Business 4 min read By Bethany Hadley
Emirates NBD and CBD Expand AI Across Dubai Banking Operations
The UAE's largest banks are moving artificial intelligence from experiments into core business, and executives forecast more change over the next five years than over the previous three decades.
Banks in the United Arab Emirates are moving artificial intelligence from the experimental stage into core operations, and executives at the largest lenders forecast that the next five years will bring more change to banking than the previous thirty. Emirates NBD and Commercial Bank of Dubai, which are already increasing investment in the technology, are at the forefront of this shift.
Emirates NBD reports more than 150 AI initiatives, 65 of which are already running in production. About half of the bank's technology budget is directed to AI. In June, Emirates NBD ranked first in the Evident AI Index for the Middle East and Africa; the index covers more than one hundred companies, including insurers and payment services. The bank also became the first in the MENA region to run OpenAI's GPT models in-country. This local deployment is intended to meet UAE requirements for data residency and privacy.
Miguel Rio-Tinto, the group's Director of Digital Transformation, believes AI will be a key factor shaping the industry's competitive landscape in the future. In his assessment, five years of change will exceed the scale of the previous three decades. At the same time, he notes that certain forecasts about the share of automation and the timeline of transformation have not yet been confirmed and may not materialise.
Pressure on cyber defence is growing in parallel. According to figures cited in the reporting, the number of critical vulnerabilities that must be assessed each month has risen from about 1,000 to 15,000. Emirates NBD uses an advanced OpenAI model to identify weaknesses in its own systems. Reportedly, the daily number of cyberattack attempts on the UAE has increased from roughly 200,000 to 700,000, a rise that coincided with a worsening regional situation following the outbreak in February of a military conflict between the United States and Iran. In July, the country managed to prevent sophisticated phishing and malware attacks against the financial sector. The UAE Cybersecurity Council warns that criminals are increasingly using AI in their attacks. The impact of the geopolitical conflict on the level of cyber threats, however, remains uncertain.
Commercial Bank of Dubai has announced partnerships with Microsoft, Silent Eight and Comarch AI Wealth, as well as a collaboration with Zamp in the field of intelligent automation. The bank has signed agreements with Harvey, Sirion and Flank for tools supporting legal and management tasks. According to CBD's Chief Technology Officer, Thomas Cherian, the bank is moving from traditional generative AI to agentic AI, which carries out tasks independently with limited human involvement. He estimates that such agents will be able to handle 55–60% of operational tasks, with final results approved by employees. CBD intends to own the agents it creates and their intellectual property.
These steps are consistent with government priorities. The UAE federal target calls for 50% of government operations to be transferred to agentic AI by 2028. In May, Dubai announced a two-year plan to expand agentic AI across the private sector. How successful these plans will be remains to be seen.
Source: fortune.com
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