Qatar has launched a new investment platform that will take control of Qatar Investment Authority‘s domestic portfolio and seek to build new national companies in sectors ranging from artificial intelligence to manufacturing and healthcare.

Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani announced Doha Investment at the Qatar Economic Forum: UNGA Special Edition in New York, according to a statement from Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).

The platform, wholly owned by QIA but operating with its own mandate and board, will focus on increasing private-sector participation, attracting international capital and expertise and developing companies in priority non-hydrocarbon industries.

“Through this platform, we aim to expand the role of the private sector in driving Qatar’s economic growth,” Sheikh Mohammed said.

Doha Investment will manage QIA’s existing domestic holdings, including stakes in some of Qatar’s largest companies, among them Qatar Airways Group, QNB Group, Ooredoo Group, Qatari Diar, Katara Hospitality and Hassad Food.

Its portfolio comprises more than 40 companies operating across more than 80 markets worldwide, spanning financial services, transport and logistics, telecommunications and technology, real estate, hospitality, food and agriculture.

More than 20 companies in the portfolio generated revenue exceeding QAR1bn in 2025, QIA said.

Doha Investment will aim to create new national champions

Alongside developing its existing companies, Doha Investment will seek to create new national champions in areas including advanced technologies, manufacturing, supply chains and healthcare.

The portfolio will include Qai, Qatar’s national artificial intelligence platform, which has been established to support the deployment of AI across businesses and wider society.

Sheikh Faisal bin Thani Al Thani, Qatar’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, will serve as managing director and vice-chairman of Doha Investment, while Sheikh Mohammed will chair the platform.

Sheikh Faisal said the investment company would work with management teams at portfolio businesses to identify new sources of value and strengthen their ability to compete both regionally and internationally.

It will also seek partnerships with domestic and international investors, combining capital, expertise and technology to develop businesses in industries where Qatar sees opportunities for growth.

The government expects the platform to support the creation of skilled jobs, strengthen domestic supply chains and develop Qatari talent, while a larger pool of high-value companies could help deepen the country’s capital markets.

The initiative forms part of Qatar’s Third National Development Strategy, which seeks to increase the private sector’s role in the economy and reduce dependence on hydrocarbons.

The establishment of Doha Investment marks a restructuring of how Qatar manages its domestic strategic investments, separating the platform’s mandate from QIA’s wider global investment activities while keeping it under the sovereign wealth fund’s ownership.

Cyberattacks against space infrastructure are increasingly moving beyond satellites themselves, with ground stations, communication networks and user terminals creating new opportunities for attackers, according to a report from Kaspersky ICS CERT.

More than 100 cyber incidents targeting space systems were recorded between 1957 and the early 2020s, based on publicly available data cited by the cybersecurity company. The findings highlight how modern space infrastructure has evolved into a connected ecosystem spanning orbital assets, terrestrial networks, ground control stations, user equipment and third-party software.

Ground infrastructure creates new vulnerabilities

Kaspersky said attackers frequently target the most accessible parts of that chain, including internet-connected equipment on the ground.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are a particular concern. After a sharp increase in GPS/GNSS spoofing incidents in the Black Sea region in 2023, Kaspersky researchers examined internet-exposed GNSS hardware in cooperation with 70 equipment vendors.

Read more: Huawei’s Sultan Mahmood Malik on building cyber resilience for the AI era

The review found more than 3,000 GNSS receivers that could be attacked directly over the internet, potentially creating risks for maritime operations, aviation and land-based logistics.

Kaspersky recommends keeping GNSS receivers inaccessible from the public internet. Where internet connectivity is necessary, organizations should use strong authentication to reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

Satellite networks can also aid attackers

Space infrastructure can also be exploited by threat actors seeking to conceal their own activity. During the 2010s, advanced persistent threat groups including Turla and Whitebear used unencrypted downstream satellite traffic to route communications with their servers, making their activity harder to trace.

The risk is not limited to sophisticated hacking groups. In 2009, militants in the Middle East demonstrated that inexpensive, commercially available software could be used to intercept unencrypted downstream video feeds from military systems.

More recently, groups such as Thrip have targeted satellite operators and geospatial mapping databases, according to Kaspersky.

Attacks can spill into critical infrastructure

The consequences of attacks on space-related systems can extend well beyond the affected satellite network.

In 2022, attackers compromised satellite operator Viasat’s KA-SAT network after exploiting a misconfigured VPN device. They deployed the AcidRain wiper, disrupting about 30,000 satellite terminals across Europe and indirectly halting the remote operation of more than 5,800 wind turbines.

The emergence of AcidPour in 2024 added another concern. The destructive malware, associated with the Sandworm APT group, targets a broader range of systems, including Linux routers, satellite modems and data-storage infrastructure.

” A space system comprises far more than what is launched into orbit; the ground-based control networks, communication channels, and subscriber receivers represent the true, and often fragile, operational foundation of the entire system. As satellite technology becomes deeper integrated into civilian life – from navigation systems to energy grids – securing these connections, enforcing encryption on downstream links, and patching vulnerable internet-exposed receivers is of highest importance,” commented Ekaterina Rudina, Security Analysis Expert at Kaspersky.

Kaspersky recommends that organizations regularly audit and patch internet-facing ground-control and subscriber hardware, particularly GNSS receivers. It also advises encrypting satellite communications to reduce interception and spoofing risks, while strengthening endpoint protection and access controls across ground-station and internal management networks.

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.