UAE Innovation Month, pinned by the UAE leadership to focus on nurturing creativity and productivity in various sectors, and without doubt, AI has been a fundamental accelerator of digital evolution across the board.
This year, however, the fundamental promise of AI has been proven, capturing the attention of executive teams globally as AI adoption has surged 282% year-over-year among CIOs. This widespread adoption has not yet translated into scaled transformation across the enterprise’s departments.
Nowhere is this more relevant than in the UAE, where national AI strategies and digital acceleration programs are raising the bar for enterprise delivery. That comes with a defining challenge for enterprise leaders is moving beyond isolated experiments and committing to the orchestrated deployment of autonomous AI systems that deliver scalable, measurable ROI.
The companies that successfully transition to becoming an Agentic Enterprise will not merely gain efficiency. They will fundamentally reimagine their operating model, how they execute work, how they engage customers, and how they stand out from the competition.
Breaking free from Pilot Purgatory
The primary impediment to transformation is the enterprise trap known as “pilot purgatory”, where single, isolated AI agents operate but never connect or scale. These standalone deployments fail because they lack the foundational structure for true enterprise-wide autonomy. In order to achieve the latter, there are three critical factors to consider:
- Multi-Agent Protocols: Seamless interoperability and communication pathways between disparate systems.
- Integrated Context: Unified, real-time access to enterprise data across functional silos.
- Robust Governance: Centralized mechanisms for ensuring security, ethical operation, and observability as agents multiply.
As regulatory focus on AI governance and data sovereignty accelerates across the GCC, regulatory alignment is no longer optional. It is a strategic and imperative step.
To avoid unnecessary pitfalls, organizations can start with one low-risk internal use case, such as knowledge management or back-office operations, to build organizational confidence and prove ROI.
From there, orchestration (not experimentation) becomes the differentiator. In 2026, success will be defined by the ability to orchestrate digital workforces in which agents collaborate with one another across departments and beyond organizational boundaries.
Mastering relational intelligence is a customer experience imperative
The failure to connect internal systems immediately manifests in a broken customer experience (CX). Therefore, transforming CX through agentic AI will be the most critical investment companies make next year, forcing organizations to reorganize around customer outcomes rather than functional silos.
In the GCC, where nearly half of UAE consumers and a majority of Saudi users now rely on social and AI-driven platforms for discovery, expectations for contextual, seamless engagement are rising rapidly.
Relational intelligence is equally emerging as the new battleground for competition. Consumers accustomed to chatbots that remember their history, preferences, and context now perceive generic, forgetful experiences as fundamentally broken.
Hence, true differentiation in 2026 won’t come from deploying the most AI. It will come from mastering relational intelligence at scale to understand not just what customers want now, but the full context of their needs and preferences over time. This is where the Agentic Enterprise moves from theory to commercial advantage.
Reorganization for the Agentic Era
The synergy between humans and AI agents is driving a ‘Great Redeployment’ where there is a structural shift in how organizations operate and how roles are defined. AI agents are built to solve problems end-to-end, they naturally cut across the functional silos that have long fragmented decision-making and customer experience.
Therefore, as routine, repetitive tasks are automated by intelligent systems, human talent is redirected toward higher-value work such as judgment, orchestration, strategic thinking, and complex relationship management.
At regional forums linked to the World Governments Summit, leaders have emphasized that AI will reshape economies and workforces, not eliminate them, making reskilling and AI literacy critical priorities.
This era demands universal AI literacy. Every employee, from entry-level to executive, must know how to prompt effectively, spot inaccuracies, tune outputs, and intervene when needed.
Trust is the non-negotiable foundation for scale
None of the AI transformations can be scaled without a non-negotiable foundation of trust. Hesitation around autonomous strategies often comes down to believing in data and the agents operating it.
On one level, when an AI agent represents your company to a customer, every interaction shapes perception. Brands whose agents deliver consistently exceptional, ethical, and context-aware experiences will reinforce their market leadership.
- Operational Trust (Security): As attackers leverage AI to scale threats with unprecedented sophistication, reactive defense becomes obsolete. Organizations must shift to anticipatory response—using AI to automate threat detection, predict attacker behavior, and surface risks at machine speed.
2026 marks the shift from experimentation to execution. The infrastructure is ready, the economic incentive is clear. Success will depend on the organization’s leadership courage to move beyond isolated pilots and a firm commitment to orchestrate, govern, and integrate autonomous systems into the core of daily operations. The Agentic Enterprise is not a distant vision. In the UAE, it is the present state of competition.
(Mohammed AlKhotani is Senior VP & GM for the Middle East at Salesforce)
