Etihad Airways said it carried 16.1 million passengers in the first nine months of 2025, an 18 per cent increase from the same period a year earlier, as demand across its expanding global network remained strong.

The Abu Dhabi-based carrier transported 1.9 million passengers in September, up 21 per cent from the same month in 2024.

Passenger load factor averaged 89 per cent during the month, one percentage point higher than a year ago, underscoring what the airline called efficient use of added capacity.

Etihad fleet comprises 115 planes

Etihad’s operating fleet stood at 115 aircraft at the end of September, serving 82 passenger destinations worldwide.

Antonoaldo Neves, CEO of Etihad Airways, said: “September delivered another strong month for Etihad, with demand remaining high as we entered the post-summer period. Year-on-year growth continues across all key metrics, reflecting the strength of our network and Abu Dhabi’s growing position as a global destination.

“We’re expanding with discipline, keeping our load factors high and operations reliable. These results show clear momentum and focused execution — exactly what we set out to achieve in 2025,” he added.

The Dubai Home Festival (DHF) 2025 is closing its season with a first-of-its-kind promotion, launching the “DHF Bundle Deal Bargains” from October 13 to 16 across major retailers in the city.

Organised by Dubai Festivals and Retail Establishment (DFRE), the final week of the home and lifestyle event will feature exclusive bundled offers on furniture, décor, appliances, kitchenware, and smart home products.

Participating brands include Royal Furniture, Jumbo, Ecity, Mamas & Papas, Lifestyle, and BLU.

The new promotion marks the first time DHF has introduced bundled deals, designed to give shoppers combined discounts and value packages catering to different budgets and design preferences.

Dubai Home Festival offers great bargains for people looking for furniture

“Whether upgrading an entire home or simply refreshing a space, customers can find strong value across key home categories this week,” DFRE said in a statement.

The Dubai Home Festival, held annually, highlights the emirate’s growing interior design and home improvement market.

This year’s event is supported by key sponsor Commercial Bank of Dubai and strategic partners including Al Futtaim Malls, Majid Al Futtaim, AW Rostamani Group, Merex Investment, and Emirates Airline.

DHF runs until October 16, with details available on the festival’s official website and social media channels.

Read: Global Village Dubai returns for Season 30: Dates revealed

The world’s largest technology and artificial intelligence event, GITEX GLOBAL 2025, opened in Dubai on Monday for its 45th edition, drawing record crowds and more than 6,800 exhibitors, 2,000 startups, 1,200 investors and delegations from over 180 countries.

The event, held from October 13–17 at the Dubai World Trade Centre, marks a major milestone in the show’s four-decade history, bringing together policymakers, tech leaders and investors to discuss the rise of AI-driven economies and next-generation enterprise technologies.

Speaking at the opening, Abdulla Bin Touq Al Marri, UAE Minister of Economy and Tourism, said: “The UAE, thanks to the forward-looking vision of its wise leadership, is not merely participating in the global race for innovation; it is shaping its contours and cementing its foundations by building an economic model defined by resilience and a future orientation, grounded in knowledge and advanced technology. This strengthens the nation’s position at the forefront of the global economic landscape.”

Panels held and tech innovations showcased at GITEX GLOBAL 2025

Panels through the day focused on AI’s geopolitical and economic impact, deep-tech ecosystems, and startup innovation.

Ekaterina Zaharieva, Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation at the European Commission, said: “The European Union and the UAE share a vision to drive innovation that benefits our citizens. We are aligned on the importance of startups and scaleups for our economies. This journey starts at GITEX 2025.”

Canada’s Minister for AI and Digital Innovation, Evan Solomon, added: “GITEX is an absolutely core example of entrepreneurs being launched at a speed we’ve never seen – and we need to keep our values and build together. It’s fantastic to meet people, meet companies, and to see our profound partnership with the UAE deepen as we share this mission to transform AI from a trustworthy technology to one that is built for all.”

Andrew Feldman, CEO of AI chipmaker Cerebras, which partnered with G42 to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer, said: “We built the largest chip in the history of the computing industry, the size of a dinner plate. By going big on chips, we were able to keep more information on the chip and move it less. This meant less power was used, and the results were delivered more quickly.”

On the show floor, major global enterprises showcased next-generation technologies.

• e& unveiled more than 90 innovations spanning robotics, mobility, digital healthcare, and consumer tech, including eVTOL prototypes and autonomous air taxis.

• Oracle highlighted new agentic AI tools for finance and supply chain management, alongside Oracle Red Bull Racing’s data-driven cloud applications.

• BlackBerry launched a new mission-critical communications platform, describing it as the only “tech in the market certified by many governments around the world for data sovereign classified comms”.

• AWS, the world’s largest cloud company, demonstrated integrated cybersecurity and operational resilience tools, while HCL Software introduced real-time AI-driven web customisation and its BigFix endpoint management platform.

This year’s edition also features the largest-ever Brazilian delegation as Country Partner, joined by national pavilions from Canada, Spain, Türkiye, Chile and Ecuador, as well as growing participation from Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Levant.

Day two will feature a virtual address by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in conversation with Peng Xiao, Group CEO of G42, exploring the rise of AI-native societies.

The agenda also includes senior leaders from Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Khazna Data Centres, Presight, Core42, and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.

Read: GITEX GLOBAL 2025: Powering the future through AI innovation

Dubai Taxi Company (DTC) said on Monday it has signed a strategic partnership with Keeta, the international arm of Chinese delivery giant Meituan, to expand last-mile delivery services and develop next-generation logistics technologies in Dubai.

The agreement was signed during GITEX GLOBAL 2025 in Dubai by Mansoor Rahma Alfalasi, CEO of Dubai Taxi Company, and Alex Wei, Logistics GM of Keeta Middle East.

The collaboration is part of DTC’s long-term growth plan to strengthen its presence in transport and delivery, particularly within the fast-growing e-commerce and quick commerce sectors. The deal will open new investment avenues, deepen commercial partnerships, and expand revenue potential.

DTC, Keeta deal: Initial fleet of 150 delivery motorbikes to be deployed

Under the agreement, DTC will deploy an initial fleet of 150 delivery motorbikes, with plans to increase that number to 500 by the end of the year.

The initiative is expected to generate more than Dhs10m ($2.7m) in revenue during the first 12 months.

DTC’s delivery bike business has been a key growth driver, with Q2 2025 revenues rising 102 per cent year-on-year to Dhs18.2m. The company said the expansion reflects its ability to meet changing market demands and deliver high-quality logistics solutions.

The partnership will also explore advanced delivery models, including drones and autonomous vehicles, leveraging Keeta’s proprietary technology in collaboration with DTC.

“At DTC, we continue to strengthen our mobility and logistics solutions in line with Dubai’s vision for a connected and sustainable future,” said Alfalasi. “The UAE’s delivery and logistics market is expanding rapidly, driven by booming e-commerce and on-demand services.”

He added that DTC is capitalising on this growth through an expanding fleet of over 2,000 delivery bikes and advanced operational systems. “Partnering with Keeta further diversifies our services, maximises fleet potential, and positions DTC at the forefront of next-generation logistics, including drones and autonomous delivery technologies,” Alfalasi said.

According to Statista, online food delivery revenues in the UAE are projected to surpass Dhs5bn in 2025 and are expected to grow at a compound annual rate of more than 3 per cent through 2030, reaching nearly Dhs6bn.

Alex Wei, Logistics GM of Keeta Middle East, said, “We are proud to partner with Dubai Taxi Company to bring Keeta’s global delivery expertise and Meituan’s advanced logistics technologies to the UAE. This collaboration combines DTC’s strong local capabilities with our world-class innovation to build a smart, efficient, and sustainable delivery ecosystem.”

“Together, we aim to strengthen last-mile delivery capabilities and play a meaningful role in the evolving mobility and logistics landscape,” Wei added.

While the developer community is in broad agreement about the potential of AI to take on an ever-growing roster of software development tasks – from code generation to testing and refactoring – there is less consensus on the speed and extent to which it might happen.

Making accurate predictions about the future is difficult, but from numerous conversations leading up to GITEX in Dubai, it’s clear that there is significant enthusiasm for AI agents in software development, although it is tempered by some doubts, especially when the conversation turns to finer details.

This is reflected by global research which shows that while 93 per cent of surveyed organisations are planning to trial agents for software development, only 27 per cent believe that these agents will become fully autonomous, down from 43 per cent in 2024.

This is of particular interest in the UAE, with its clear ambitions and a strategy to foster a development ecosystem through initiatives such as the National Program for Coders, which aims to train 100,000 coders within five years. In such a dynamic environment, implementing AI agents effectively will be essential.

So how can development teams prepare for successful human/AI collaboration? This depends partly on how quickly and deeply they commit to integrating AI agents. It’s useful to see two possible scenarios: The first where AI agents are integrated into the development process at a slower pace and function as a valuable assistant to human developers, and the second where AI will take a more dominant role in development at all stages of the process.

Scenario 1: Dev-to-Agent collaboration

AI’s support is seen expanding beyond simple code completion, with agents becoming active team members, capable of autonomously resolving issues, updating documentation, and tidying codebases. This enables human developers to shift their focus to complex, creative work. Furthermore, AI agents/assistants will extend to non-coding roles, like QA, DevOps, and product management.

To manage the work with the coding agents, the developer toolkit must evolve. Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) will transform to include intuitive interfaces that enable humans to assign tasks, track progress, and review output from AI agents. This necessitates creating tools that build trust, allowing developers to quickly verify the AI’s actions. Beyond coding, the next generation of AI will automate tasks like debugging, profiling, and environment configuration, further expanding human capacity.

“Even with the current LLM models, code can be generated in seconds via completion and edit prediction. In this first scenario, context switching will be minimised with ‘one window, one chat’ coding. Short prompt tasks will be fully taken over by the agents, which saves hours of development. At the same time, it won’t solve business problems completely because a business case usually requires more than one developer,” said Andrew Zakonov, VP of Business at JetBrains.

As machine-generated code proliferates, new control mechanisms are critical. This includes implementing Git-level tagging to mark code as AI-generated for traceability and developing specialised auditing and testing tools to ensure machine-written code meets quality standards.

Scenario 2: Dev as an Agent Lead

The shift toward a ‘full-blown’ AI future relies on creating collaboration models where AI-developer teams take the lead. This requires solving three core challenges: establishing seamless AI workspaces, developing next-generation collaboration tools, and creating an AI-native marketplace.

The biggest challenge is defining the interaction points between human insight and AI productivity, a field called Human-AI eXperience (HAX). Developers will need radically new IDEs designed for guiding and verifying a flood of AI-generated code. These tools must automatically understand, validate, and summarise AI output, allowing human developers to stay focused on high-level architecture and requirements.

For AI developers to operate effectively, they must be given a single, integrated environment that provides the tools they need without friction. This means moving beyond complex integrations to give AI agents direct, seamless access to all development tools (coding, testing, debugging, documentation) from one interface. The agent’s physical “home” must also be addressed, whether through centralised cloud platforms or secure, offline-first local inference environments.

Finally, scaling AI productivity requires a new hub for code reuse. A dedicated AI-first marketplace must feature built-in sandboxing for safe testing and automated verification pipelines to check quality and compatibility. This allows AI teams to move faster, share assets safely, and continuously improve codebases, creating a scalable ecosystem for autonomous development.

Regardless of what the future holds, one thing is clear: AI will evolve from a supportive assistant into a proactive player in coding, testing, and analysis. This shift will create new roles for developers as guides and reviewers, collaborating closely with AI agents.

Whether AI agents quickly take a lead in software development or remain as assistants to human developers for a prolonged period, their contribution will be key to the success of developer teams. It’s essential that organisations read the market and develop a blueprint that works for their organisation.