Deloitte invests in AI to scale Saudi unit

Deloitte is scaling up its AI business in the Kingdom, with a dedicated quantitative team serving insurers, investment banks, and sovereign wealth funds, Yousef Barkawie, partner and board member for AI and data at Deloitte Middle East, told EnterpriseAM on the sidelines of Leap 2026.

The Qiddiya work shows what that looks like in practice. Deloitte is deploying agentic AI to monitor operations at the entertainment development, extending a partnership that already produced an AI-powered command center, unveiled in November 2025, that uses real-time data to help manage the project. The work spans “command and control center development to agentic AI to monitor the operations of the park,” Barkawie said.

Why agentic AI? Barkawie frames it as the step beyond the generative AI boom. Rather than just responding to prompts, AI agents can be handed objectives and carry out tasks with more autonomy, letting companies automate parts of their operations instead of using AI as a productivity tool. “Agentic AI is even newer technology, this is where the actual results are happening,” he said.

The bigger bet is on scale. Saudi organizations have spent the past few years experimenting with AI. Deloitte is wagering that the next wave of spending will be driven by moving those experiments into production across entire organizations, while addressing the cybersecurity, operational and governance risks that come with wider deployment. “How do organizations scale out their digital transformation? How do they deploy AI and innovation across their organizations, and how do they move from experimentation into full production?” Barkawie said.

For Deloitte, that means focusing on three areas: Generating value from AI at scale, building resilience against cyber and operational threats, and giving ministers, CEOs and boards the governance frameworks needed to deploy the technology more broadly.

There’s capital behind it. Deloitte has committed more than EUR 1.5 bn in incremental investment over four years across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, targeting generative AI, sovereign cloud, and sector-specific technology. Deloitte has not disclosed how much of that EMEA investment is earmarked for Saudi Arabia. The firm isn’t building everything itself — it pairs technology from AWS, Google, Nvidia, SAP, and Oracle with its own IP, including fine-tuning large language models and retrieval systems for clients.