UAE firms deepen AI bets as spending jumps

UAE businesses are sharply increasing their use of artificial intelligence to cut costs, raise output and strengthen resilience, with AI-related spending rising 521 per cent over the past 13 months, according to a new market snapshot based on corporate payment data. The findings point to a shift from trial use to operational deployment, particularly among smaller businesses seeking quicker productivity gains in a more uncertain regional and global environment.

The report, published by Dubai-based spend management company Pemo, draws on aggregated and anonymised transactions from more than 6,000 businesses and more than AED 1.4 billion in annual spend. It says 12 per cent of UAE businesses in the sample are actively using AI tools, with adoption accelerating strongly in late 2025 and carrying into 2026. October to December 2025 recorded three times as many first-time AI adopters as any quarter in 2024, suggesting a break from experimentation towards steadier investment.

That change matters because it offers one of the clearer real-time pictures yet of how firms are spending on AI in the UAE, a market where official policy has pushed digital transformation for years but where granular private-sector adoption data has often been harder to pin down. The UAE’s Digital Economy Strategy aims to raise the sector’s contribution to GDP from 9.7 per cent in 2022 to 19.4 per cent within a decade, while the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031 places AI at the centre of competitiveness, government performance and future growth.

What stands out in the new figures is the role of smaller firms. Pemo said small and medium-sized businesses accounted for 59 per cent of total AI spend, even though larger companies spent more on average per business. Mid-sized firms were among the heaviest users by transaction frequency, indicating that the strongest momentum may be coming from companies agile enough to deploy tools quickly but large enough to spread them across teams.

Ayham Gorani, Pemo’s co-founder and chief executive, said businesses were becoming more selective about where AI delivered immediate value, with the focus on “improving efficiency, reducing friction in day-to-day operations and enabling teams to move faster without adding complexity”. He said organisations were increasingly trying to “do more with less”, and that visible returns were helping adoption spread from isolated tools into broader use across operations.

The report also suggests that most companies are still in the early stages of adoption. Nearly two-thirds of AI-using businesses rely on a single tool, while only 37 per cent use two or more. That implies the headline jump in spending, while striking, does not yet amount to full-scale transformation across the corporate sector. Instead, the pattern appears to show many firms moving first into narrow applications such as workflow automation, software development, content generation and task management before committing to deeper, organisation-wide change.

That reading fits the broader international debate around AI adoption. The IMF said in February that AI could lift global productivity by as much as 0.8 percentage points a year if countries put the right policies in place, while also warning that gains will depend on institutions, regulation, infrastructure and workforce readiness. In its 2025 consultation on the UAE, the fund noted the authorities’ emphasis on AI as a driver of productivity and diversification in non-hydrocarbon sectors.

There are, however, limits to what the Pemo dataset can show. Because it is built from confirmed card and bill-pay transactions, it captures paid AI usage visible in corporate spending flows rather than the full range of enterprise adoption. It may miss internally developed systems, bundled software contracts, or AI features embedded in wider technology platforms. That means the figures are best read as a strong signal of commercial buying behaviour, not a complete census of every AI deployment in the country.