Inception CEO Ashish Koshy on powering AI-native enterprise solutions

Inception is participating at GITEX GLOBAL 2025 as part of G42’s vision to build AI-native nations.

In this conversation, CEO Ashish Koshy highlights the company’s role as the core intelligence layer powering the G42 Intelligence Grid, presenting a range of domain-specific and sector-agnostic products designed to accelerate transformation, enhance efficiency, and deliver measurable outcomes for both public and private sectors. From intelligent decision-making to advanced human capital management, Inception’s solutions showcase how AI can be responsibly scaled to drive real-world impact, reflecting the UAE’s ambitious national AI vision.

Tell us about Inception’s showcase at GITEX GLOBAL 2025.

We are participating as part of the G42’s vision for building AI-native nations, showcasing our position as the core intelligence layer powering the G42 Intelligence Grid. Under the theme ‘Authentic Intelligence. Real Impact’, we are presenting our range of domain-specific and sector-agnostic products at the Main Hall (Hall 6) and Government Hall (Hall 18).

We are demonstrating how these products are helping organisations accelerate transformation, unlock efficiency, and drive tangible progress while announcing strategic partnerships that reinforce our leadership and support the UAE’s national AI vision.

Inception has introduced a suite of enterprise-focused AI solutions. What is the driving objective behind these launches, and how do your offerings stand out from others in the market?

At Inception, our goal has always been to empower enterprises with AI-native solutions that address real world challenges and drive measurable impact. We were founded as an AI institute in 2017, and that rich foundation in research and development continues to guide everything we do. What began as a centre for frontier research has evolved into an engine for enterprise transformation, where scientific breakthroughs are translated into deployable, AI-native products.

Our products enable organisations automate complex workflows, enhance decision-making, and unlock new efficiencies. Each product is powered by large, multilingual models optimised for enterprise applications across various areas such as executive decision-making, investment, procurement and human capital – all developed responsibly.

What sets Inception apart is our convergence of research-driven insight and technical depth. Our solutions integrate securely within enterprise systems and deliver explainable outcomes. Moreover, by leveraging agentic AI frameworks, our products can act autonomously, learn continuously, and collaborate with human users in real time. This enables Inception to deliver responsible, regionally relevant, and globally scalable AI innovation.

What does the future of AI look like in your view, and what role do you see Inception playing in that?

The future of AI is not about replacing the role of a human but amplifying it. We are in an era of agentic AI, where intelligent systems evolve from support tools into proactive teammates embedded within workflows, freeing professionals to focus on strategic, creative, and high-trust work that demands human judgment.

At Inception, we are pioneering this shift by integrating autonomous agents into our AI-native products. For example, we developed:

• (In)Sight to enhance decision-making by automate meeting preparation, enable real-time insights and cross-referencing, and streamline post-meeting reporting.
• (In)Alpha uncovers hidden patterns and insights from vast volumes of unstructured data, enabling faster, more informed investment decisions while reducing biases and maximising returns
• (In) Procurement doesn’t just automate sourcing and contracting workflows; it identifies high-performing suppliers, accelerates sourcing-to-award cycles, ensures compliance, and drives measurable savings
• (In)Business Human Capital uses advanced AI to identify skill gaps, matches top talent to the right roles, and streamlines recruitment from end to end
• (In)Business Productivity and (In)Business Process modules empower teams to deploy no-code AI agents that coordinate workflows, surface knowledge, and make intelligent decisions often faster, more accurately, and at greater scale than human-led systems.

We believe our role is to be the trusted enabler for governments and enterprises, by ensuring that these agentic systems are secure, transparent, explainable, and culturally aligned to local context. Ultimately, our goal is to accelerate AI adoption globally and democratize access to its full potential, supporting organisations to become smarter, faster, and more resilient.

What are the top trends shaping your industry in 2025?

The technology landscape in 2025 is being reshaped by a powerful convergence of innovations that are accelerating experimentation, driving exponential demand for computing power, and intensifying global competition. At Inception, we view these shifts as opportunities to build AI-native products that deliver meaningful, industry-shaping impact.

One of the most transformative forces shaping this evolution is the rise of Agentic AI systems that are capable of independently planning and executing complex, multistep tasks. These adaptive agents can perform actions, collaborate autonomously, and continuously refine their strategies through learning. At Inception, we are embedding these capabilities into our products that enables AI to work where it matters most, by empowering enterprises to focus on strategic, high-value initiatives while navigating an ever-evolving AI landscape with agility and confidence.

Another defining trend is the growing importance of specialised compute and advanced connectivity. Purpose-built, application-specific semiconductors are emerging as the backbone of large-scale AI training and inference, offering unmatched speed, scalability, and energy efficiency. Combined with next-generation connectivity, these advances are transforming how data is processed, transmitted, and applied in real time.

Lastly, quantum computing, autonomous robotics, and next-generation mobility are moving from theory to tangible application. As these frontier technologies mature, Inception is exploring how its AI-native products can integrate quantum-inspired algorithms and autonomous systems to push the boundaries of what intelligent machines can achieve.

Together, these trends signal a future where intelligence, infrastructure, and innovation converge by reshaping industries and empowering organisations to operate smarter, faster, and more sustainably.

How is the Middle East positioned compared to other global tech markets?

The Middle East and UAE in particular is rapidly emerging as a global technology powerhouse, fueled by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, and cloud adoption, outpacing many established tech markets globally.

For this we must thank the country’s leadership for their foresight and the encouragement to really pursue AI development and application at scale in the public and private sector. When it comes to application of technology, we usually see early adoption by the private enterprise followed by the public sector. In the case of AI, in UAE, this trend has been reversed. We see huge applications of AI in the public sector, which in turn is driving its use amongst private enterprises.

A recent example is Abu Dhabi’s ambition to become the world’s first fully AI‑native government by 2027. It plans to operate every major public service with AI, backed by $3.54bn in funding for the 2025–2027 rollout. Its flagship super app, TAMM, brings over 1,100 government services into a single AI‑powered app, covering everything from license renewals to company formation with remarkable speed and precision.

The Deloitte Middle East Technology Fast 50 programme reported an average revenue growth of 8,823 per cent, surpassing other global regions. In particular, the UAE has consistently made global headlines with pivotal “firsts,” including the appointment of the world’s first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and launching both JAIS, the region’s most advanced bilingual Arabic large language model that caters to the underserved communities and connects with 2Bn Arabic speakers globally, and K2Think, an open-source reasoning framework designed for affordable, high-performance reasoning.

These achievements prove that the Middle East, led by UAE and Abu Dhabi, is actively redefining the standards and possibilities of sovereign AI, digital infrastructure, and business transformation.

What are your plans for the next five years?

Over the following years, Inception will continue its mission to build transformative AI-native products that solve real-world challenges across sectors. Our focus remains on developing cutting-edge AI solutions that drive operational efficiency, accelerate innovation, and deliver measurable business and societal impact. We will continue to leverage agentic AI technology to enable adaptive, autonomous decision-making with a human in the loop protocols. We will continue to build domain-specific AI products that serve to sectoral needs and operational realities.

In addition, our ongoing work in underrepresented languages will set a new global benchmark for inclusive AI. We will continue collaborating with governments, industry partners, and academia to ensure AI is scaled responsibly and inclusively. This ecosystem-driven approach is key to contributing and supporting the UAE’s AI Vision 2031, reinforcing the country’s ambition to become the world’s most AI-prepared nation.