Held at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center on February 23-26, 2025, this year’s Web Summit Qatar drew over 25,000 attendees — nearly twice as many as its first edition last year. By locking in Web Summit until 2028, Qatar makes one more step to cement its ambition to become a strategic gateway to the MENA region for global enterprises. Hosting high-profile events like these is indeed fast-tracking the Arabian Peninsula’s push toward becoming a sought-after business hotspot.
In brief, AI emerged as a silver lining in every conversation, panel discussion, and speaking session. Here’s a closer look at the areas where AI took the spotlight.
Big corporate AI tech trends and their integration into the business strategy
Ihab Foudeh, Vice President Microsoft, Middle East, Alexander Mann, Managing Director EMEA, Monetization Partnerships, Meta, and Steven Malony, Belkin shared their perspectives on the future of AI and the way it’s already adopted in Big Tech:
- Microsoft: Ihab Foudeh expressed pride in the rapid adoption and transformative impact of Microsoft Copilot across organizations, consumers, and Microsoft’s own operations. He attributes this success to enhanced productivity, enabled by a suite of services and tools that empower users to sustain growth without the need for continuous hiring, thereby reducing operational costs.
- Belkin: The company leverages AI extensively across its operations, from gaining better insights into downstream supply chains to accelerating product prototyping. Beyond internal efficiency gains, Belkin also delivers AI-powered consumer products, such as the Auto-Tracking Stand Pro.
- Meta: Alexander Mann of Meta emphasized the company’s substantial investment of over $65 billion in infrastructure and innovation. These investments concentrate on three strategic focuses:
- AI-powered advertising
- Large language model Llama
- AI virtual assistant Meta AI
The role of AI in marketing business process transformation
The panel discussion titled ‘Navigating the data gold rush in marketing’ led by Carla Zakhem-Hassan, Chief Marketing Officer at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications at IBM, revealed the opportunities of data-driven marketing in the numbers:
- J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.: Over 62% of JP Morgan’s employees are enrolled in the internal program called LLM Suite, where they are engaged to use the company’s internal ChatGPT-based ecosystem to spend the time on things that matter, “the higher order sort of activities.” Specifically, this gen AI tool serves as a ‘research analyst’ that aids in decision making. Thanks to it, the financial giant managed to cut the time to write their thought leadership content series by 17%.
- IBM: The company launched a two-week, company-wide challenge to create AI tools using their own platform, watsonX.ai. What does this have to do with marketing? Well, before the official release, more than 168,000 employees tested the product as real users. This helped iron out bugs and fine-tune the platform before launch.
Both panelists identified change management as the primary hurdle when implementing AI in marketing departments of large, less-agile organizations. They emphasized that big corporations could benefit significantly by adopting the nimble approaches of smaller teams, particularly their ability to make rapid decisions and freely experiment with new technologies.
Big, promising partnerships announced
On the sidelines of the summit, several agreements were signed, set to support the country’s economic growth, long-term tech-driven transformation, and global leadership in responsible AI adoption.
- Yono & Snoonu: Snoonu, Qatar’s fastest-growing all-in-one super app, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Yuno, the US-based payment orchestration platform to reinforce both companies’ commitment to innovation, security, and efficiency in digital transactions.
- Scale AI & MCIT: The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the frontier AI solutions provider, Scale AI, signed a strategic partnership agreement to drive Qatar’s digital transformation.
Events like this open doors to more than just networking and big, flashy booths. They’re the heart of transformative discussions. Open banking, digital payments, and RegTech adoption to streamline regulation — these are the forces making the MENA region more predictable for innovation. Our company is actively eyeing the local landscape, adapting to support local businesses and those looking to expand here with their IT initiatives.
— Maria Komendantova, *instinctools’ PR Lead
Stay tuned for more updates.
