LEAP 2026: Five tech leaders unpack Saudi Arabia’s evolving AI ecosystem
As LEAP 2026 gets underway, industry leaders across sport, infrastructure, collaboration, security and industrial AI explain what Saudi Arabia’s push to become the region’s AI hub looks like on the ground — and what they’re bringing to this year’s show
02 September, 2026
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Saudi Arabia’s aspiration to be the Middle East’s artificial intelligence hub is no longer a matter of strategy documents and headline investment figures. It is showing up in stadiums, on rigs, in meeting rooms and inside data centres — in the everyday operations of businesses and governments across the kingdom.
With LEAP 2026 now underway under the theme “Into New Worlds,” Gulf Business asked leaders from across the technology ecosystem two questions: what does the AI-hub ambition actually look like with their customers today, and what are they showcasing at the event? Their answers, featured below, point to a common thread: a shift from deploying technology to owning it, and from AI that advises to AI that acts.
Lakshmi Narayanan — general manager, Mannai Information Technology Saudi Arabia
For us, the AI-hub ambition looks like AI moving from pilots into permanent infrastructure. We see this clearly in sport, where venues and cities preparing for global sporting moments are being built on connectivity and data from the outset, not retrofitted later. But the pattern holds well beyond sport, across government, finance and healthcare too.
Customers are less focused on which platform to buy and more focused on what capability they keep. That shift, from deploying technology to owning it, is what a genuine AI hub looks like up close. At LEAP 2026, we’re showcasing how AI, connectivity and infrastructure work as one system across sports, cities and enterprises, rather than as separate technologies bolted together.
Fittingly, we’re in the SportsTech Hall this year, given how much of the kingdom’s momentum — from the Saudi Pro League to future hosting preparations — is now shaping wider digital investment. “Into New Worlds” speaks to that same convergence for us, where a stadium, a city and a business increasingly run on the same intelligent foundation.
Murad Ali — head of Middle East & Central Asia, Logitech for Business
Saudi customers are moving from discussing AI as a future opportunity to applying it across everyday business operations. There is a growing interest in smarter meeting spaces and technology that helps employees work more effectively. For Logitech, this means looking beyond individual devices and instead working on connected workplace ecosystems that are easy for IT teams to deploy and manage. AI-powered collaboration solutions can improve the experience of hybrid meetings, but they also help organisations build flexible workplaces. The opportunity is to make Saudi Arabia’s AI ambitions practical, turning investment in technology into better experiences for employees and customers.
At LEAP 2026, we are showcasing how AI and intelligent collaboration technologies are reshaping the modern workplace. The new Rally AI Camera Pro and Rally AI Camera will be officially launched at the event, designed specifically for meeting rooms, boardrooms and other similar venues. At the same time, our current lineup of Logitech workplace solutions will be presented during the event.
Maher Jadallah — vice president, Middle East and Africa, Tenable
Saudi Arabia’s ambition to become an AI leader translates into rapid digital transformation, cloud adoption and massive growth across its attack surface. In practice, local organisations are deploying AI platforms, autonomous agents and cloud infrastructure at scale. However, as AI models accelerate the speed and volume of vulnerability disclosures, human-speed triage is no longer viable. Our customers are shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive risk reduction. They are using AI-driven context to cut through the noise, prioritising the tiny fraction of exposures that present legitimate attack paths to their critical business assets.
At LEAP 2026, we are demonstrating how organisations can securely navigate the new frontier of enterprise technology. In line with this year’s theme, “Into New Worlds,” and to support Vision 2030, we will be showcasing a major expansion to our Exposure Management platform. This includes Tenable Hexa AI, an agentic AI engine that automates complex remediation workflows at machine speed. We will also be introducing our expanded AI Exposure coverage across major large language models, Model Context Protocol deployments and AI-native developer environments, to help security teams govern shadow and authorised AI.
Rabii Al Khonaizi — regional sales director, Saudi Arabia and North MEA, Submer
Honestly, what I’m seeing with customers is that the conversation has moved from “if” to “how fast.” A few years ago, we were explaining what AI infrastructure requires. Today, customers are coming with power secured and clear timelines, asking how quickly they can deploy. The challenge now is not ambition or investment. It’s the practical side: power density, cooling and how quickly capacity can come online. We’re seeing this across operators, enterprises and government-backed projects. The pace of development in Saudi Arabia is impressive, and the kingdom is clearly serious about becoming a major AI and data centre hub. AI workloads are pushing data centres beyond what traditional infrastructure was designed to handle.
At Submer, we look at the whole infrastructure, not just one part of it. We support customers from advisory and design through build, power, thermal management and IT integration, helping them put the right infrastructure in place for high-density AI. The “Into New Worlds” theme fits well because the level of compute the region is looking for requires a different approach to power, cooling and deployment. LEAP brings together the people building this next generation of infrastructure, so it’s a great place to have those conversations.
Suliman Gaouda — regional vice president, AI – APJ MEA, IFS
In practice, it looks far less exciting than the headlines and far more consequential. Seventy per cent of the industrial workforce is not behind a desk. They are on the rig, up the tower, on the site, in the hangar.
Fifty years of enterprise software was built for the thirty per cent who are. So when an operator in the kingdom says they want to be an AI hub, the real test is not the size of the cluster. It is whether the AI reaches the other 70 per cent. Here is what that looks like on a Tuesday morning: a technician photographs a nameplate, and the system returns the asset identity, its maintenance history, the likely root cause ranked by confidence, and whether the part is in his van or the next one over. A turnaround scheduled by an algorithm rather than a spreadsheet and three phone calls. A chiller or a switchgear whose degradation raises a work order by itself, rather than lighting up a dashboard nobody owns. Two Saudi examples make it concrete. STC deployed 5,000 field service engineers on our scheduling and service management platform, one of the largest workforce optimisation programmes in the Middle East. ARO Drilling, the Saudi Aramco and Valaris joint venture, went live in nine months, on time and on budget, across maintenance, supply chain, finance and human capital for 400 full users and 2,000 self-service users. Their IT director put it plainly: from streamlined procurement to more efficient maintenance of critical equipment on the rigs, it changed how they operate.
Four forces are converging on that same seventy per cent. Half the skilled industrial workforce retires within five years. Supply chain disruption has stopped being an event and become a condition. The connected asset population is multiplying faster than anyone’s capacity to maintain it. And carbon has moved from an annual report into an operating constraint. Every one of those lands on the frontline. The kingdom’s real advantage is that it is building the operating layer at the same time as the compute, rather than a decade later. Most economies did it the other way round and are still paying for it.
At LEAP, we’re showcasing industrial AI that performs the work, rather than AI that produces one more recommendation. Three things specifically. IFS Loops digital workers, which carry a decision through to action across systems instead of stopping at an insight. IFS Nexus Black Resolve, which puts a senior engineer in every frontline worker’s pocket: the technician captures a fault by photo, voice or video, and gets back a diagnosis, the right part and a guided repair path before the next shift change. And IFS.ai Operational Intelligence, which reads telemetry off rotating equipment, power and cooling, detects the anomaly, and raises the maintenance work request.
On the theme: “Into New Worlds” is usually read as the frontier, and the frontier everyone is looking at is the model. We would argue the harder new world is the one where an agent is trusted to act inside a live industrial operation, with governance, an audit trail, and someone accountable for the outcome. That is not a model problem. Put it plainly: SAP will record that the money was spent and the person was paid. It will not tell you why the crane is getting slower. That answer lives in the machine — in the vibration, the temperature, the pressure, the operator’s log. Reading that language and turning it into a work order, a schedule, a spare part and a capital decision is the new world we are building for. And the proof is already public.
