Who's Really Using AI? UAE Expert Says Turning Ideas Into Profits Is Key Challenge

(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Thousands of executives, founders and investors arriving at Ai Everything in Abu Dhabi this week will see no shortage of technology promising to transform healthcare, cities, energy and business. The harder question comes after the demonstration: will anyone actually use it?

AI experimentation has raced ahead of deployment across much of the corporate world. Deloitte found this year that only 25 per cent of organisations had moved at least 40 per cent of their AI pilots into production, despite expectations that the figure will rise rapidly.

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For Thomas Pramotedham, chief executive of Abu Dhabi-based Presight, the problem is increasingly less about whether someone can build an impressive AI system and more about whether they can persuade an organisation to change around it.“You can have a great idea, but if you've not driven adoption, that means you have not gotten a way to communicate the idea to someone who would take change,” he told Khaleej Times.“Change may be the hardest.”

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That problem sat behind Presight's Future Forum on Monday, held one day before Ai Everything. Rather than bringing only startups and investors together, the gathering placed founders in front of potential customers, technology companies, government entities and capital providers, while launching a new platform called FutureSight aimed at taking technologies from discovery towards investment, deployment and commercial scale.

After the demo

Presight received 376 applications from 62 countries before selecting 12 companies working across areas including healthcare, AI safety, critical infrastructure, smart cities and climate intelligence.

But Pramotedham said the companies that stood out were not simply those with interesting ideas or high valuations.“Today it's very difficult to differentiate the noise and the signal,” he said.

Presight looked closely at whether companies already had users, credible customers and evidence that somebody was willing to pay for and integrate their technology. Among the companies presented at the forum were systems for predicting deterioration in hospital patients, detecting methane from satellite and aerial data, inspecting infrastructure with drones and controlling risks in enterprise AI systems.

Pramotedham recalled a discussion in which an investor was asked how a founder should use a 60-second pitch. The advice was to spend roughly 10 seconds on the idea and 50 seconds on the founder.

The reasoning, he said, was that the idea would inevitably change. Customers would react differently than expected, problems would emerge and the founder would need to steer the company through them.

That challenge reflects a much wider problem in AI. McKinsey reported last week that 89 per cent of organisations now use AI regularly in at least one business function, yet only about 6 per cent qualify as high performers attributing significant financial impact to it.

The technology is spreading. Transforming organisations around it is taking longer.

From investment to customer

That is where Abu Dhabi is trying to build another layer of its AI ecosystem. The capital is already substantial. So is the computing infrastructure. But the city is increasingly trying to shorten the distance between a technology company, a large customer and the institutions needed to put the product into use.

Hub71 provides one indication of that shift. Startups in its Abu Dhabi ecosystem had raised more than $2.7 billion by the end of 2025 and generated $1.5 billion in revenue. More relevant to commercialisation, they signed corporate deals worth $244 million between 2022 and 2025.

FutureSight is Presight's attempt to work further along that chain. The company says the platform expands on its earlier accelerator model by connecting emerging companies not only with capital but with customers, Presight's own business and its wider network.

Pramotedham said speed also requires accepting that Abu Dhabi does not need to build every capability itself.“You can always build your own capability,” he said.“But you can't grow as fast as you need to in today's world, where the AI revolution is growing so quickly. So you need to partner and share.”

“Questions that are impacting us can't wait for infrastructure to be built. You need to solve it today with the best, most accessible, most trusted, most applicable AI solutions.”

Can a small market become a launchpad?

There is an obvious limitation. The UAE is not a consumer market on the scale of the United States, China or India. Pramotedham argues that its value lies elsewhere.

“UAE is not just a single market. UAE is a catalyst,” he said, describing it as a potential route into the GCC, Central Asia and other international markets.

Whether that model works will be measured less by how many founders attend events in Abu Dhabi than what happens afterwards.

A meeting has to become a pilot. A pilot has to become procurement. The product has to survive integration, regulation and employees changing how they work. Then a UAE customer has to become evidence strong enough to win another customer somewhere else.

Abu Dhabi already has much of the capital and computing infrastructure behind the AI boom. Its next wager is that customers willing to adopt new technology can become an advantage too.

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