technology industry Archives — Carrington Malin

January 24, 2022
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GCC tech in 2022: another big year for innovation? Last year saw a long list of government initiatives in the GCC to accelerate digital transformation, encourage innovation in government and create policies to encourage Fourth Industrial Revolution industries. Recently, I was interviewed by ZDNet’s Damian Radcliffe for his article on ‘the biggest trends shaping the digital future of the Middle East‘.

I have no doubt that 2022 will prove to be an exciting year for artificial intelligence and emerging technologies in the Middle East. There have been so many government initiatives, policy moves, proof of concepts and trials across public and private sectors, not to mention investments in new ventures and R&D over the past year, it’s difficult to simply keep track of the developments already in motion! However, I believe we’ll have plenty of new ventures, projects and initiatives to look forward to in 2022 too.

However, beyond the addition of more impressive sounding new government initiatives, I believe that we’re going to see more real evidence of initiatives and programmes set in process during the past 2-3 years bearing fruit. For example, the UAE published its first AI strategy in 2017. Now, nearly five years on, the strategy (which has been updated a number of times) has informed the launch of new initiatives across UAE education, skills development in government, investment, new projects and new organisations, public services and regulation. In Saudi Arabia, the progress made on data and AI at a government level, has paved the way for a new wave of government and private sector initiatives, companies, partnerships and investments.

As Damian’s article helps to illuminate, there are rapid changes taking place across the Middle East’s tech and telecom ecosystems, making the region an exciting place to be at the moment.

You can read Damian’s full article on Tech in 2022 in the Middle East region here.


April 11, 2021
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UAE innovation plans stand to gain from Israel significantly via collaborations following the historic Abraham Accords signed last year. I volunteered a few of my views on the matter to ZDNet’s Damian Radcliffe for his article on ‘how diplomacy is ushering in a new era for Middle East tech‘, which gathers opinion on the Accords impact on the technology sector from Bahrain, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the US.

I believe that the UAE’s new relationship with Israel, offers technology sectors in both countries enormous opportunities. As the UAE continues to put in policies and incentives to encourage home-grown innovation and attract global tech talent, it can now draw on some of the resources and expertise that have helped Israel to scale its startup ecosystem. Likewise, the growing number of UAE investors interested in early-stage venture capital deals, can learn a lot from their Israeli counterparts.

From the outset, the engagement of Israeli tech firms with the UAE has been enthusiastic, to say the least. Many in the UAE’s technology industry were contacted by dozens of Israeli technology companies in the weeks following the signing of the Abraham Accords. I was personally contacted by more than a hundred members of the Israeli technology sector in the 3-4 weeks following the Accords and conducted dozens of market briefings for startups, investors and technology exporters. We’ve since seen thousands of Israelis fly to the UAE, many of them also from its tech sector and startup ecosystem, not to mention a few high profile deals.

Beyond the initial ‘gold rush’, it remains to be seen how Israeli and UAE technology sectors will invest in each other, compete against one another and collaborate together. However, overall, it seems likely that UAE innovation plans will benefit from the additional technology focus, knowledge and investment inspired by the country’s new relations with Israel.

You can read Damian’s full article on the Abraham Accords impact on the Middle East tech sector here.


January 25, 2021
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Despite the economic pressures of the past few years and the disruption of the pandemic, there is so much going on in tech in the Middle East at the moment. So, there was no shortage of material for Damian Radcliffe’s annual Middle East technology predictions story in ZDnet, which quoted me and others from the region’s tech ecosystem on a wide variety of trends including 5G, emerging technologies, government investment, startups, smart cities, open data and cybersecurity.

Prior to the pandemic IDC forecast that investments in digital transformation and innovation will account for 30 percent of all IT spending in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META) by 2024, up from 18 percent in 2018. Meanwhile, it has predicted that government enterprise IT spending in META will top $8 billion in 2021.

During the past 12-18 months we have seen significant activity in several key areas of government spending, including digital transformation, creating Government Clouds, introducing open data policies and platforms, digital services and robotics. Then there was the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) announcement of the Kingdom’s National Strategy for Data & AI (NSDAI) in October, revealing plans to raise $20 billion in investment for data and AI initiatives.

My expectation is that some of the government digital platforms and initiatives that have been created over the past 18 months will support the launch of a variety of new initiatives, local and foreign investment, public-private sector partnerships and opportunities for startups during 2021.

You can read Damian’s full article on what 2021 means for tech in the Middle East here.


January 14, 2021
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It’s been a bumpy ride for GCC technology ecosystems, with plenty of budget cuts, job losses and, due to the onset of Covid-19, slowing venture capital activity. However, some of the region’s most ambitious government initiatives to-date have been put in place to accelerate innovation, talent and growth in the tech sector. Uptake of some technologies also seems to have spiked since the pandemic.

So, is the region’s tech sector growing or cooling off? It’s an interesting question and, as with many questions like this about industries, there’s no simple answer. WIRED Middle East asked me whether I was optimistic about the future of tech in the region. The short answer is that I am very optimistic, although the tech sector is not without its challenges.

It is true that much of the technology sector has been hit hard by the knock-on effect of lower oil prices on GCC IT spending, increase price competition and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on decision making, new projects and project spending. Multinationals and regional technology firms have cut budgets, including staffing and other expenses as a result. However, one really has to drill down to specific technologies, solutions and the current technology needs of customers in the region to fully understand what’s going on. All types of technology business are not contracting. In fact, far from it, some tech firms are growing fast and many of those are working with new emerging technologies for automation, data analytics, AI-powered digital services and other disruptive services and solutions.

There are also contradictory trends when looking at the impact of 2020’s turmoil on jobs and the region’s need to compete for the right tech talent. There are three key driving forces here shaping the region’s tech talent pool: 1) global trends creating new tech jobs and decreasing demand for tech jobs that are being obsoleted and/or impacted by automation, 2) the GCC’s belt-tightening of the past few years due to lower oil prices, forcing public and private sectors to be more cost-effective and 3) the unexpected consequences of Covid-19, which include the accelerated demand for some emerging technologies.

Along side the economic ups and downs, and the surprises brought about by the pandemic, there are the heavily funded innovation and technology initiatives that have been put in place by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. For example, the massive open data projects in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the recently announced $20 billion Saudi National Strategy for Data & AI (NSDAI), Abu Dhabi’s increasing investment in R&D, and numerous smart city and smart city services projects. We’ve also seen an upswing in the numbers of tech startups outside of the popular ecommerce, delivery, travel and transport segments.

However, the one change that I’ve noticed over the past few years, may be the crucial one for the GCC technology ecosystems. I believe that there has been a clear attitudinal change among GCC citizens themselves, that has helped to make technology a more attractive sector for jobs, entrepreneurship and investment. In years past, a traditional career in technology has been a safe government IT job, whereas today locals are joining the tech sector in larger numbers, there is a new generation of tech startups founded by GCC citizens and we’re starting to see more interest in startup venture capital investments from Gulf investors.

Huge, well thought through government tech initiatives, the recent acceleration of demand for emerging technologies and the increasing engagement of GCC nationals in the tech sector are the three top reasons why I believe there has never been a more exciting time for the region’s tech industry.

Read Ashleigh Stewart’s full article on WIRED Middle East.


December 30, 2019
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Will AI take your job? Of course not, but that’s hardly the right question.

The semantics used by the technology industry about AI and its impact on jobs have started to grate on me a bit. The future of work is changing faster than ever before and it will drive many new opportunities and new career paths. In the short term, the reality is that a lot of people will lose their jobs, but that’s something no technology leader wants to be quoted as saying, in particular when they could be holding forth on our bright AI-powered future.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said – a couple of years ago now – that AI will impact 100 percent of current jobs, which, of course, is now common sense. AI’s impact on jobs is also a complex subject and its dangerous to try to sum it up in one simple concept. However, by and large, that’s what many tech leaders are doing, with “AI won’t take your job” as the reassuring umbrella message that the whole drive towards AI adoption seems to fly under. The answer is both straightforward and misleading. No, AI won’t take your job, anymore than a gun will shoot you: that requires a human.

The fly in the tech industry’s ointment is that their customers are not always ‘on message’. Many large employers have already commented over the past year that one of the benefits that AI brings to them is the ability to do more with less staff, some even going further and stating plainly that the technologies are allowing them to cut volumes of staff.

There are now a growing number of studies that highlight huge changes in the number of current jobs that will be phased-out due to the introduction of automation. In October, a report on the banking sector from Wells Fargo & Co. estimated 200,000 job cuts across the US banking industry over the next decade, including many customer service functions. Often, the big numbers in such reports are necessarily ‘fuzzy’. Statistics often include jobs that employers will phase out by head-count freezes, jobs that will no longer be specified for new operations, plus actual redundancies.

Forecasts for the elimination of certain jobs are embraced by the technology industry as evidence that the nature of work is changing and that old jobs must die in order for new, technology-enabled jobs to be created. One can already see from Linkedin’s top emerging jobs lists for 2019, that specialist roles in artificial intelligence development, robotics, data science and data security are all fast-growing. This is the crux of the now commonplace – but, as yet, unsubstantiated – argument that AI will create more jobs than it eliminates.

How much of ‘the future’s so bright’ narrative is used by the tech industry to distract us from the here and now? On conference platforms all over the world, big tech typically urges employers to focus about how AI can enhance productivity, help define new business models and benefit customers, and not to simply save costs by replacing workers. However, for any business that aims to be competitive in our global economy, must look at ways to cut costs as well as ways to increase efficiencies. As more AI-powered solutions are developed that reduce the need for human workers, more jobs are cut.

Food delivery platform Zomato announced that it was laying off some 600 people in September, claiming that most of these jobs will be automated following continued investment in technology systems.

Earlier in the year budget airline AirAsia confirmed that it had closed nine call centres as a result of its AI chatbot customer service project. No redundancies were mentioned and it’s assumed that most, if not all, call centres were outsourced.

Banks all over the world have used automation to cut countless thousands of jobs over the past ten years and AI will allow them to cut thousands more.

Meanwhile, global economic analysis firm Oxford Economics estimates that automation will eliminate up to 20 million manufacturing jobs worldwide by 2030.

According to the 2019 Harvey Nash / KPMG CIO Survey, one third of CIOs say their companies plan to replace more than 20 percent of job roles with AI/automation within 5 years, although 69 percent also believe new job roles will compensate for those lost. Many agree that the new technology-powered job roles created will compensate for current jobs lost. This also, clearly, means different things to different people. A new data science role may sound great when you’re at college or, perhaps, already involved in digital data, but not so much if you’re a call centre agent with 10 years’ experience who’s just been let go.

So, to me at least, it seems disingenuous for technology leaders to hide behind technicalities, calling out warnings of job losses as a result of AI as being misinformed, unjustified or not presenting the entire picture. Cost savings are a powerful driver of AI adoption and, for many organisations, those savings will be made by cutting jobs. There’s room for the tech industry to be a little more honest about that.

This story first appeared on Linkedin.