Qatar’s cybersecurity vision is proactive by design. As AI reshapes both attack and defense, the 2027 IT Security Summit, Qatar arms CISOs to secure identity, defend against AI-driven threats, quantum attacks and build the resilience Qatar’s National Cyber Security Strategy demands.
Explore how Qatar’s CISOs and IT security practitioners must evolve their strategies as agentic AI, cloud migration, and the National Cyber Security Strategy reshape the threat landscape. Gain a clear view of the architectural, operational, and governance shifts needed to secure a resilient digital Qatar.
Trust in the Age of Autonomous AI
Securing AI agents and autonomous systems with governance controls.
The Next Cyber Arms Race
How AI is reshaping cyber defense against advanced automated threats.
Identity at the Center of Digital Security
Identity as the core security layer across hybrid digital ecosystems.
Preparing for the Post-Quantum Security Era
Preparing enterprises for quantum-safe security and data protection.
Cyber Resilience for the Connected Enterprise
Strengthening cyber resilience, recovery and operational continuity.
Security, Sovereignty, and Digital Trust
Navigating AI governance, data sovereignty, and global security risks.
Securing the Digital Supply Chain
Managing supply chain risk through visibility, trust, and assurance.
Cyber Risk, Governance, and Boardroom Priorities
Aligning cybersecurity with business resilience and executive risk.
By 2028 40% of large enterprises in the META region will have a dedicated budget for GenAI Fraud Defense
Source: Worldwide Security Spending Guide, META, 2026
Associate Research Director (META)
IDC
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Associate Research Director (META)
IDC
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As AI agents gain autonomy to access data, make decisions, and act across enterprise systems, they introduce a new and rapidly expanding attack surface that traditional security models weren’t built to handle. This keynote draws on IDC research to outline how security leaders can govern agent identities, enforce guardrails, and build resilient architectures that let organizations scale agentic AI with confidence.
Qatar-specific intelligence
IDC research grounded in Qatar’s threat landscape and CISO investment data.
A peer network built for Qatar
Connect with CISOs from Qatar’s banking, energy, and government sectors.
Decisions, not just discussions
See where to invest and how to align security with Qatar’s growth agenda.
Frameworks you can apply now
Take home approaches for resilience, identity, and AI security governance.
Cyber and physical threats now converge across the Gulf. IDC’s ResOps framework shows how enterprises, including in Qatar, can stay operational when everything fails at once.
How conflict escalation in the region is reshaping IT spending, cloud resilience, and cybersecurity investment across the Gulf, including Qatar.
As AI agents gain access to enterprise systems, security and governance become as important as capability, a critical lesson for Qatar’s CISOs building agentic security programs.
Saudi Arabia’s $100 billion Project Transcendence is shifting from a broad investment vision to a more targeted AI and data center strategy. Enterprise pressure to keep pace is growing. The AI Leadership Summit & Awards 2027 brings together business and technology leaders to build the governance, operating models, and investment discipline to capture that opportunity
AI spending in Saudi Arabia is set to grow nearly fivefold by 2029. But only half of Saudi organizations consider themselves ready to take full advantage of AI. The gap between investment and impact is where leaders need a framework. The AI Leadership Summit is built for the executives closing that gap. What you will take away:
Board-Led AI Strategies
Defining enterprise direction, investment priorities and competitive advantage in the AI era.
Innovation vs Productivity
Balancing new revenue creation with substantial revenue-per-employee gains.
Organizational Transformation in the AI Era
Transforming organizational models for human + AI collaboration.
The Autonomous Enterprise
Moving from AI-assisted processes to autonomous, agent-driven enterprise operations
Enterprise Architecture for the AI Era
Evolving the tech stack with a guiding business architecture.
AI-Enabled Operating Models
Redesigning workflows, decision-making and execution for the AI era.
Trust at Enterprise Scale
Building scalable governance, oversight and transparency into enterprise AI systems.
Measuring AI ROI at Enterprise Scale
Reshaping how productivity is measured across every Line of Business.
By 2028 AI spending across the Middle East and Africa will reach $25.6 billion, growing at 35% CAGR
Sources: IDC’s Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending Guide — Forecast 2025 (August); IDC’s AI Tech Buyer Survey 2025, KSA (n = 56)
Associate Research Director, Artificial Intelligence (META)
IDC
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In his role as associate research director for IT services and software across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META), Melih drives IDC’s regional research and consulting engagements in the areas of IT services, Cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and intelligent automation.
He first joined IDC in 2012 as a senior research analyst located out of IDC’s Istanbul office, with various responsibilities for the firm’s IT services, cloud computing, software, and telecom domains — both in Turkey and across the wider META region. Between 2016 and 2021, Melih headed the international marketing and investor relations practice at P.I. Works, a global automation and AI software vendor that serves telecom operators.
Now back at IDC, Melih is leveraging his vast experience in the IT services, cloud, software, and telecommunications domains to advise clients on go-to-market strategies, technology marketing and promotion activities, and market trends analysis. He is also driving a wide variety of research and consulting projects across the META region.
Melih has also previously served as enterprise channel and marketing manager at Nortel Turkey and as business development and strategy manager at Netaş, one of the leading systems integrators in Turkey and a former Nortel subsidiary. He possesses a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and received his MBA from Esslingen University of Applied Sciences in Germany. He has worked as a business development specialist at HP and wrote his MBA thesis for the company, covering European retail channel trends and winning strategies for channel businesses.
Set the Saudi AI Strategy
Build an investment thesis aligned to Vision 2030 and SDAIA priorities, not just global best practice.
Govern with Discipline
Navigate PDPL, CITC mandates, and SAMA regulations while maintaining the velocity Saudi enterprises need.
Quantify the Value
Move beyond pilot metrics. Translate AI investment into measurable revenue-per-employee gains across Saudi’s key sectors: energy, finance, and government.
Lead the Change
Build AI talent pipelines, Saudization-compatible operating models, and the culture to sustain an AI-Fueled Enterprise.
How leaders move beyond AI experimentation to enterprise-wide orchestration, and what it takes to turn fragmented pilots into operational impact in the agentic economy.
Agentic AI will enhance the capabilities of more than 40% of enterprise applications by 2027. How IT and business leaders are governing, costing and scaling the shift.
The CIO is now the chief orchestrator of the intelligent enterprise. The ten IDC predictions defining the agentic, quantum-aware and edge-intelligent enterprise.
Karien Bornheim
CEO and Founder
Footprint Africa Business Solutions (FABS)
Africa’s AI moment has arrived faster than most boardrooms expected. Pilots are becoming production systems. Yet governance and security are often the last items on the agenda, not the first.
This is a mistake we cannot afford.
Too many organisations treat AI governance as paperwork rather than infrastructure. They assume a policy document is protection. It is not. Real governance means knowing where your data lives, who can access your models and whether your decisions can be audited when a regulator asks. Mauritius raised that bar in April 2026 with its National AI Strategy and FAIR Guidelines, built on Fairness, Accountability, Inclusiveness and Responsibility, applied across the entire AI lifecycle, from design through to decommissioning. They are not yet binding but they are built with a clear path towards becoming so and vendor neutral by design, meaning imported AI tools are held to the same standard as anything built locally. Separately, financial institutions already carry sharper obligations. Since 2021, FSC licensees offering AI-enabled advisory services, must maintain board-level oversight of their algorithms.
The threat landscape has shifted just as quickly. Internally, staff are pasting client data into public AI tools without a second thought. It does not look like a breach. It feels like productivity. Many are going further by quietly building their own AI agents to handle parts of their job, with no oversight, no access controls and no record of what data those agents can reach. Externally, attackers are using the same technology to accelerate reconnaissance and sharpen social engineering. Voice cloning and AI-written phishing have made “spot the typo” training obsolete overnight.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Skills are concentrated in a handful of hubs. Regulatory maturity varies from one African jurisdiction to the next. A framework built for Mauritius will not automatically work in Rwanda, Kenya or any of the other African markets, which is particularly important for Mauritian based pan-African companies.
This is precisely the gap Footprint Africa Business Solutions (FABS) closes. Across 54 African markets, we help organisations put governance into practice, not just on paper. Compliance documentation with a managed and proven secure and resilient infrastructure are how audit-readiness becomes real rather than aspirational. We have done this for regulators and many other institutions across the African continent and we understand that a framework built for one jurisdiction rarely fits another unchanged.
The organisations that thrive will not be the fastest. They will be the ones building resilience alongside ambition, with the right partner beside them. AI will reward the prepared and expose the rest.
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As Saudi Arabia accelerates its Vision 2030 digital government transformation, public sector leaders face a dual challenge: delivering AI-powered citizen services while strictly managing IT budgets and infrastructure overhead.
IDC projects that AI spending in Saudi Arabia will grow to USD 7.83 billion by 2029, a 30.3% CAGR, yet only half of Saudi organizations consider themselves well-prepared for AI, with data foundations, skills gaps, and governance cited as the top barriers.
Achieving the balance Vision 2030 demands requires shifting away from fragmented legacy databases toward consolidated, modern architectures. IDC’s own regional research names fragmented data estates as the most cited hurdle to production-grade AI in the Middle East.
Join senior public sector leaders for an exclusive executive roundtable exploring how government entities can optimize total cost of ownership and modernize data infrastructure.
The discussion will cover strategic approaches to consolidating database stacks, making the most of cloud infrastructure, and applying modern AI-ready data platforms to drive operational efficiency, reduce data sprawl, and deliver scalable AI initiatives cost-effectively.
IDC projects Saudi Arabia’s AI spending will nearly triple by 2029, and every additional workload adds another data source that has to be secured, synced, and paid for unless agencies consolidate first.
Fragmented legacy databases inflate licensing, integration, and maintenance costs long before a new AI project ever launches. Learn why government leaders treat total cost of ownership as a starting requirement for any new citizen service.
Every additional database stack run by an agency adds a step between a citizen’s request and the answer. Explore why consolidating onto a smaller number of modern, cloud-ready platforms is critical.
Saudi data residency and sovereignty requirements do not pause while agencies modernize. The leaders furthest along build for governance and compliance requirements while cutting infrastructure overhead, rather than treating the two as separate projects.
IDC presents current research on META public sector AI and digital transformation spending.
Melih Murat
Associate Research Director, Artificial Intelligence (META), IDC
As organisations navigate increasingly complex data environments, fragmented data and siloed systems can drive up costs, create inefficiencies, and limit AI readiness. This session will explore how an AI Data Plane can unify disparate data sources, simplify data management, and reduce data sprawl. Discover how Couchbase helps organisations optimise their data architecture, lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and build a scalable foundation for AI-driven innovation.
Ettore Cremonesi
Senior Director, Solutions Engineering EMEA, Couchbase
As governments accelerate AI adoption, building scalable and cost-efficient cloud infrastructure is essential to support growing workloads while maintaining security, compliance, and operational efficiency. This session will explore how AWS enables government organisations to modernise their cloud infrastructure, optimise costs, and scale AI capabilities securely. Discover practical strategies for building a resilient, future-ready cloud foundation that can support AI innovation at scale.
A senior public sector panel on closing Saudi Arabia’s AI readiness gap: the budget, governance, and data decisions standing between Vision 2030’s AI ambition and outcomes leaders can tangibly measure.
Melih Murat
Associate Research Director, Artificial Intelligence (META), IDC
Ettore Cremonesi
Senior Director, Solutions Engineering EMEA, Couchbase
Associate Research Director, Artificial Intelligence (META)
IDC
Read bio
In his role as associate research director for IT services and software across the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META), Melih drives IDC’s regional research and consulting engagements in the areas of IT services, Cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and intelligent automation.
He first joined IDC in 2012 as a senior research analyst located out of IDC’s Istanbul office, with various responsibilities for the firm’s IT services, cloud computing, software, and telecom domains — both in Turkey and across the wider META region. Between 2016 and 2021, Melih headed the international marketing and investor relations practice at P.I. Works, a global automation and AI software vendor that serves telecom operators.
Now back at IDC, Melih is leveraging his vast experience in the IT services, cloud, software, and telecommunications domains to advise clients on go-to-market strategies, technology marketing and promotion activities, and market trends analysis. He is also driving a wide variety of research and consulting projects across the META region.
Melih has also previously served as enterprise channel and marketing manager at Nortel Turkey and as business development and strategy manager at Netaş, one of the leading systems integrators in Turkey and a former Nortel subsidiary. He possesses a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and received his MBA from Esslingen University of Applied Sciences in Germany. He has worked as a business development specialist at HP and wrote his MBA thesis for the company, covering European retail channel trends and winning strategies for channel businesses.
A senior public sector panel on closing Saudi Arabia’s AI readiness gap: the budget, governance, and data decisions standing between Vision 2030’s AI ambition and outcomes leaders can tangibly measure.
IDC presents current research on META public sector AI and digital transformation spending.
Senior Director, Solutions Engineering EMEA
Couchbase
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A senior public sector panel on closing Saudi Arabia’s AI readiness gap: the budget, governance, and data decisions standing between Vision 2030’s AI ambition and outcomes leaders can tangibly measure.
As organisations navigate increasingly complex data environments, fragmented data and siloed systems can drive up costs, create inefficiencies, and limit AI readiness. This session will explore how an AI Data Plane can unify disparate data sources, simplify data management, and reduce data sprawl. Discover how Couchbase helps organisations optimise their data architecture, lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and build a scalable foundation for AI-driven innovation.
Couchbase, the operational data platform for AI, empowers businesses to succeed by bringing data to life in new ways. Major market-leading companies rely on Couchbase for mission critical operational, analytical, mobile and AI workloads. Built to replace legacy infrastructure and fragmented data services, Couchbase empowers enterprises with a unified platform architected for performance, flexibility and global scale.
With Couchbase, organizations bring their data to life, launching game-changing customer experiences, exploring the limitless potential of AI, and seamlessly extending applications from the cloud to the edge and beyond. Couchbase’s AI-ready technology and enterprise partnership model eliminate complexity and reduce total cost of ownership, enabling teams to stay agile, innovative and secure.
Couchbase believes data should never slow you down, but act as the foundation for your next breakthrough. Discover why Couchbase is trusted to help the world’s biggest players scale, move fast and stay resilient, no matter what’s next on their roadmap.
Cloud4c
Enterprise AI is crossing an important threshold. Intelligence that once sat alongside employees is beginning to enter the operating fabric of the enterprise: observing events, invoking applications, coordinating workflows, resolving incidents, and increasingly making decisions and taking autonomous action at unprecedented speed and scale.
This changes the modernization equation. An AI assistant can work around fragmented foundations. An autonomous agent cannot. As agentic exposure increases, every weakness in the enterprise core, from disconnected applications and unreliable data to excessive permissions and poor observability, can directly affect an automated outcome.
This places a new agentic AI-focused readiness and modernization imperative around five mission-critical dimensions, the pillars to an enterprise operating ecosystem: Applications, Business Outcomes, Compute, Data, and Embedded Security. This now defines the operating core of the agentic enterprise.
Applications can no longer remain operating in fragmented systems connected through manual hand-offs. Agentic operations require API-first architectures, integration fabrics, observability, standardized runbooks and orchestration so intelligence can move securely across processes. Business outcomes must determine where autonomy is valuable and where human judgment must remain in control.
Compute decisions also become more nuanced. The most capable AI model is not necessarily the right model for every task. Performance, latency, context, sovereignty and economics will increasingly drive dynamic model and workload placement. This creates a new Agent FinOps discipline: continuously matching business processes to the models and infrastructure that deliver the required outcome at an appropriate cost and risk profile.
Data must similarly become actionable and agent-ready, not merely available. Agents require unified enterprise data foundations with trusted context, governed retrieval, lineage and policy-aware access before information enters prompts, RAG pipelines or automated decisions.
This is giving rise to another layer of enterprise intelligence architecture: AI Studios and agent factories that industrialize how agents are built, tested, deployed and continuously evaluated, supported by an agentic control plane governing identities, model routing, permissions, tool access, consumption, observability and auditability.
Embedded security becomes fundamental because autonomy increases the consequence of misplaced trust. Zero Trust, non-human identity governance, continuous exposure management and policy-gated remediation must secure not only infrastructure, but the very actions agents are authorized to perform.
For Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 ambitions, the implication is significant: scaling intelligence across critical and regulated sectors will require sovereignty, resilience and governance to advance at the same pace as autonomy.
The agentic enterprise will not be defined by how many agents it deploys, but by how confidently its core can allow them to act and deliver impact in sync.
Hasan Reyhanoğlu
Information Security & Risk Management Director
Softtech
Kademeli güvenlik her zaman önemliydi. Ancak yapay zekâ aklıyla desteklenen saldırılar hızlandı, ölçeklendi, kişiselleşti ve çok daha inandırıcı hâle geldi. Bu nedenle kademeli güvenliğin önemi bugün bambaşka bir boyuta taşındı. Üstelik konu artık yalnızca bir bilgi güvenliği meselesi değil; iş yapış biçimi ve strateji meselesi. Güvenlik, her iş ve projede o işe özgü riskler gözetilerek, tüm katmanlarıyla daha tasarım aşamasında konumlandırılmalı. Bunu yaptıysan direncini ciddi ölçüde artırdın. Yapmadıysan, geçmiş olsun.
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Egyptian enterprises spent the last decade adding applications faster than they could integrate them. [IDC stat needed: regional figure on application sprawl, IT spend on integration, or share of IT budget spent on maintenance] The result is duplicate cost, growing integration complexity, and pressure on technical talent that is already scarce. All three problems trace back to the same cause: an estate that has grown faster than IT can run it.
IDC and Zoho are hosting a closed-door roundtable in Cairo for senior CIOs and IT leaders from Egypt’s largest enterprises to examine what a leaner estate actually removes: duplicate cost, operational complexity, and the talent strain that comes with running dozens of disconnected systems, cloud and AI initiatives included.
Melih Murat
Associate Research Director, Artificial Intelligence (META), IDC
Amir Hanna Nosseir
Business Development Manager, MEA, Zoho
For more than 25 years, Zoho has been committed to building software and technology that help businesses excel. From small companies to large organizations, more than 130 million users worldwide rely on Zoho to get work done. Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 18,000 employees. Its privacy-first approach, long-term thinking, deep engineering focus, and customer-centric philosophy make it one of the world’s most prolific technology companies. Headquartered in Chennai, India, Zoho has additional offices in the United States, Japan, China, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. For more information, visit www.zoho.com
Corniche Room
1089 Nile Corniche, Qasr El Nil, Cairo Governorate 11519, Egypt
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Saudi enterprises are setting ambitious AI goals: faster innovation, enterprise-wide scale, and stronger
governance over how AI gets used. IDC’s research across the Middle East shows that 43% of organizations say pursuing those goals has directly accelerated their move to cloud, and 24% have already rewritten their cloud strategy specifically to keep pace with AI.
IDC and NTT DATA are hosting a roundtable for CIOs in Riyadh on October 12, centered on the same question IDC posed to enterprises across the region: what really determines the progress and success of an enterprise’s AI strategy?
IDC’s own research points CIOs toward the decisions that actually determine that: where will AI run, can the infrastructure support it, is it resilient and compliant, can it operate at scale, and can the organization afford it sustainably. Join us as we unpack some of the most critical decisions that define the AI roadmap for Saudi enterprises.
AI ambition is setting the pace for cloud decisions right now. For Saudi enterprises, that
means the cloud strategy gets built around what AI needs, not the other way around.
Legacy applications are the quiet blocker on most AI roadmaps. Many enterprises hold onto them to avoid disrupting the business, but an AI roadmap that’s serious about scale has to deal with modernization first.
Sovereignty isn’t a policy checkbox anymore. It’s a design decision built into the cloud architecture from the start, especially as geopolitics increasingly shapes where data and workloads can sit.
Getting the AI right also means getting disciplined about which parts of cloud actually deserve the investment.
Saudi AI roadmaps are ambitious; scaling them is a challenge. Drawing on IDC research, this keynote maps the gap between ambition and production, and the five cloud decisions that close it: where AI runs, what infrastructure it needs, how sovereignty and resilience are designed in, how it operates at scale, and how its cost stays under control.
Jebin George
Senior Research Manager, Cloud and Datacenter Services, IDC
As Saudi enterprises move AI from ambition to production, the cloud strategy gets built around what AI needs. This session unpacks the decisions that make that real in the Kingdom – where AI runs, how sovereignty and resilience are designed in, and the foundation that turns infrastructure into AI-ready capability.
Faisal Banaeamah
Senior Partner Solutions Architect, MENAT, AWS
What happens after an organization successfully migrates its workloads to the cloud? This session challenges the traditional definition of cloud success and explores why migration should be viewed as the starting point rather than the destination. Through practical scenarios, we will examine how organizations can move from migration to modernization, data-driven applications, generative AI, and agentic workloads. Attendees will learn how to rethink their cloud journey, identify opportunities beyond infrastructure migration, and connect cloud foundations to measurable business transformation.
Mahmoud Elzayyat
Sales Manager, NTT DATA
Bassel Al Annan
Pre-Sales Manager, NTT DATA
Saudi CIOs are past asking whether to move to AI on cloud- sovereignty rules, national AI ambitions, and rising competitive pressure have made this a board-level decision. This session pairs IDC’s market perspective with NTT DATA’s delivery perspective to unpack what’s really driving the call.
Jebin George
Senior Research Manager, Cloud and Datacenter Services, IDC
Mahmoud Elzayyat
Sales Manager, NTT DATA
Bassel Al Annan
Pre-Sales Manager, NTT DATA
Faisal Banaeamah
Senior Partner Solutions Architect, MENAT, AWS
Senior Research Manager, Cloud and Datacenter Services
IDC
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Jebin George is part of IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure global research domain. He focuses on cloud, datacenter, and infrastructure adoption trends across the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa, with particular emphasis on how cloud strategies are evolving in the era of AI and increasing digital sovereignty requirements. His research provides strategic guidance to hyperscalers, telecom operators, system integrators, and enterprise CIOs as they navigate hybrid multicloud adoption, AI-driven infrastructure modernization, and sovereign cloud frameworks.
Jebin brings 20 years of technology market research experience, including 16 years with IDC Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa. Throughout his tenure, he has led syndicated research, custom consulting engagements, and executive advisory initiatives focused on the evolution of the cloud market, hyperscaler ecosystems, and enterprise digital transformation strategies. Prior to IDC, he worked with SunTec Business Solutions, where he supported global market research and consulting initiatives for international ICT markets.
Saudi CIOs are past asking whether to move to AI on cloud- sovereignty rules, national AI ambitions, and rising competitive pressure have made this a board-level decision. This session pairs IDC’s market perspective with NTT DATA’s delivery perspective to unpack what’s really driving the call.
Saudi AI roadmaps are ambitious; scaling them is a challenge. Drawing on IDC research, this keynote maps the gap between ambition and production, and the five cloud decisions that close it: where AI runs, what infrastructure it needs, how sovereignty and resilience are designed in, how it operates at scale, and how its cost stays under control.
Sales Manager
NTT DATA
Read bio
Saudi CIOs are past asking whether to move to AI on cloud- sovereignty rules, national AI ambitions, and rising competitive pressure have made this a board-level decision. This session pairs IDC’s market perspective with NTT DATA’s delivery perspective to unpack what’s really driving the call.
What happens after an organization successfully migrates its workloads to the cloud? This session challenges the traditional definition of cloud success and explores why migration should be viewed as the starting point rather than the destination. Through practical scenarios, we will examine how organizations can move from migration to modernization, data-driven applications, generative AI, and agentic workloads. Attendees will learn how to rethink their cloud journey, identify opportunities beyond infrastructure migration, and connect cloud foundations to measurable business transformation.
Pre-Sales Manager
NTT DATA
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Bassel Al Annan is a cloud and AI leader focused on helping organizations accelerate digital transformation and unlock business value through emerging technologies.
Saudi CIOs are past asking whether to move to AI on cloud- sovereignty rules, national AI ambitions, and rising competitive pressure have made this a board-level decision. This session pairs IDC’s market perspective with NTT DATA’s delivery perspective to unpack what’s really driving the call.
What happens after an organization successfully migrates its workloads to the cloud? This session challenges the traditional definition of cloud success and explores why migration should be viewed as the starting point rather than the destination. Through practical scenarios, we will examine how organizations can move from migration to modernization, data-driven applications, generative AI, and agentic workloads. Attendees will learn how to rethink their cloud journey, identify opportunities beyond infrastructure migration, and connect cloud foundations to measurable business transformation.
Senior Partner Solutions Architect, MENAT
AWS
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Faisal Banaeamah is Sr. Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in MENAT. He enables local strategic partners to build and scale cloud-native and AI-powered solutions that accelerate customers’ digital transformation goals. Previously at Amazon Alexa, he contributed to the Arabic locale launch as Sr. Solutions Architect. In his two decades of experience, he has built and delivered digital transformation strategies specializing in solutions architecture, system integrations, and modernizations. His technical expertise spans cloud computing, integration, databases, NoSQL, APIs, microservices, containers, DevOps, and at-scale solution architecture. Faisal holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Software Engineering from KFUPM, Saudi Arabia.
As Saudi enterprises move AI from ambition to production, the cloud strategy gets built around what AI needs. This session unpacks the decisions that make that real in the Kingdom – where AI runs, how sovereignty and resilience are designed in, and the foundation that turns infrastructure into AI-ready capability.
Saudi CIOs are past asking whether to move to AI on cloud- sovereignty rules, national AI ambitions, and rising competitive pressure have made this a board-level decision. This session pairs IDC’s market perspective with NTT DATA’s delivery perspective to unpack what’s really driving the call.
NTT DATA is a $30+ billion business and technology services leader in AI and digital infrastructure. We accelerate client success and positively impact society through responsible innovation. As a Global Top Employer, we have experts in more than 70 countries. NTT DATA is part of NTT Group.
Privacy Policy: https://www.nttdata.com/global/en/info/privacy-statement
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 123 Availability Zones within 39 geographic regions, with announced plans for 7 more Availability Zones and 2 more AWS Regions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Chile. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.
Privacy Policy: https://aws.amazon.com/privacy/
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Your communication platform is no longer just where conversations happen. It’s becoming the intelligent
execution engine where work gets done, actions get triggered, and increasingly, customer and user experience are shaped. AI is what’s making this possible, moving from assistive to autonomous, now able to execute multistep work rather than just summarize or assist.
By 2027, IDC expects 60% of organizations to manage multiagent experiences that span multiple channels, applications, and suppliers, enabling more seamless and context-rich experiences.
IDC and Zoom are hosting an exclusive roundtable for senior IT decision makers in Saudi Arabia to understand what this shift demands of your organization: how your platform strategy, customer experience approach, and governance decisions need to evolve as AI takes on more of the work.
These sessions focus on delivering a clearer view of the decisions ahead, grounded in IDC research, and the chance to compare notes directly with peers already navigating the same shift.
Communication platforms are moving past hosting meetings and messages. They’re becoming the layer that triggers work and drives outcomes, and that changes what you should expect from yours.
AI is moving from assisting work to executing it. Get a clear read on where your organization stands today, and what preparing for that shift actually involves.
The platforms pulling ahead are the ones connecting internal automation directly to customer experience, not treating the two as separate investments. See what that integration looks like in practice.
As platforms take on more autonomous action, governance and security become as important as capability. The same goes for industry fit: the strongest platforms pair vertical-specific workflows with real interoperability across your stack, not a trade-off between the two.
We have moved past the “Great Implementation.” As we enter 2026, the global enterprise has reached a critical inflection point where the sheer volume of data, the complexity of multi-cloud ecosystems, and the velocity of agentic AI have outpaced traditional human management. The mandate for the IT executives has fundamentally shifted: it is no longer about managing technology, but about architecting autonomy.
Eren Eser
Associate Research Director, Türkiye, IDC
AI used to play a supporting role- drafting, summarizing, answering on the side. That’s changing. Leading enterprises are moving AI from the sidelines to the center, powering core workflows instead of assisting around their edges. This keynote explores where the opportunity is moving, and what it takes to help enterprises move from experimenting with AI to running on it.
Mohannad Al Kalash
Vice President of Zoom for the Middle East, Türkiye, Africa and Pakistan (METAP), Zoom
AI is transforming meetings from bounded events into continuous, intelligent workflows- capturing decisions, driving follow-ups, and extending collaboration long after the call ends. This panel explores what virtual experience means in an AI-first world: balancing automation with human connection, rethinking meeting culture, and preparing teams for a future where “the meeting” is just one touchpoint in an ongoing, AI-augmented process.
Eren Eser
Associate Research Director, Türkiye, IDC
Mohannad Al Kalash
Vice President of Zoom for the Middle East, Türkiye, Africa and Pakistan (METAP), Zoom
Wael Almarzouki
General Manager for Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Zoom
Associate Research Director, Türkiye
IDC
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Eren is a seasoned analyst with 20+ years of experience in the ICT sector. He directs all IDC ICT research and consulting engagements in Türkiye, and all sustainability research and consulting projects across the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META).
Based in Istanbul, Eren has been involved in projects ranging from market forecasts to strategic consulting engagements on market entry, competitive analysis, go-to-market strategies, technology marketing, and end-user studies. Eren’s vast experience in the IT services, cloud, software, and telecommunications domains helps IDC clients understand the impact of technology-enabled, sustainable transformation processes in the context of sustainable digital business strategies, operations, products, and services. In addition to his research and consulting activities, Eren is a speaker at industry events.
Prior to joining IDC in 2017, Eren spent more than a decade in IT industry roles spanning portfolio management, channel and business development, pricing, and software development at companies including Turk Telekom and TAI.
Eren earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering and an MBA focused on technology road mapping for strategy and innovation, both from Middle East Technical University. He received a master of science in information systems, with a thesis on modeling mobile telecommunications services, from Middle East Technical University. During his academic endeavors, he studied for one semester at the University of Copenhagen, and for one semester at Harvard University. He is pursuing a marketing PhD focused on sustainability.
AI is transforming meetings from bounded events into continuous, intelligent workflows- capturing decisions, driving follow-ups, and extending collaboration long after the call ends. This panel explores what virtual experience means in an AI-first world: balancing automation with human connection, rethinking meeting culture, and preparing teams for a future where “the meeting” is just one touchpoint in an ongoing, AI-augmented process.
We have moved past the “Great Implementation.” As we enter 2026, the global enterprise has reached a critical inflection point where the sheer volume of data, the complexity of multi-cloud ecosystems, and the velocity of agentic AI have outpaced traditional human management. The mandate for the IT executives has fundamentally shifted: it is no longer about managing technology, but about architecting autonomy.
Vice President of Zoom for the Middle East, Türkiye, Africa and Pakistan (METAP)
Zoom
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Mohannad Al Kalash is the Vice President for Middle East and Africa at Zoom and a distinguished cybersecurity entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the field. As the founder of CyberX World, a leading multinational cybersecurity awareness platform, he has been a pioneering force in advancing digital security across the Arab world. Mohannad Al Kalash innovative leadership and commitment to raising cybersecurity awareness have positioned him as a key advocate for securing cyberspace and empowering Arab youth with essential skills and knowledge.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Systems and Networks and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Manchester. Mohannad al Kalash’s passion for technology began in his youth, where he eagerly embraced the latest advancements, using his time to explore and learn from cutting-edge devices.
Through his work, Mohannad Al Kalash aims to ensure that the Arab youth play a crucial role in enhancing cybersecurity, envisioning a future where they are instrumental in fortifying cyberspace against evolving threats and challenges.
AI is transforming meetings from bounded events into continuous, intelligent workflows- capturing decisions, driving follow-ups, and extending collaboration long after the call ends. This panel explores what virtual experience means in an AI-first world: balancing automation with human connection, rethinking meeting culture, and preparing teams for a future where “the meeting” is just one touchpoint in an ongoing, AI-augmented process.
AI used to play a supporting role- drafting, summarizing, answering on the side. That’s changing. Leading enterprises are moving AI from the sidelines to the center, powering core workflows instead of assisting around their edges. This keynote explores where the opportunity is moving, and what it takes to help enterprises move from experimenting with AI to running on it.
General Manager for Saudi Arabia and Bahrain
Zoom
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Wael brings with him over two decades of extensive experience in the ICT sector, with a strong background in sales management, business development, and project management. Throughout his career, he has successfully led numerous strategic initiatives and played a pivotal role in supporting government entities and telecom sectors in accelerating their digital transformation journeys.
He holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from California State University, USA, and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from King Saud University.
AI is transforming meetings from bounded events into continuous, intelligent workflows- capturing decisions, driving follow-ups, and extending collaboration long after the call ends. This panel explores what virtual experience means in an AI-first world: balancing automation with human connection, rethinking meeting culture, and preparing teams for a future where “the meeting” is just one touchpoint in an ongoing, AI-augmented process.
Zoom (NASDAQ: ZM) is a system of action for modern work, turning live collaboration into completed results. From entrepreneurs to global enterprises, customers choose Zoom to seamlessly collaborate, communicate, and drive outcomes across meetings, phone, contact center, and more — all with the built-in assistance of Zoom AI Companion. Founded in 2011, Zoom is headquartered in San Jose, CA. For more information, visit zoom.com.
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Saudi organizations are moving fast on agentic AI. IDC forecasts that total AI buyer spending in the Kingdom will grow from $2.72 billion in 2025 to $7.83 billion in 2029, a 30.3% CAGR. Yet only half of Saudi organizations consider themselves ready to make the most of that investment, and a quarter cite a non-centralized data foundation as one of their biggest barriers.
According to IDC, companies that don’t prioritize high-quality, AI-ready data will experience a 15% loss in productivity by 2027 as they try to scale generative and agentic AI. The spending is real. The readiness to use it well is not, at least not yet.
IDC and Iron Mountain bring Saudi CIOs together for a roundtable in Riyadh to explore what it takes to make enterprise data agent-ready: clean, classified, and accessible enough for an AI agent to act on with confidence.
The conversation will center on where CIOs should draw the line between data that’s ready for autonomous action and data that still needs work – including how to identify hidden or disconnected data that may not yet be visible to the organization or integrated into its systems -and how that decision should shape the next two years of investment.
How leading CIOs are locating unstructured and disconnected data that sits outside core systems. Why this hidden data is often the biggest blind spot in an AI-ready data strategy.
How CIOs are deciding which data sets can be trusted to an AI agent today, and which ones still need classification and cleanup.
IDC forecasts a 15% productivity loss by 2027 for organizations that don’t prioritize AI-ready data. How leaders are using this risk to secure internal buy-in for data foundation work.
How CIOs are extending classification and retention policy to cover data that agents can now act on.
We have moved past the “Great Implementation.” As we enter 2026, the global enterprise has reached a critical inflection point where the sheer volume of data, the complexity of multi-cloud ecosystems, and the velocity of agentic AI have outpaced traditional human management. The mandate for the IT executives has fundamentally shifted: it is no longer about managing technology, but about architecting autonomy.
Eren Eser
Associate Research Director, Türkiye, IDC
Enterprises are sitting on vast stores of dark, unclassified data that AI agents can’t yet trust or use. This keynote shows how to turn that hidden liability into a governed, agent-ready foundation- covering the classification, metadata, and lifecycle practices needed to get there, drawn from Iron Mountain’s experience managing information at scale.
Mihails Balonuskovs
Regional Digital Solution Architect (MENAT), Iron Mountain
AI ambition is outpacing the data foundations needed to support it. This panel unpacks why so many AI initiatives stall at the data layer – fragmented ownership, weak governance, poor quality – and debates what “AI-ready” really means, with practical steps for closing the gap.
Eren Eser
Associate Research Director, Türkiye, IDC
Mihails Balonuskovs
Regional Digital Solution Architect (MENAT), Iron Mountain
Associate Research Director, Türkiye
IDC
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Eren is a seasoned analyst with 20+ years of experience in the ICT sector. He directs all IDC ICT research and consulting engagements in Türkiye, and all sustainability research and consulting projects across the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa (META).
Based in Istanbul, Eren has been involved in projects ranging from market forecasts to strategic consulting engagements on market entry, competitive analysis, go-to-market strategies, technology marketing, and end-user studies. Eren’s vast experience in the IT services, cloud, software, and telecommunications domains helps IDC clients understand the impact of technology-enabled, sustainable transformation processes in the context of sustainable digital business strategies, operations, products, and services. In addition to his research and consulting activities, Eren is a speaker at industry events.
Prior to joining IDC in 2017, Eren spent more than a decade in IT industry roles spanning portfolio management, channel and business development, pricing, and software development at companies including Turk Telekom and TAI.
Eren earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering and an MBA focused on technology road mapping for strategy and innovation, both from Middle East Technical University. He received a master of science in information systems, with a thesis on modeling mobile telecommunications services, from Middle East Technical University. During his academic endeavors, he studied for one semester at the University of Copenhagen, and for one semester at Harvard University. He is pursuing a marketing PhD focused on sustainability.
AI ambition is outpacing the data foundations needed to support it. This panel unpacks why so many AI initiatives stall at the data layer – fragmented ownership, weak governance, poor quality – and debates what “AI-ready” really means, with practical steps for closing the gap.
We have moved past the “Great Implementation.” As we enter 2026, the global enterprise has reached a critical inflection point where the sheer volume of data, the complexity of multi-cloud ecosystems, and the velocity of agentic AI have outpaced traditional human management. The mandate for the IT executives has fundamentally shifted: it is no longer about managing technology, but about architecting autonomy.
Regional Digital Solution Architect (MENAT)
Iron Mountain
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As the Regional Digital Solution Architect at Iron Mountain, Mihails Balonuskovs brings nearly a decade of experience designing automation and AI solutions across the Middle East. Specializing in Digital Content Management, Intelligent Document Processing, and AI Automation, Mihails Balonuskovs has spearheaded many high-stakes digital transformation projects for major government entities and private organizations across the region. By architecting digital solutions that automated complex workflows, from country import audits to customer-facing services, these projects successfully saved thousands of hours in manual document validation and optimized processes for a more educated human decision-making.
Mihails Balonuskovs is driven by an unwavering commitment to staying at the forefront of technological advancements, constantly exploring how innovation can improve business decision-making and enhance daily operations. With a deep focus on automation over the last five years, he has successfully leveraged these technologies to drive continuous innovation for organizations across the region.
AI ambition is outpacing the data foundations needed to support it. This panel unpacks why so many AI initiatives stall at the data layer – fragmented ownership, weak governance, poor quality – and debates what “AI-ready” really means, with practical steps for closing the gap.
Enterprises are sitting on vast stores of dark, unclassified data that AI agents can’t yet trust or use. This keynote shows how to turn that hidden liability into a governed, agent-ready foundation- covering the classification, metadata, and lifecycle practices needed to get there, drawn from Iron Mountain’s experience managing information at scale.
Iron Mountain, founded in 1951, is the global leader in storage and information management services. Trusted by more than 225,000 organizations around the world, including 95% of the Fortune 1000, Iron Mountain stores and protects billions of information assets—including critical business information, highly sensitive data, and cultural and historical artifacts—across a real estate network of more than 9.1 million square meters in over 1,400 facilities across more than 60 countries.
