Every major energy company is chasing AI right now. What’s harder to replicate is what several MENA producers have: enormous asset portfolios, patient long-term capital, and genuine alignment between national policy and corporate strategy,” Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former oil trader for Petronas, Malaysia’s state-owned oil firm, tells EnterpriseAM. “That combination lets them deploy at enterprise scale faster than most international competitors can manage,” says Lamarré, who co-founded the International Digital Exchange, a blockchain-based platform for oil and gas trading.

Important caveats: Oil and gas firms are notorious for their messy data, industry insiders say. Data from sensors and other technology is often gathered and stored separately by different parts of the same company, often in different file formats — and rarely shared between divisions.

That makes it far more challenging to gather all the necessary data to train AI systems. When AIQ sells its products to other companies, its engineers spend an average of 100 days on-site, mapping and consolidating the company’s data sources and training AI systems, Saravan says.

There’s also an especially high cost for errors in the field because an oil well that’s mismanaged or offline could cost mns of USD in revenue. “A wrong answer from ChatGPT is cute, but a wrong decision in the oil and gas space can be catastrophic,” Saravan says.

This shift comes as Gulf nations are making massive investments in AI, looking to diversify their economies and to hedge against the possibility of losing both income and global sway if the planet shifts toward renewable energy and away from fossil fuels.

AI is projected to contribute USD 100 bn or more to both the Saudi and UAE economies by 2030, according to the consultancy PwC, or around 13% of GDP.

Hydrocarbons, meanwhile, currently account for around 47% of Saudi Arabia’s GDP and 22% of the UAE’s, according to the World Bank’s 2025 Gulf Economic Update. (A separate report from the International Monetary Fund using different accounting practices found that hydrocarbons accounted for just 24% of Saudi’s GDP.) Both governments say they expect oil’s share to keep shrinking.

These AI investments also come as global oil markets are being rocked by the Iran war and the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Net income for ADNOC’s gas division dropped 52% y-o-y in 2Q 2026 amid the closure of the Strait, EnterpriseAM reports. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, saw a 33% spike in profits during the war due to a mix of higher energy prices and alternate paths to ship oil out of the country, The New York Times reports.

AI investments are unlikely to meaningfully affect how oil companies respond to the Strait closure, because those investments pay off over a longer time frame, analysts say. But the closure does underscore the importance of long-term investments in technological improvements to hedge against volatility.

“The Strait of Hormuz is topical. It’s newsy, but it’s not affecting capital investment because that’s not [oil companies’] lens. Their lens is zoomed out,” Brian Spector, CEO of Assure, a company that designs AI tools for energy firms, tells EnterpriseAM.

Longer term, there’s also potential for AI to transform the basic science of drilling, allowing companies to profitably extract far more oil from wells than they have in the past.

Companies typically leave about two-thirds of a field’s oil in the ground. A reservoir’s natural pressure pushes out maybe 5-15%, and pumping in water or gas to keep it flowing brings the total to about a third. Injecting CO2, steam, or chemicals can take recovery past 50%, but it’s expensive — and the environmental impact significant. Analysts speculate that AI could meaningfully increase that yield.

“Squeezing that oil out of reservoirs would be game-changing stuff,” Chuck Yates, a longtime US energy finance executive and founder of Collide, which sells AI software to oil and gas firms, tells EnterpriseAM.

Fears of a regional AI bank run aren’t totally overblown

Some lawmakers in the United States are worrying about the prospect of an “agentic bank run” after a firestorm on X engulfed AI fanbois and doomers alike — and bankers in MENA need to keep their eye on the story.

BACKGROUND- The brouhaha was prompted by a 27 September note from Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok, who sketched out a world in which robots independently move savers’ cash to different vehicles to earn a better return.

The outcome could speed outflows of deposits from traditional banks, which typically offer lower interest rates for savers, and toward fintechs that offer higher rates. The outflows could force banks to raise the rates they offer depositors — and price up what they charge borrowers. In a nightmare scenario, an agent could theoretically spark a run on a bank.

An agentic bank run is (probably) a long way away. There’s no telling how quickly the average citizen is likely to turn something as important as his savings over to the AI overlords — but probably not too soon.

But there’s a slow-bleed version of this that banks should start worrying about — especially in our corner of the world.

In Egypt, banks are already competing with fintech upstarts for deposits. Granite, for example, gives individuals and companies access to a money-market fund with daily subscriptions and redemptions. Thndr started life as a stock-trading app (it now accounts for c. 20% of total trading value on the EGX) and now offers a suite of products including money-market funds.

“The product was there,” Thndr co-founder and CEO Ahmad Hammouda tells EnterpriseAM, referring to money-market funds. Thndr’s contribution was making it “easy and accessible.” Money-market funds can give savers a better return than traditional accounts, he argues, without the long lock-up periods associated with high-yield certificates of deposit that have been big in Egypt for years as it claws its way out of an economic crisis.

Thndr’s growth woke some Egyptian bankers to the competition that could come from fintechs as more of them get their acts together, two senior bank treasury executives tell us. The company’s fund assets under custody have rocketed to EGP 45 bn (USD 860 mn), held by more than 800k investors, the company said in September.

The clouds: “We will lose some deposits to fintech players,” a C-suite exec at a leading national bank tells us, emphasizing the word “some.”

And maybe a rainbow? “But right now all of these guys need a bank — someone needs to hold their funds for them. And they need us for securitization, their lifeblood,” the exec says.

But remember: Money that finds its way back to a bank through a fintech won’t come back at the same value — or stay put for as long.

And the agents may not be far behind? Thndr’s Hammouda is already preparing for an agentic future. An upcoming iteration of his product would remember what clients tell it about their finances and investing goals and offer monthly recommendations for how to bring their assets back to an agreed mix of stocks, mutual funds, deposits, etc. That’s not an agent moving money without your permission, but it’s not too many steps away.

A glimpse of the future: Some customers in the UAE can already initiate a bank payment through another company’s app. The UAE’s payment standards include provisions that make it possible to automatically move money from a current account at Bank A to a savings account at Bank B — not conceptually too far from Slok’s agentic future.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR in the near term: Industry observers should keep an eye on tech spending at regional banks. The threat of clients switching to fintechs could convince some long-complacent institutions to finally get serious about improving product and customer experience.

Report: The UAE is the sixth most popular target for the world’s hackers

The UAE is the sixth most targeted country in the world by hackers, Microsoft says in a new report timed to the start of Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October.

The findings reflect the intense concentration of financial, energy, manufacturing, and retail firms in the tiny nation — all juicy hacking targets. They also reflect how the hacking landscape has been supercharged by AI in recent years.

Caveat: There’s no reason to doubt the findings — Microsoft products are used across the planet, which means the company has greater visibility into who’s getting hacked and where than all but a few other organizations. But the company is also a big player in the region and recently said it plans to deploy its AI-empowered cyber defense tool MDASH across UAE government customers, a fact the company and state media touted in a press release for the report.

Another recent Microsoft report found that UAE residents are the biggest AI superusers on the planet. Just over 73% of the UAE’s working-age population were users of generative AI in 2Q 2026, up a bit more than three percentage points from the prior quarter.

Huawei signs Iraq data center MoU; AIQ lands India camera deal

Huawei expands in Iraq: Iraq’s Communications Ministry signed an MoU with the Chinese tech giant to build enterprise data centers across the country, Iraqi News reports. The ministry didn’t provide a cost figure for the deal. Huawei already works with 240+ Iraqi enterprises and several government ministries. The deal comes amid competing US and Chinese bids to power the region’s sovereign compute buildout.

AIQ heads to India: The company, a joint venture between Abu Dhabi’s national oil company, ADNOC, and Presight, a division of the UAE’s AI champion, G42, will deploy 1 mn AI-powered cameras across the refineries, gas stations, and digital stores of an unnamed Indian oil and gas conglomerate, it says via Reuters. The cameras will read license plates and provide restocking intelligence. The deal marks a significant expansion outside the MENA region for AIQ. Non-UAE customers currently account for just 5% of its business. The company has previously taken its tech to Kazakhstan and Indonesia.

Presight’s bet on robotics: G42’s Presight and Abu Dhabi investment firm Shorooq are investors in US startup Maven Robotics’ USD 100 mn Series A funding round, per Arab News. The investment came through the pair’s USD 100 mn AI fund and Shorooq’s Bedaya Fund. Maven already has robots operating at customer sites. It will use the fresh capital to produce 250 more of its third-generation robots and expand their use across warehouse operations.

Cutting Arabic errors and developing drugs faster

Cutting Arabic errors: Nvidia cut its speech-recognition model’s error rate on Saudi dialects to 30% from c. 55% after training it on more than 100 hours of Najdi and Hijazi speech, Arab News reports. The audio comes from a 667-hour dataset developed by Saudi Arabia’s national data and AI authority, SDAIA, and the Saudi Broadcasting Authority. The dataset spans more than 10 Saudi dialects.

Cracking down on model copying: OpenAI says it stopped people linked to Moonshot AI, the Chinese startup behind rival chatbot Kimi, from using its models to help improve competing AI systems. More via CNBC.

AI speeds up the drug hunt: Abu Dhabi-based Insilico Medicine says AI is speeding up its timeline for selecting cancer drugs for further testing to as little as 12-18 months from a previous 2.5-4.0 years, The National writes.

Drug development is, by all accounts, a very boring process. But it’s made for some gripping film scenes. In 1993, And the Band Played On made the tale of developing the first antiretrovirals a key component of the story of the first years of the AIDS crisis. Then there’s 2010’s Love and Other Drugs, a pretty decent romcom set in the morally dubious world of pharmaceutical sales. But, for our money, there’s nothing better than Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive uncovering the pharmaceutical development scheme that led to his wife’s murder.

That’s it for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Thursday and then every Tuesday and Thursday after that.

We’re excited to have you along for the ride — feel free to invite some friends. Stay in touch with the team at [email protected].

CALENDAR

October 2026

6-7 October (Tuesday-Wednesday): AI Everything Abu Dhabi, billed as the world's largest AI-first expo, opens at ADNEC.

11-13 October (Sunday-Tuesday): Riyadh’s King Salman Center for Disability Research runs an AI hackathon for people with disabilities, sponsored by Boeing Saudi Arabia.

26-27 October (Monday-Tuesday): The Dubai AI Festival returns as part of Dubai AI Week.

26-29 October (Monday-Thursday): Riyadh hosts its annual Future Investment Initiative under the theme “The Power of Legacy” with a heavy AI-investment track.

27 October (Tuesday): Alphabet reports 3Q earnings after the US market closes, with AI capex and Gemini / cloud growth as the headline watch items.

27 October (Tuesday): Microsoft reports fiscal 1Q 2027 earnings after the US market closes, including Azure and OpenAI-partnership capex disclosures.

28 October (Wednesday): Meta reports 3Q earnings, with AI infrastructure spend in focus.

29 October (Thursday): Amazon reports 3Q earnings, including AWS and Bedrock AI growth.

30 October (Friday): UAE businesses with annual revenue of AED 50 mn or more must have an accredited e-invoicing provider in place by this date.

November 2026

7-10 November (Saturday-Tuesday): Cairo ICT runs in New Cairo alongside AIDC Expo, its dedicated AI, data center, and cloud event.

17-19 November (Tuesday-Thursday): Bengaluru Tech Summit brings businesses, startups, researchers, and policymakers to Bengaluru, India, under the theme “AI & Beyond.”

17-20 November (Tuesday-Friday): Microsoft Ignite runs in San Francisco and online, covering Microsoft’s AI, cloud, security, and data products.

18-19 November (Wednesday-Thursday): Global AI Show opens at Space42 Arena in Abu Dhabi, with enterprise AI, computing capacity, and sovereign AI on the agenda.

30 November-4 December (Monday-Friday): AWS re:Invent brings Amazon’s cloud and AI conference to Las Vegas, with product announcements and sessions on deployment, costs, and security.

December 2026

1-3 December (Tuesday-Thursday): Black Hat MEA brings cybersecurity leaders, researchers, and technology companies to Malham, Riyadh.

6-12 December (Sunday-Saturday): NeurIPS holds its main AI research conference in Sydney, offering a look at advances that could shape the next generation of commercial AI.

7-11 December (Monday-Friday): GITEX Global opens with a leadership summit at Dubai World Trade Centre on 7 December, followed by its exhibition at Expo City Dubai on 8-11 December.

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