Page 75 - SAMENA Trends - October 2019

REGIONAL & MEMBERS UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

Artificial Intelligence Driving IT Spending in UAE

Spending on IT across the UAE has been manager at Zoho Labs, noted that while it be for an office building, a hospital, or
witnessing a steady increase, driven by AI will make an impact across all sectors, a university,” added Ahmed Khashan,
businesses looking to increase efficiency, the technology sector has, unsurprisingly, president of Gulf countries at Schneider
improve performance, and reduce costs, by been one of the early adopters of AI. “A Electric. “Collaborative efforts between
investing in artificial intelligence systems, substantial amount of AI technology has government and private bodies have been
experts said. “We are definitely seeing been applied in the IT management space vital in fast-tracking digital transformation
a significant increase in AI adoption in and is effectively improving productivity,” initiatives and building sustainable, secure
the UAE,” Ali Hyder, group chief executive he said. “AI can predict outages, forecast and reliable urban communities especially
officer of Focus Softnet, told Khaleej Times. demand, present actionable insights in the UAE.” Gartner predicts the use of
“AI is changing the way we use technology from service desk tickets, enable better AIOps in business will rise from 5 per cent
and conduct business, communicate with customer satisfaction via chatbots, and in 2018 to 30 per cent in 2023. It’s only a
our customers/vendors and analyze our much more. AIOps, which essentially matter of time before AI is adopted across
data. It has the potential to bring change means leveraging AI for your IT operations, critical business functions like credit
on a wide scale to organizations, where is catching up fast. “The Internet of approval, money laundering detection, and
customer and operational data is primary Things and AI continue to play a pivotal much more. AI is here to stay and will help
to the business. AI presents organizations role in shaping our strategy towards an us achieve better employee productivity
with tremendous opportunities to augment ecosystem that enables productivity and and customer satisfaction.
human capabilities across industries and drives digital transformation - whether
this technology is transforming systems
through creativity and agility.” Experts
noted that the UAE is expected to scale up
investments in AI and blockchain solutions
- a trend that should lead to more growth
opportunities for businesses. “On the
industries front, AI brings in so much
quality and accuracy into processes,”
said Hyder. “With its inherent capability
of automation and machine learning
capabilities, AI helps in multi-tasking,
helps people with different abilities perform
like others, and increases workload many
times over as compared to the normal way
of doing the same task. Image recognition,
speech recognition, natural language
processing and machine learning are a few
of the commonly-applied AI technologies.”
Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, product

SBP Grants Permission to ‘Foree’ to Provide Payment Services in Pakistan

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has expensive POS machines for it. Foree almost 150 million cellular users, 70
allowed Foree to provide payment services Founder and CEO Saleem Ropani said, million 3G/4G/broadband subscribers, and
in Pakistan, as per a statement. Foree is “Foree is on a mission to make payments 60 million bank accounts. Co-founder and
basically a mobile payment platform that easy, interoperable and trusted to power Chief Technology Officer of Foree Mehdi
allows users to pay anyone using the QR economies by delivering financial inclusion Hussain said, “Keeping our customers and
code or mobile number, CNIC number, and social-economic justice.” Adding, users safe and delighted is our number one
email address, twitter handle, Facebook or “Along with creating new avenues for jobs priority at Foree. We dedicate extensive
Foree address. Foree is a low-cost digital and formalization of the economy, through resources to ensure all the user data
platform for businesses used globally. our technology, we are enabling access and information is secure. We’ve built a
It allows even the smallest merchant to to financial services with ease and trust. company culture that reinforces trust at
begin accepting digital payments in an Foree aims at becoming the backbone every opportunity.”
affordable manner. You don’t need any of Pakistan’s digital society.” Foree has

75 OCTOBER 2019