AI ‘employees’ make their mark in the Gulf

April 4, 2025, 12:18 PM

Pc screen view, islamic woman dressed in national hijab talking with male colleague, chatting using virtual modern video conference application, communicating from home, enjoy distant conversation — Companies are increasingly adopting AI employees to help with tasks from writing presentations to content creation

AI advisers in the boardroom
Startups raising development capital
Public remains sceptical

From customer service to the C-suite, AI “employees” are climbing the corporate ladder in the Gulf as the technology behind them improves.

Regional wealth funds such as ADQ are now using AI “boardroom advisers” to help make decisions according to Middle East AI News, while startups are raising capital and launching so-called “AI employees”.

These are AI-powered chatbots equipped to work in what are called “digital ecosystems” to answer queries or generate work-related responses, which the technology website Tahawultech says “function as full-fledged digital workforce members”.

Bahrain’s Bank ABC launched its own AI employee, named Fatema, in 2019.

Since then, the underlying technology has come a long way, Bank ABC’s chief innovation officer, Yousif Almas, tells AGBI.

“The challenge before was language understanding and language generation. That problem has been largely solved now with generative AI,” Almas says.

Bank ABC’s use of an AI employee has focused on internal tasks, he says. Senior and junior employees use the bank’s AI employee for tasks such as creating job descriptions, building presentations and creating marketing content and materials.

A major technology company supplied Bank ABC with its large language model to integrate into Bank ABC systems, but the bank retains control over the sensitive data generated.

“We have control of the data, where the data goes,” Almas says.

Carrington Malin, an entrepreneur and consultant in AI and emerging technologies, says it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a distinction between traditional chatbots and an AI employee.

“What are now being marketed as ‘AI employees’ consist of a conversational interface – a chatbot or voicebot – and a platform that integrates other intelligent systems and data sources,” Malin says.

Despite some companies marketing the software as fully-fledged “employees” (Bank ABC’s Fatema has an employee number and a line manager, for example), the advantage of these AI employees over traditional chatbots is simply that they can “converse better and with users and execute more complex tasks,” Malin says.

The public is still sceptical of AI chatbots. A survey last year found that almost four out of five UAE consumers said they would not engage with a brand using AI services.

That is why, in line with Bank ABC’s approach, “the best use cases today are probably internal,” Malin says.

AI employees are part of a wider trend of automation of work, he argues. “The arrival of AI employees is really the first step on a new journey of innovation that will change the way we automate work.”