Dubai has retained its position as the leading destination for executive nomads for the third consecutive year, according to the Savills Executive Nomad Index 2025, with Abu Dhabi ranking second for the second year in a row.

Dubai scored highest for its flight network, while Abu Dhabi was recognised for superior internet speeds, reflecting the UAE’s continued appeal to mobile professionals. “Add to that year-round sunshine, world-class hospitality, access to top-tier schools and healthcare, and it’s clear why the region continues to lead the way for executive nomads,” said Andrew Cummings, head of residential agency, Middle East, Savills.

The remaining top five locations — Malaga, Miami, and Lisbon — retained their positions, with Palma (6th) and Barcelona (7th) rounding out the top destinations.

All are coastal cities offering favourable climates alongside business opportunities.

Executive Nomad Index based on factors including digital nomad visa programmes

The index ranks 30 destinations for long-term remote workers based on factors including digital nomad visa programmes, quality of life, and established residential markets, with prime rents receiving half weighting in the calculations.

New entrants

Tokyo (11th), Auckland (9th), Crete (15th), Vancouver (18th) and Berlin (28th) were new additions to the index.

“The landscape for executive nomads is changing. Markets are creating new strategies to attract digital and executive nomads,” said Kelcie Sellers, associate director, Savills World Research.

She shared that countries such as Canada and New Zealand, while not offering explicit digital nomad visas, have revised long-term visitor visas to accommodate fully remote employment.

Kiteworks has released the findings of its fourth annual Data Security and Compliance Risk Survey Report, uncovering a significant gap in data governance among Middle East organisations. While regional businesses lead globally in requiring supplier security certifications (60 per cent), the report warns that many lack visibility into whether those standards adequately protect private data flows — creating what experts describe as a “compliance theater effect” that looks strong on paper but weak in execution.

The survey, which gathered insights from 461 global organisations, highlights how Middle East companies have developed mature certification frameworks without corresponding capabilities to monitor third-party data exchanges. This lack of visibility creates cascading risks, including higher breach rates, slower detection times, and increased litigation costs.

“Requiring certifications demonstrates process maturity, but without visibility into actual data flows, it’s like having a state-of-the-art security system with no cameras,” said Dario Perfettibile, VP and GM, European operations, Kiteworks. “Our research shows that measurement drives protection – organisations must know precisely where their private data travels and who handles it.”

Strong standards, weak visibility

The report notes several imbalances in Middle East data governance practices:

• Process excellence: 60 per cent of organisations require supplier certifications, the highest globally.

• Visibility gaps: Despite this, most struggle with basic third-party data tracking.

• Technical controls: Only 31 per cent have systems in place to validate governance policies.

• AI governance: While 24 per cent enforce strict AI blocking (also the highest globally), most lack the visibility needed to ensure such policies protect sensitive content.

The hidden cost of blind spots

Globally, the findings show the consequences of insufficient third-party visibility:

• Organisations managing 1,001–5,000 third parties face the highest breach risk.

• 46 per cent of organisations without third-party visibility cannot determine their breach frequency.

• Companies with precise tracking detect breaches up to four times faster.

• Clear visibility reduces litigation costs by over 80 per cent.

“The data tells a compelling story: Visibility isn’t optional – it’s the foundation of effective governance,” added Perfettibile. “Middle East organisations have built the right processes; now they need the technology to make those processes meaningful.”

Moving from compliance theater to true governance

The report emphasises that certification frameworks and contractual safeguards offer limited protection without monitoring and measurement. To move from compliance theater to true governance, organisations must be able to answer critical questions such as:

• How many third parties handle our private data?

• Where does sensitive information travel?

• Which controls are effective in practice?

• Can breaches be detected and responded to in real time?

A call to action

According to Kiteworks, Middle East organisations must urgently address visibility gaps while leveraging their strong certification processes. Key actions include:

• Unified tracking of private data exchanges

• Real-time monitoring of third-party data flows

• Technical validation of compliance standards

• Risk assessment metrics for mitigation

“Middle East organisations stand at a critical juncture,” concluded Perfettibile. “They can either continue with compliance theater – looking good on paper while risks multiply – or they can build true governance by adding visibility to their already strong processes. The choice will determine whether they lead or lag in the global data security landscape.”

The full Data Security and Compliance Risk: 2025 Annual Survey Report is available at Kiteworks

What does your internal voice sound like? Only you know its cadence, its accent, its way of pausing between thoughts. Only you know how it rises when excited or drops to a murmur when uncertain. This inner voice, uniquely yours, impossible to replicate, is what taste is all about. And it’s precisely what AI, despite its glorious efficiency in automation, cannot capture. Yet art can.

Taste emerges from the accumulation of everything that makes you singular. It’s the residue of your highs and lows, your resilience learned through mistakes, your celebrations and losses. It forms through encounters with people from every corner of the world, through meals in the best and worst restaurants, through wandering galleries and discovering artworks that stop you in your tracks. It’s this amalgamation of experiences that led you to this moment.

In museums, as with many of life’s experiences, we instinctively compare what we’re seeing with what we’ve seen before. We construct our understanding, layer by layer, building a framework that becomes our lived experience — something that develops every minute of every day, yet remains personal and distinctly yours, just like your inner voice. The way I would curate an exhibition and how you would approach it are different. How an artist creates a work is completely different from that of another.

When I use AI, I spend more time negotiating and explaining what I mean than I would if I’d have just done it myself. Yes, it can tick a box and fill a space, but life is more than that. In the case of ChatGPT or similar, its responses are not meaningful, but mere predictions based on what’s come before; it’s vanilla, it’s beige, it’s basic. It’s artificial.

Bias is inherent

The argument that AI is biased isn’t going to stick. Of course it is biased. Everything is. You are, I am, museums are. The data we pick to collect and analyse is biased. The questions we ask and interpret are biased. The things we include — and don’t — are a bias. There is no escaping it. But it’s about what we do with that bias. It’s about recognising that taste isn’t neutral; it’s deeply subjective and shaped by systems of power, access, and legacy. What we perceive as “good” or “refined” often carries layers of bias, including the influence of colonial narratives and dominant cultural norms. The more we, as humans, become aware of that, the more expansive and inclusive our understanding of value and creativity can become.

Taste cannot be quantified or placed neatly in a spreadsheet. It has a habit of surprising even its maker. Unlike data points that can be aggregated and optimized, taste operates in the realm of the ineffable — that space between instinct and distinctiveness, where true innovation lives. This non-standardisable, dynamic aspect of taste makes defining it so elusive, because it is both important to discover but impossible to domesticate.

Today, creating something meaningful requires doubling down and integrating your perspective, which needs to be nuanced and complex, shaped by your lived experiences. This point of view needs to adopt an interpretive paradigm, embracing different ontological perspectives and epistemological roots — a synthesis of subjectivism, constructivism, and critical inquiry. AI can’t do this. It cannot lean on the weight of life, it cannot bring diverse perspectives, it cannot reflect on what it feels like to live and experience a fractured world, nor can it understand the complexity of cultural hybridity, or the nuance of existing between worlds.

AI can only process information once it’s been transformed into digital data. It has never heard a word spoken aloud, never felt the awkwardness of silence, never experienced the heat of an argument. It hasn’t heard its own voice. When AI generates content, it cannot originate style with intentionality because it lacks the very thing that makes style meaningful: a point of view forged through living.

Every time we uncritically accept AI’s definition of what’s attractive or artistic, we participate in the slow erasure of diverse thought. When AI systems train on billions of images that overwhelmingly represent certain standards, normalcy, virtues, and aesthetic preferences, they don’t just learn patterns — they amplify dominant visions, and in doing so, make them matter more than others. This creates a feedback loop of sameness — trained on its own data — potentially entrenching these narratives even further into a web of uniformity and sold to us as universally appealing. Whose culture are we transmitting? Whose dreams deserve amplification and whose taste constitutes the baseline for creativity?

I want to work on exhibitions that AI can’t. I want to ask questions that AI cannot answer. Of course, AI will give an answer — it always does — but I want another side of the story. I want a counterargument; I want a deep, complex, entangled, and deeply thought-provoking assembling of ideas, concepts, and opinions. As we like to say at the Media Majlis Museum: there is always another side.

AI can be used to enhance creativity

Yet we also cannot overlook AI’s potential, and using it simply to become more efficient misses the point. AI should be used to enhance the creativity of highly imaginative individuals. When we reduce AI to a tool for doing things faster and cheaper, we miss its capacity to help us dream bigger, think stranger, imagine wilder. The real opportunity isn’t in replacing human creativity but in amplifying it, in creating space for the weird and wonderful ideas that only emerge when humans have the time and freedom to play.

The world has never needed taste more urgently. When every option is instantly available, when every variation is possible, the person who knows which one to choose becomes invaluable. Taste develops through exposure, curation, and reflection. You have to see, hear, and feel to understand what excellence looks like. You must discern and recognise distinctions that matter. These preferences express values that go beyond aesthetics. They reveal how you see the world. As you evolve, so do your sensibilities. This maturation — from reaction to reflection, from preference to philosophy — is a fundamentally human process that no algorithm can replicate.

Only you know your taste. Like the voice in your head, it’s yours alone. It’s cultivated through years of paying attention, of caring deeply, of being willing to be wrong. It emerges from the messy, complicated, gloriously inefficient process of being human.

As we stand at the threshold of an AI-saturated future, the question isn’t whether machines can create — they clearly can. The question is whether we’ll remember why human creation matters. Not because it’s more efficient or optimised, but because it carries the weight of a life lived, the perspective of a unique consciousness, the irreplaceable value of someone believing something matters. Ultimately, an understanding of what is artificial and what is not.

Jack Thomas Taylor is the curator of Art, Media and Technology at the Media Majlis Museum, a university museum in Northwestern Qatar’s school in Doha.

Read: Harnessing AI: Why asking the right questions is key to success

Some Google services including YouTube temporarily went down on Thursday in Turkey and some parts of Europe including Greece and Germany, according to a Turkish deputy minister, internet monitors and users in the regions.

The Freedom of Expression Association, which monitors local censorship on the internet, said the outage on Alphabet’s Google GOOGL.O began around 10:00 a.m. (0700 GMT) in Turkey.

Tracking website Downdetector said services were mostly restored before 0900 GMT, with the number of reports of service disruptions decreasing from 0751 GMT onward.

Google did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on the matter.

Turkey’s cyber security watchdog has requested a technical report from Google, deputy transport and infrastructure minister Omer Fatih Sayan said on X.

A map posted by Sayan showed Turkey, large parts of southeast Europe, and some locations in Ukraine, Russia and western Europe as affected.

There were sporadic outages in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, including problems accessing websites, YouTube and some phone contacts linked to Gmail, users there said.

In Germany, outage tracking website allestoerungen.de, a division of US-based Ookla, reported an uptick in Google disruptions from around 09:00 a.m. (0700 GMT).

Dubai Holding Asset Management (DHAM) has unveiled Dubai Retail as the unified brand for its extensive portfolio of more than 40 malls and lifestyle destinations.

The move is part of DHAM’s growth strategy following the 2024 integration of Nakheel and Meydan into Dubai Holding, aimed at enhancing scalability, efficiency, and long-term competitiveness across its retail operations.

With the launch of Dubai Retail, DHAM consolidates a diverse offering that spans 10 malls, 15 lifestyle destinations, and 18 retail centres across the emirate. Collectively, these properties house over 6,500 retailers across 13 million square feet of gross leasable area (GLA), positioning the new brand as a key contributor to Dubai’s retail and tourism economy.

As part of the rebrand, Nakheel Mall has been renamed Palm Jumeirah Mall, following the completion of a redeveloped section that strengthens its flagship role on the Palm Jumeirah.

Malek Al Malek, group CEO of Dubai Holding Asset Management, said: “Our malls and destinations have been instrumental in shaping the city’s dynamic retail landscape and evolving customer experiences. Dubai Retail draws on the strength and synergies of the wider Dubai Holding ecosystem—including development and asset management—positioning it to seize the opportunities presented by a rapidly expanding population, a thriving tourism sector and forward-looking urban development.

“The recent launch of Nad Al Sheba Mall, together with the ongoing development of Al Khail Avenue, which will add 1.2 million square feet to our existing GLA upon completion, underscores our commitment to expanding Dubai Retail’s footprint with destinations that drive Dubai’s experience economy and integrate retail, dining, leisure and entertainment into vibrant lifestyle hubs.”

Fareed Abdelrahman, managing director of Retail Destinations at DHAM, added: “Being one of the region’s largest groups of malls and retail destinations is only the starting point. This announcement strengthens Dubai Retail’s ability to grow strategically and continuously enhance its destinations to meet the evolving expectations of residents and visitors. By aligning with global retail trends and elevating the customer experience, we aim to ensure our destinations remain relevant, competitive, and a key contributor to Dubai’s progress as a leading global retail and lifestyle capital.”

Dubai Retail’s portfolio includes major malls such as Palm Jumeirah Mall, Nad Al Sheba Mall, The Outlet Village, Circle Mall, Ibn Battuta Mall, Dragon Mart, Golden Mile Galleria, Bay Avenue, Bay Square, and the upcoming Al Khail Avenue.

Its lifestyle destinations include Bluewaters, JBR, Palm West Beach, The Club at Palm West Beach, Vista Mare, Al Khawaneej Walk, Souk Al Seef, Souk Madinat Jumeirah, Boxpark, Last Exits, DXBIKE, and Dubai Islands Beach. Meanwhile, its 18 retail centres serve communities across the city, from Jumeirah Islands to Discovery Gardens and Al Khail Gate.

By consolidating more than 40 properties under one umbrella, Dubai Retail aims to redefine the customer experience while advancing Dubai’s ambitions to be a global capital for retail and lifestyle.