Saudi Arabia’s Civil Defence has declared the danger over in Riyadh and Al-Kharj after a second wave of emergency alerts was issued in the early hours of Saturday.

The National Early Warning Platform sent warnings to residents in both areas, urging them to follow Civil Defence instructions and take precautionary measures. The alerts were the second issued for Riyadh and Al-Kharj overnight after an earlier round of warnings had also been lifted.

In subsequent updates, Civil Defence said the danger had passed and urged residents to continue following official safety guidance.

During the warnings, residents were advised to stay away from open areas and glass windows and avoid balconies and rooftops. Those outside were told to enter the nearest building or shelter behind a solid barrier, while people were also advised to avoid gatherings and filming.

Authorities have not specified the nature of the potential threat that prompted the Riyadh and Al-Kharj alerts. Similar warnings were issued in several other parts of Saudi Arabia on Friday and early Saturday, including Jeddah, Taif, Khamis Mushait, AlUla and the Farasan Islands.

The warnings come amid an escalation in drone and missile attacks against Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. On Thursday, debris from an intercepted drone fell in Taif, killing one person and injuring two others, according to Saudi authorities.

Ask Vivek Arora about AI and jobs, and he reframes the question before answering it. “I don’t believe the most useful question is how many jobs AI will replace,” says the managing director of SHRM MENA, the global HR association. “The bigger question is how many jobs will be redesigned because of AI.” What makes MENA interesting, he says, is “the speed at which AI is moving from ambition to implementation.”

In the UAE and Saudi Arabia especially, it is “increasingly becoming part of how organisations operate, how governments deliver services and how businesses think about productivity and growth.” So far, he notes, the pattern is one of reinvention rather than removal: “We are already seeing roles being broken down into tasks” — what can be automated, what can be augmented, and where human judgement remains critical.

SHRM’s 2026 research points the same way; in organisations that have deployed AI, changes in job responsibilities are reported far more frequently than actual displacement. His conclusion follows from that. “AI strategy and workforce strategy can no longer sit in separate rooms,” he says. “If you are investing in technology, you also need to be thinking about job design, skills and how your people will work alongside it.”

Redesign, not replacement
The first wave, he observes, is landing on work that is “repetitive, rules-based or highly transactional,” already visible across customer service, administration, finance, recruitment, marketing, operations and several HR processes. But he is careful to add that “transformation doesn’t necessarily mean disappearance.”

Recruitment is the example he reaches for: AI can increasingly handle sourcing, screening, scheduling, drafting job descriptions and analysing talent data, which changes what a recruiter spends time doing rather than whether the recruiter is needed. “The value of the recruiter then shifts towards judgement, relationship building, assessment and advising the business on talent.”

New roles will emerge too, he says, around AI governance, workforce analytics, AI-enabled job design, responsible AI, data stewardship and human-AI collaboration — though he expects most to arrive as “new capabilities expected within existing roles” rather than new job titles. It is a distinction he thinks matters. “The bigger workforce shift may not be from old jobs to new jobs, but from old versions of jobs to new versions of them.”

If the jobs are changing, so is the skill set that fills them. “AI literacy will increasingly become a baseline capability,” Arora says — not that everyone needs to become a technologist, but that they should “understand how to work with AI, question its outputs and apply it responsibly.” Alongside that fluency, he expects growing value in the things technology cannot easily replicate: “judgement, critical thinking, creativity, communication, problem-solving and the ability to work through ambiguity.” He describes it as a paradox. “The more capable AI becomes, the more valuable distinctly human judgement becomes.” What matters most, in his view, is the willingness to keep learning: “Skills are changing too quickly for any qualification earned at the beginning of a career to carry someone through the next twenty years.”

From headcount to capability
That pace, he suggests, changes how organisations should plan. Workforce planning has traditionally started with roles — how many people, which positions. AI, he argues, calls for a different opening question: “What work needs to get done? Which tasks can technology perform? Which require people? And what skills will the organisation need as that balance changes?” The shift he describes is “from simply planning headcount to planning capability,” and it depends on firms understanding their current skills base far better than most do today.

The static three-to-five-year plan, he says, no longer works. “Organisations need much more dynamic skills intelligence, stronger internal mobility and continuous reskilling.” The ones that manage it well, he adds, won’t wait for a role to become obsolete before reacting: “They will identify how the role is changing and start preparing the person in that role for what comes next.”

The region’s gap, in his reading, is wider than a shortage of specialists. “There is certainly a capability gap, but I would define it more broadly than a shortage of AI specialists.” Beyond the technical shortage, he says, sits an “equally important” gap in helping the wider workforce apply AI within their own jobs, something one-off training does not solve. Learning has to sit “much closer to the work itself — practical, continuous and connected to real business problems,” and he encourages employers to look inward first.

“In many cases, the person you need tomorrow may already be working for you today; they simply need a pathway to build the next set of capabilities,” he says. That is particularly relevant in MENA, Arora notes, where organisations are managing rapid economic transformation, localisation priorities and competition for specialised talent at the same time.

HR’s role
AI, in Arora’s view, “has the potential to make HR significantly more strategic”, but only if the function “takes ownership of the workforce implications rather than treating AI purely as a technology issue,” because “every major AI decision eventually becomes a people decision.” Which work changes, which roles need redesigning, who needs to be reskilled, where human oversight should remain — “these are not questions that technology teams can answer alone.”

At the moment, he says, HR is too often left out of the discussion: SHRM’s 2026 research found more than half of organisations surveyed did not directly involve HR in their AI strategy, “a gap organisations need to address.” He puts the point simply. “HR doesn’t need to own AI. But HR absolutely needs to own the people strategy around AI.”

On how far to automate, Arora sets out a clear principle: “Automate the process where it creates value, but retain meaningful human accountability where decisions materially affect people.” AI is well suited to spotting patterns, processing large volumes of information and giving managers better insight, he says, but “hiring someone, evaluating their performance or making decisions about their career carries consequences that require context, judgement and accountability” — and AI “is only as reliable as the data, assumptions and governance around it.”

Efficiency, he argues, cannot be the only measure. The question, as he frames it, “is not simply, ‘Can we automate this?’ It should be, ‘Should we automate this, and what human oversight does this decision require?’”

That emphasis on practical application, he says, is the thinking behind the HR + AI Lab, a new feature of the 2026 conference. “HR leaders are no longer asking whether AI matters. They are asking what they should actually do with it.” The Lab is built around real HR challenges rather than technology for its own sake, looking at how AI can support talent acquisition, employee development and workforce decisions — “and equally importantly, what governance and human oversight need to sit around those applications.” He hopes leaders will leave “with a clearer understanding of where AI can create genuine value… and what it will take to implement it responsibly.”

The GCC opportunity
For the Gulf, Arora sees an opportunity on a national scale. The region is investing heavily in developing local talent, but, he cautions, “localisation cannot only be about increasing representation. The long-term opportunity is to build capability and create sustainable career pathways.” AI can support that work, he says — helping organisations see the skills they already have, identify gaps against future requirements, personalise learning, and connect people to internal opportunities “based on capability rather than only previous job titles.”

The measure of success, he suggests, should reflect that: “The measure of successful AI adoption shouldn’t only be how much more efficiently an organisation operates; it should also include whether it is building stronger workforce capability for the long term.”

With more than 2,000 business and HR leaders expected in Dubai, that is the conversation he hopes the conference will open up. “We need to move beyond the broad conversation about whether AI will change work. It already is.” The more useful discussion, he says, is about the choices that change forces, redesigning jobs rather than simply automating tasks, identifying skills before they become shortages, giving people genuine pathways into new roles, keeping human judgement where it matters, and measuring whether AI is improving both business performance and workforce capability.

“These are business questions,” he says, “not just HR or technology questions.” For the region, he adds, the ambition should be a larger one than speed of adoption: “The opportunity is bigger than adopting AI quickly. It is about building the workforce capable of turning that technology into sustainable economic and business value.”

The Middle East’s aviation sector has spent years investing in digital booking, loyalty and passenger experience, but the payments infrastructure sitting behind those journeys has often received far less attention.

For airlines operating global hub models, that gap is becoming increasingly costly. Cross-border processing fees, limited local payment options, false declines and fragmented transaction data can all weigh on margins and conversion at a time when carriers are under pressure to extract more value from every booking.

Daumantas Grigaravicius, head of Middle East at Adyen, spoke to Gulf Business at ATM about why airline payments need to catch up with the rest of the passenger journey, how local acquiring and alternative payment methods can support conversion, and why smarter use of payments data and AI-driven fraud tools could become a bigger part of airline revenue strategy.

Why have airline payments been slow to evolve and what are the implications?

Airlines have invested heavily in the front of the journey, booking interfaces, loyalty apps, in-flight entertainment, ancillary merchandising, but the payments layer powering those experiences has not seen the same level of investment. Part of the reason for this is historical, in that payments infrastructure decisions have traditionally been evaluated on uptime and reconciliation rather than on conversion or passenger experience. The results of this now show up in two places, on the cost side and on the revenue side – and they compound.

On the cost side, airlines globally spend more than $20bn a year on payment processing, according to McKinsey. Set against IATA’s estimated $39.5bn in industry net profit for 2025, that figure amounts to more than half the sector’s bottom line.

The scale is amplified in the UAE, where airports handled 156.8 million passengers last year, nearly 70 million of them transit passengers connecting through some of the busiest hubs in the world. At those volumes, even marginal processing inefficiencies compound quickly. Every cross-border transaction routed through a non-local acquirer, and every unoptimised interchange fee, eats directly into the P&L.

Our research shows that local acquiring helps businesses save an average of 59 per cent versus cross-border processing.

On the revenue side, the cost of inertia is harder to see in real time but no less material. When a passenger reaches checkout and can’t pay the way they want, sees a price in a currency they don’t use, or gets declined by a fraud rule they shouldn’t have triggered, they leave. This is a passenger lost not to a competitor’s product, but to a competitor’s infrastructure.

What is the revenue impact for regional airlines of not supporting local payment methods and currencies?

Our research found that 78 per cent of consumers globally are less likely to complete a purchase when their preferred payment method is unavailable, and 41 per cent will abandon the transaction altogether. Apply those numbers to an airline selling tickets into a passenger base spanning dozens of countries, each with its own dominant payment method, and the scale of foregone revenue becomes hard to ignore.

The Middle East compounds this because of how regional aviation works. Carriers based here are hub operators by design, and their core customer is the connecting passenger – so in terms of payment method, they can be selling to a Chinese traveller who expects Alipay, a Brazilian transit passenger who expects Pix or a Japanese business traveller who expects Konbini. A checkout process that offers only international card networks is not conducive to conversion for a meaningful share of that traffic. It is therefore a barrier being presented at the most revenue-critical point in the customer journey.

Currency is the parallel issue. When a passenger sees a price in a currency they don’t transact in, the mental conversion slows them down at checkout and increases the chance they abandon the purchase. The transactions that do complete are processed as cross-border, which carries higher interchange and scheme fees. Local acquiring solves both of these issues.

When Vietnam Airlines rolled out local acquiring with Adyen, they brought their transaction costs down and increased their overall authorisation rate by 5 per cent, delivering meaningful incremental revenue from transactions that would otherwise have failed.

Airlines are sitting on vast amounts of transaction data, but few are using it to inform commercial decisions. What insights are being overlooked in your opinion and how could a smarter payments layer change that?

The data exists, but in most carriers it sits in fragments: booking, loyalty, acquirer and ancillary platforms, each holding a separate view. The insights always exist at some level, but are often buried across systems that were never really built to work as one or are simply overlooked.

One example is decline analytics at the flight route level, since the smallest drop in authorisation rate on a high-traffic route is a material revenue event, and yet this data frequently lives with the acquirer and is not adequately monitored. Another is payment method performance as a forward indicator, which, if conversion on a given payment method in a given market is climbing month-on-month, can signal where demand is forming and where the airline should be investing. A third is shopper origin. Knowing where a passenger is transacting from is both a commercial signal, informing how the checkout should be configured for their market – and a risk signal that allows fraud rules to be calibrated to the actual passenger profile.

A unified payments layer addresses information gaps such as these because it produces a single, connected data set across every channel – website, app, airport, in-flight, third-party. It lets an airline see the full passenger journey as a connected sequence rather than a series of disconnected transactions.

Adyen’s single platform is built around this principle. We bring the gateway, acquiring, local and international payment methods, hardware, risk management, fraud protection and real-time reporting into a single solution, giving airlines a connected view of traveller behaviour, payment performance and revenue trends across the business.

Airlines operate in one of the most fraud-prone sectors in payments, and the region’s position as a global connecting hub means a high volume of cross-border transactions from markets with very different fraud profiles. Tell us a bit about this, and is the industry’s approach to tightening controls actually protecting revenue?

Aviation has always been a high-risk fraud category, since the combination of high-value online and cross-border transactions is the conditions fraudsters look for. IATA has historically estimated that airlines lose at least $1bn a year to payment fraud. For a regional hub carrier, the risk profile is amplified by the volume of cross-border transactions and the diversity of originating markets.

A fraud signal that is normal behaviour in one country can appear highly suspicious in another, and automated, rule-based systems can struggle with that nuance.

In many cases, however, tightening controls is not protecting revenue but simply shifting the cost. The instinct when fraud rises is to tighten rules, raise friction, add verification steps and decline more aggressively. The chargeback rate then falls, but so does the conversion rate. The losses move from one ledger to another, and the net effect on margin can often be worse, because a declined legitimate transaction can cost the airline both the revenue and the future loyalty of a customer.

Instead, the approach that actually protects revenue starts from the assumption that most transactions are legitimate and uses behavioural data to identify the small subset that aren’t. Adyen Uplift, our AI-driven risk engine, operates this way: It analyses transaction patterns across our global network in real time and adapts to each merchant’s risk appetite, replacing static rules with a model that responds to actual behaviour. The outcome is both less fraud and a smoother checkout; not one at the cost of the other.

du hosted an exclusive VIP gathering at Madinat Jumeirah’s Mina A’Salam Hotel to celebrate the regional launch of Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max.

The invitation-only event brought together select VIPs and key industry figures for a hands-on experience with Apple’s newest flagship devices.

The showcase highlighted the new 2-nanometer A20 Pro chip’s performance, advanced vapour chamber thermal management, and a redesigned camera system featuring mechanical variable aperture technology.

Guests had the opportunity to experience the handsets’ spatial video capabilities. They integrated iOS 27 features firsthand, while du’s concierge service provided attendees with seamless priority allocations and direct pre-orders on site.

The gathering highlights Dubai’s standing as a leading destination for major technology debuts, where digital innovation meets world-class lifestyle experiences.

In other news, du has deployed what it described as the world’s first six-carrier aggregation configuration on a commercial 5G-Advanced network, combining six 5G new radio carriers across 420 MHz of spectrum in partnership with Nokia.

The deployment brings together frequency division duplex and time division duplex spectrum across the 3.6 GHz, 2.6 GHz, 2.1 GHz, 1.8 GHz and 600 MHz bands, du said on Friday.

The capability was deployed on du’s commercial 5G-advanced standalone network under real-world field conditions and validated using the latest generation of compatible devices, the company said. Nokia supported the deployment using its commercial Habrok massive MIMO radios.

For most of his career, Noel Tata stayed in the shadows of India’s most famous business family, building retail and trading businesses while his half-brother, Ratan Tata, became the public face of the conglomerate.

Today, the low-profile executive has emerged as a pivotal figure in a battle that could determine both the leadership and ownership structure of the 158-year-old Tata empire.

Noel Tata, the chairman of Tata Trusts, the charity arm which owns about 66 per cent of the holding company Tata Sons, now holds one of the most influential positions in Indian corporate governance.

Since succeeding Ratan Tata as chairman of the philanthropic trusts after the latter’s death in October 2024, Noel Tata has acquired a decisive voice over the future of the autos-to-aviation conglomerate.

That influence is now being tested in separate disputes over the reappointment of Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran and the prospect of a public listing of Tata Sons.

Noel Tata has made clear he opposes a listing of Tata Sons, arguing it should continue to be privately held, with every option explored to avoid an initial public offering.

If forced to vote on a listing, he would have “no option but to veto” the proposal, he said on Thursday.

“A listing will destroy its character and strike at the heart of this principle,” Tata said in a statement.

Once listed, Tata Sons would face pressure from shareholders seeking financial gains, leaving little room to channel funds into rescuing troubled group firms or backing ventures with payoffs far in the future, he added.

His stance pits the charity arm that controls the Tata empire against the Tata Sons board and places him at the centre of a widening debate about how India’s largest conglomerate should be governed.

Listing debate

The listing debate intensified after India’s central bank rejected Tata Sons’ request to surrender its registration as an upper-layer non-banking financial company, potentially opening it to regulations that could require a public listing.

On Friday, Shapoorji Pallonji Group, Tata Sons’ second-largest shareholder with a stake of 18.4 per cent, backed such a listing, saying it looked forward to working with the company on the process.

The group, which has long sought to monetise its holding, is evaluating a proposal by which it could sell part of its stake for at least $2.6 billion.

But Noel Tata has taken the opposite view, insisting that Tata Sons should remain private.

The dispute extends beyond ownership. Tata Trusts also challenged Tata Sons’ September 17 decision to ask Chandrasekaran to stay on for a third term, weeks after he indicated he would not seek reappointment when his tenure ended in February 2027.

The Trusts called the resolution a “legal nullity”, arguing that Tata Sons’ articles of association require both Trust nominee directors to vote for a chairman’s appointment or reappointment.

According to Tata Trusts, four directors voted in favour of Chandrasekaran, while Noel Tata voted against.

The vote thrust Noel Tata into a succession battle that could shape the group’s next decade, reinforcing his position as a kingmaker within the Tata empire.

Retail and trading roots

Long overshadowed by Ratan Tata, Noel built his career in less glamorous corners of the group, earning a reputation in retail and trading rather than in Tata’s flagship steel, software and automotive businesses.

Unlike Ratan Tata, one of India’s most recognisable corporate leaders, Noel Tata cultivated influence quietly.

He rarely sought publicity, even as he accumulated board positions across the group and became a trusted adviser within the Tata establishment.

Though seldom seen in public, he spent years serving on company boards before emerging as a central figure after Ratan Tata’s death.

Trustees unanimously appointed him chairman of Tata Trusts, and he later joined the Tata Sons board as a non-executive director.

“The job is to find the most effective allocation of the resources we have, make choices on how to deploy those resources meaningfully, and do what is best for India,” Noel Tata said at an event in August.

After graduating from Britain’s Sussex University, Noel Tata joined Tata International, the group’s trading arm, before moving to Trent, then a relatively small retailer.

As managing director from 1999, he helped transform Trent into one of India’s biggest retail success stories, through brands such as Westside and value-fashion chain Zudio.

In 2010, he became managing director of Tata International, growing revenue to more than $3bn from about $500m. He stepped down in 2021 after reaching the group’s retirement age for senior executives but stayed as non-executive chairman.

Along the way, he accumulated senior boardroom roles across the conglomerate, including chairmanships at Voltas and Tata Investment Corporation and vice-chairmanships at Tata Steel and watch and jewellery maker Titan.

“He has kept a low profile so the outer world doesn’t know him well, but he is quintessential Tata,” former Tata Sons executive Sanjay Singh told Reuters in 2024.