Features
2015 OUTLOOK

By Editor
The year will likely see continued consolidation of the major trends that have been holding the industry’s interest for the past few years including Big Data analytics, cloud, SDN, IoT, and BYOD
It looks certain that 2015 will see continued consolidation of the major trends that have been holding the industry’s interest for the past few years. IoT (Internet of Things), SDN, Managed services, Big Data analytics, cloud, Mobility and BYOD are among trends that are in varying degrees shaping the changing face of the industry. The fact that when many of these Technologies come together as enablers, there is likely to be a snowball effect and this is precisely the kind of future we are heading towards with these trends in tandem.
Rabih Dabboussi, General Manager, Cisco UAE says, “By 2022, there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet. By some estimates, even this is a conservative outlook. Technology has advanced and has become smaller in size, is more flexible and adaptable to different applications and has also gone down in terms of costs. This has driven a tremendous adoption and appetite in introducing connectivity and intelligence to almost everything around us. Businesses will strive to leverage this connectivity and intelligence to differentiate.”
The IoT opportunity is likely to emerge into the limelight over the next couple of years in terms of deployments. From integration to securing the infrastructure that will enable IoT to work, there is potentially a lot of opportunities that the channel will be likely to unearth.
Sabbahuddin Khan, Regional Manager at Allied Telesis Middle East says, “The IoT trend will dramatically increase the number of network-connected entities. Devices that contain sensors, control, or intelligence will increasingly become network connected. IPv6 will gain wider adoption, as will management technologies that are required to manage network-connected nodes. The IoT will deliver benefits for everyone, from enterprises to municipal councils, but it is the value of information and knowledge that will see new players introduced and new business models emerge during 2015.”
As IoT initiatives get off ground, in fact many of the larger projects could be spearheaded by government entities as they enable more public e-services for the public.
Rabih adds, “The next few years are thus likely to be of IoT gaining ground. We got some economists to gauge the value of the IoT economy. The value at stake of the IoT between now and 2022 is $ 19 Trillion. The potential is immense. We took that model and applied to Dubai and the report was about the value at stake between now and 2019 for Dubai’s smart city initiative. It is about 5 Billion dollars.”
Mobility & software drive the future
Mobile device penetration as well as mobile data traffic growth rate in the region are among the fastest in the world. MEA is set to post the world’s highest-growth rate of IPv6-capable smartphones and tablets according to a Cisco forecast. These trends will encourage even wider adoption of wireless access and Mobile Device management as well.
Sabbahuddin says, “The unprecedented adoption rate of mobile devices in the enterprise landscape means that wireless access is now more important than ever, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. The technological innovations that the 802.11ac standard is enabling will lead to continuing growth in demand for wireless access products, and will ensure that wireless access has a critical role in unified enterprise network infrastructure. Users will demand pervasive and reliable wireless coverage and seamless mobility. This wireless expansion drives the need for tightly integrated management platforms.”
In addition, the rising prevalence of Mobile workforces will also mean that workers would need better access remotely. That is driving the demand for hyper-converged systems that help manage virtualized infrastructures. Hyper-convergence infrastructure have a software-centric architecture that tightly integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources and other technologies.
Ahmad Qadri, Regional Director for Middle East at Nutanix says, “Mobility has meant that large teams of people have been freed from their offices and are able to work offsite, either beside their customers or from home to increase productivity, customer satisfaction and personnel retention. But the distributed systems needed to support these work environments are driving the uptake of hyper-converged infrastructure at such a pace that even traditional storage area network (SAN) players are reducing SAN production and redirecting IT spend into hyper-converged technology. And it will become even more prevalent in 2015 as businesses look to the IT department to support this new working environment while still keeping equipment and maintenance costs low.”
Therefore he believes that hyper-converged will transition from the ‘early adopter’ phase to mainstream production environment; from test and development to Tier 1 applications.
Nutanix is partnering with Dell globally and have extended that into the region. The Dell XC-series appliance integrates Dell’s x86 server platform (PowerEdge R720xd) and Nutanix web-scale software to provide a solution with enterprise class performance, scalability, availability and data management features.
Basil said, “Web-scale IT is making huge inroads compared to traditional DAS, NAS and SAN architectures. The demand for software defined storage is going through the roof- over delivering on promise. Cost-wise, it is cheaper and performance wise, it is better. Customers are liking it and software defined storage has seen quick adoption unlike SDN.”
What happened in the case of server virtualization is now unfolding with storage and networks. SDN is still in the initial phase of rollout with Telcos testing it.
Basil adds, “It is only now that SDN is beginning to see traction. Telcos are taking the lead. They are testing and that gives confidence to the enterprise segment to take it up. We are therefore now seeing a lot of interest around SDN.”
Legacy network architectures cannot provide the scale that SDN can potentially bring in to the infrastructure which is required especially as organizations move more workloads to the cloud and the workforce become more mobile.
Sabbahuddin adds, “The flexibility in user location and device usage that is becoming the norm in Enterprise IT, as the BYOD concept has taken hold, will drive requirements for more dynamic operation of Enterprise communication systems. Organizations needing solutions to these requirements will increasingly look to SDN as the source of such solutions. The efficiencies to be gained by integration between business rules, user information, and network infrastructure will benefit network administrators and users alike.”
The cloud’s next phase
According to Rabih, the next phase of cloud computing is about optimizing data centres. That will mean moving some of the actual application processing to the edge, i.e., what is being referred to as ‘fog-computing’. The terms Fog Computing, coined by CISCO, refers to computing on the edge wherein data processing and decisions are happening closer to the event location, leaving only more critical decision making to the central cloud locations.
He adds, “We believe the next phase of cloud computing especially when it comes to smart city initiatives and IoT is in fog computing – taking some of the data centre responsibilities and some of the application processes and distributing it to the edge. So instead of centralizing it in the cloud, you do it in the fog which is closer to the user.”
Rabih claims that Fog computing alongside cloud computing will see more adoption in 2015 in tandem with IoT growth.
Elaborating further, he says, “For example, when you are in the parking lot, the access point covering the parking lot needs to cover your location and the density of cars in the parking lot. That access point needs to tell the lights to turn on or off, brighten up or dim down based on number of people. These decisions need not go to the cloud as they can be taken at the edge. You will see processing and many applications taking place at the edge in places like the parking lot, in a street, a mall, a theatre etc. But you will also see more centralizing applications in the cloud as well.”
There is also likely to be great consolidation in the cloud services market. Ahmad believes that the larger players in the cloud service market will get bigger and there will be a scramble for the rest of the market opportunities.
He says, “If it isn’t already, hybrid cloud will become the ‘new normal’ infrastructure solution as more and more organizations realize the benefits of balancing hardware control and software scalability. Over the next five years, we’ll see the big cloud services providers (CSPs) hold a vast majority of the hardware market. Meanwhile, the smaller businesses fighting for the remaining market share will be forced to pick between building their own open source-based infrastructure solutions or purchasing turnkey products.”
Bigger picture
Quite obviously IoT will also be a driving factor for Big Data analytics to become more prevalent in terms of deployments. There is going to be a growing demand for such solutions for instantaneously fetching results for specific queries. Therefore, the compute infrastructure in the background is going to consume a lot of processing power.
Rabih says, “If you think of Mobility and IoT together, there is going to be a lot of data going to be generated. In order to link to link people, devices, process, things together, there has to be a tremendous amount of processing power that needs to be enabled behind this. The amount of time it takes to search through text is much less than it takes through for a video file or a voice conversation or facial recognition etc. The level of complexity and consumption of computing that is going to be needed in the future is entirely different level than in the past. Hence, the notion of Big Data, which is about taking zettabytes of data in a distributed way across multiple servers and multiple processors so that you gain your result much quicker such as in the case of a crime scenario investigation. It could be so many other different scenarios. In future, the ability to do Big Data crunching will be at our fingertips.”
Cisco’s Rabih also concedes that we are already onto an era when a single company’s solutions will not do and there is likely to be a lot of collaboration that will help enable all required solutions and services.
He adds, “No single company is going to have the answer to all these requirements. We have been developing Technologies both on the analytics side and also on the networking side to enable the Big Data model. We are now integrating Hadoop which is the platform for enabling distributed processing across a compute environment into our systems. We are building the services delivery platform or the orchestration platform that allows to include multiple vendors and allows to do the analytics for you.
Dell strengthened its portfolio in information management solutions with the acquisition of StatSoft last year. StatSoft is a provider of analytics solutions that deliver data mining, predictive analytics and data visualization capabilities.
Basil says, “We now have software portfolio for predictive analytics, an area where we were lacking prior to the StatSoft acquisition. We are in a position now to provide our customers access to proven and affordable advanced analytics solution that delivers the predictive and prescriptive analysis capabilities that their businesses need in order to make faster, more accurate decisions.”
Security, a prime time focus
With more devices connected, it would akin to a mouth-watering prospect for would be attackers as they seek network vulnerabilities to attack. Therefore, security needs to stay competent to tackle malicious attacks.
Rabih says, “Security is becoming a great concern. There will more focus on that and more technologies introduced that will allows us to adopt all the trends that I mentioned. This has to be much more robust than what is there currently. As we go towards the predicted 50 billion devices, the actual attack surface area would have increased tremendously.”
Security solutions will become more heavily integrated to guarantee the security of data and the privacy of users across the entire infrastructure. More organizations in the Middle East today recognize the need for efficient network security systems to secure their Businesses.
Sabbahuddin says, “The increasingly flexible policies of network access and the growing number of threats will escalate the demand for newer network protection technologies. The escalating likelihood of attack and the resulting loss of productivity and damage to reputations will ensure that security is a high priority for executive management—particularly given the number of high-profile attacks during 2014. Likewise, Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) technology, integrating application control capability, will play a leading role in the security space.”
Upbeat outlook
The region continues to be adopt new technologies. Large initiatives are being spearheaded by Government initiatives including the smart city projects.
Rabih says, “We are seeing a determined effort to invest in Technology as a way to enable the transformation of the nation, across the GCC. The vision of the leadership in the region is taking the lead in Technology adoption and we have been engaging with the governments in shaping those strategies and deploying the infrastructures in enabling all of those objectives. IT is now at the forefront of the government’s fiscal budgets. There is an increase in allocation. IT is not an afterthought. Although IT I not a solution to all issues, yet it is an element of all solutions for all problems.”
Sectors including Education BFSI, Education, Hospitality, Healthcare etc are all in process of upgrading their capabilities to compete and provide best services. Technology will remain a key enabler behind those efforts.
Basil says, “Oftentimes, the Middle East or any emerging markets would follow the trends going on globally. Customers see the opportunity because they are not tied down by legacy. The large enterprises see the opportunity to leapfrog other regions in terms of infrastructures and implement modern solutions. The small and medium size enterprises find it cheaper to implement as they can start taking advantage of enterprise grade solutions that are available at affordable costs.”
It has been a tricky era for the partners. They are challenged to embrace the disruptive technologies in their go to market models but most are keeping pace.
Rabih says, “Partner ecosystems have been evolving alongside. We are seeing a big appetite from our partners to sharpen their expertise and tools that helps them to deliver these new Technologies.”
While telcos delivering ICT services as part of their Managed services portfolio will increase, there will a lot more of opportunities emerging in the era that is on the cusp of pervasive connectivity and intelligence. The opportunities for integrators is only bound to rise.
Features
2025 Hospitality Tech Trends

By Prince Thampi, Founder and CEO, Hudini
As we approach 2025, the hospitality industry is poised for transformational growth, driven by evolving traveller preferences and advancements in technology. The future of hospitality promises enhanced convenience, personalisation and sustainability, with a significant focus on creating memorable experiences for guests. Let’s dive into five key trends that will shape the hospitality tech landscape in 2025 and beyond.
- The Continued Rise of Frictionless Technology
The increased demand for frictionless experiences is set to dominate the industry, with more and more travellers preferring hotels that offer touch-free check-in, check-out, and room access via mobile apps. This trend reflects a broader shift towards easy interactions powered by seamless digital integration. Mobile apps have been an essential tool for a few years now, enabling guests to manage their stays, order room service, and access hotel information effortlessly. With the introduction of Gen AI, those apps have become more powerful than ever and are now able to provide highly personalised recommendations and speak in different languages.
Hotels embracing this trend will gain a competitive edge, as tech-savvy travellers prioritise convenience and efficiency during their stay. According to a recent survey by Deloitte, around 72% of travellers are more likely to choose a hotel that offers mobile check-in and check-out services over those that don’t.
- Hyper Personalised Guest Experiences
In 2025, personalisation will continue to be at the core of hospitality services but will finally be taken to the next level thanks to Gen AI. Guests expect hotels to anticipate their needs and offer tailored experiences, from customised room settings to personalised dining recommendations. Apps powered by AI are now able to predict guest needs based on a wealth of data, ingested from the hotel systems or fed externally.
Leveraging guest data and insights, hotels can create unique offerings that cater to individual preferences. This level of personalisation not only enhances guest satisfaction but also fosters loyalty and repeat bookings. According to Oracle’s findings, biometrics and AI are set to play pivotal roles, with 62% of guests valuing automated recognition for personalised interactions. Biometrics will experience a breakthrough into mainstream hospitality in 2025. Facial recognition technology has matured significantly and is ready to be weaved into the guest experience. It will enable better security and guest recognition while protecting their privacy at the same time.
- AI-Enabled Customer Service
Artificial intelligence is revolutionising every aspect of the hospitality industry, but will be by itself a new way of providing customer service. Chatbots and virtual assistants are becoming standard tools for handling common queries, offering instant support, and streamlining operations at any time and in any language.
AI-driven solutions not only enhance efficiency but also provide guests with 24/7 assistance, ensuring a smoother and more satisfying experience. By integrating AI technologies, hotels can free up staff to focus on delivering exceptional in-person service.
- Sustainability and Eco-Friendly Practices
Sustainability is no longer optional, it’s a necessity often enforced by regulation. Travellers are increasingly favouring hotels that adopt eco-friendly practices, such as using locally sourced food, implementing energy-efficient operations, and reducing waste.
By prioritising sustainability, hotels not only meet guest expectations but also contribute positively to the environment. This commitment to green initiatives enhances brand reputation and attracts environmentally conscious travellers. A recent survey by Booking.com found that 83% of global respondents believe more sustainable travel is vital, with 49% believing there aren’t enough sustainable travel options and 53% saying they get annoyed when a hotel prevents them from being sustainable.
Smart use of technology is key in the sustainability journey of hotels. Technology can accurately measure the reduction in carbon footprint, it will help reduce energy and adopt renewable energy sources, and will enable the effective management of food waste. Many hospitality apps allow guests to apply green energy settings to a room, some will even exchange your energy savings to loyalty points.
- The return of ‘real’
With Gen Z – the first generation grown up with everything digital – becoming the next large group to travel, the craving for ‘real’ experiences is bigger than it ever was. Hotels focusing on truly unique and hyper local experiences; a great meal, cultural outing, or wellness treatment will win the hearts of this generation.
Fortunately hotel apps, AI, automation of processes, sustainability tech and the removal of cumbersome processes like checking-in and studying paper manuals will free up hotel staff to allow them to do what they do best: providing unforgettable, personalised and sustainable experiences.
Features
With DMTT into effect from Jan 1st, 2025, a tax expert explains everything businesses in Bahrain need to know!

Last September, the Kingdom of Bahrain introduced a new law to implement a Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax (DMTT) at a rate of 15% on businesses operating in the Kingdom that meet certain criteria.
With the new tax into effect in time for the new year, Mr. Nilesh Ashar, an international tax specialist with more than 25 years of experience, serving as Senior Managing Director & Head of Tax Middle East at FTI Consulting, provided a comprehensive overview of the new law and its implications for businesses in Bahrain.
Mr. Ashar stated that the Kingdom’s decision is a significant milestone in the Middle East, with Bahrain emerging as a front runner to implement the DMTT on large multinational enterprises (MNEs) having presence in the Kingdom.
“The new law underscores Bahrain’s international commitment as part of the inclusive framework of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to address base erosion and profit shifting by MNEs,” stated Mr. Ashar.
“Effect from January 1st, 2025, onwards, the law is largely based on the OECD Model Rules on global minimum tax (GMT) in terms of calculation of the tax, exclusions, and reliefs. Additionally, the new law contains specific provisions on procedures, enforcement, and anti-avoidance measures applicable in the Kingdom.”
While explaining who will be affected by this tax, and what the law actually entails, he added that the new law applies a 15% tax on the income of Bahrain entities (including permanent establishment, joint venture, and JV subsidiaries) that are part of an MNE group with annual consolidated revenue exceeding €750 million, for at least two out of four preceding fiscal years. However, the tax does not apply to foreign subsidiaries of a Bahraini-headquartered group or other foreign group companies that are part of the same MNE group. The DMTT is also not applicable to certain excluded entities as specified in the law, including government bodies, international organizations, non-profit organizations, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and certain investment funds.
Mr. Ashar explained that the law lists specific transitional and permanent reliefs from the levy of DMTT, including transitional country-by-country safe harbor relief, exclusion for the initial phase of international activity, de-minimis exclusion, and simplified computation safe harbor relief.
Describing key considerations for businesses, Mr. Ashar said that, detailed rules (Executive Regulations) are expected to be published in the coming months, it is now imperative for businesses to assess the impact of the DMTT on their Bahrain presence, evaluate the availability of any reliefs, and prepare for the compliances to be undertaken based on the law read in conjunction with the OECD Model Rules.
Mr. Ashar described, “In terms of taxable income, this is defined in the law as the financial accounting net income or loss for the fiscal year, before making any consolidation adjustments eliminating intra-group transactions, in accordance with the local accounting standards. Detailed rules on calculation of taxable income will be prescribed in line with the OECD Model Rules. Several compliance obligations are specified in the law including obtaining a registration, filing of annual tax returns, and paying taxes in advance over the relevant fiscal year. These compliances are expected to be in addition to the notifications and filings as required by the MNE Group under the OECD Model Rules.”
In addition, the law also provides specific provisions on enforcement via conduct of tax audits, assessments and procedures in relation to litigation and appeals. Mr. Ashar noted that a Tax Objection Committee will be formed for this purpose. Also, penal consequences are laid out in case of defaults, like failure to obtain registration, file tax returns, or submitting incorrect data. Such defaults may trigger stringent administrative fines, without prejudice to criminal liability.
Mr. Ashar further explained that a general anti-avoidance rule empowers the National Bureau of Revenue to disregard any transaction if it is not genuine or its primary purpose is to obtain a tax advantage against the objective of the law. Furthermore, the law specifies certain acts to qualify as ‘tax evasion,’ resulting in onerous consequences including criminal liability for legal persons, if held responsible for such evasion. Dispute resolution through a settlement process is acknowledged.
Mr. Ashar concluded that the Executive Regulations to the law are yet to be issued and are expected to prescribe detailed rules, controls and manner of calculation and application of DMTT in a manner consistent with the Model Rules. He also noted that since the law is published in the Arabic language, his views are based on an unofficial translation of the law.
Cover Story
Trump’s Deregulation Bets, AI Shakeups, and Digital Assets: 2025 in Focus

By Koen Ripping, CEO, Affor Analytics
It is that time of the year again when your mailbox gets filled with outlooks for 2025 from all sides. And it’s no surprise that, again, the year’s outlook comes with a high degree of uncertainty. I’ll refrain from actually giving targets this time, as you can read them from any Wall Street’s bank outlook. And mostly, because it’s hard to get them right. In the past eight years, actual market returns were outside the range of all forecasts compiled seven times, of which the market outperformed five times (source: Bloomberg).
Still, a good case can be made for uncertainty this year. If Trump actually holds up to some of his statements, we could see deregulation on multiple aspects, lower corporate taxes, and of course, tariffs. This will obviously not only impact the US, but could affect economies globally through tit-for-tat tariffs or, for longer term effects, geopolitical actions. Our expectation is that deregulation will happen, and this will feed into a more accommodative and friendly environment for small-to-midsize companies.
This does, however, not mean an end to the Magnificent Seven’s dominance for the coming year. The driver of the outperformance has been a superior earnings growth compared to the rest, which was 33% for Mag7 in 2024 compared to 3% for the rest resulting in an outperformance of around 24% (depending on when you read this). Consensus earnings growth for next year for Mag7 and the rest are respectively 18% versus 12%, resulting in an expected outperformance of 8% for the megacaps from our equity team.
Lower corporate tax could be a potential bull case for the US market, but given the wider pro-growth strategy from the new Trump administration, we don’t see much room for this. Then tariffs are the most significant risk on the otherwise good growth outlook, but we are not expecting an outright tariff war. The tactic will probably be precisely targeted tariffs, where we see an increase in China tariffs and possibly auto tariffs on the EU and Mexico, so retaliatory tariffs will also be the answer. This would add a one-time premium on price levels, as we’ve seen in the first Trump administration, but doesn’t feed through to sustained inflation.
In general, both in the US and EU, continued easing is expected, with falling policy rates supporting economic growth in both areas. This, together with policymakers poised on enhancing growth, and with companies having, like we say in Dutch, cash that is splashing against the baseboards (flush with cash), builds towards a bull case for 2025. Amongst other trends, this will also flow towards three trends I am most familiar with: Digital Assets, Artificial Intelligence, and M&A.
Digital assets – A serious asset in 2025

2024 has been a good year for digital assets. Especially for Bitcoin, where the new BTC spot ETF cleared the way for institutional investors and others that were bound from trading on less conventional exchanges. This inflow of capital made the BTC ETFs surpass the Gold ETFs in AUM within a year, which has been around for over a decade.
Another important factor for digital asset performance is Trump’s election. Since its arrival, the risky asset class has been met with suspicion and disbelief, mainly because of regulatory unclarity and negative publicity. With Trump pledging support to the industry and even mentioning a strategic Bitcoin reserve for the US, markets have been rallying.
A strategic reserve would drastically improve the legitimacy of the asset class as a whole. Though this is still far-fetched, our view is that the new US government will definitely be accommodative in this area. They seem to have gathered a team of experts around him that looks suited to walk the thin line of implementing new regulations while not restricting market participants and early adopting businesses.
After a very dominant Bitcoin in 2024, our digital assets team expects this dominance to decline, while still growing in value, leaving room for alternative tokens to outperform. The first signs of this shift are visible in the pick-up in Ethereum spot prices. This shift correlates with previous cycles of the market, where Bitcoin initially leads, followed by other assets higher on the risk curve. We identified two trends to gain more traction in 2025.
The first trend is tokenization as part of the Real-World Assets sector. This is one of the areas we are also exploring for our funds, like institutions such as BlackRock and JP Morgan already explored for traditional assets such as stocks, bonds, or real estate. By tokenizing these assets on a blockchain, they become more liquid and can be fractalized. The assets become tradable 24/7, and the transaction settlement is fast, cheap, and transparent, allowing for more financial opportunities.
The other one is Artificial Intelligence. Many of the current platforms, such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini are centralized, coming with risks such as privacy issues, potential biases, and single points of failure. Decentralized solutions could be a solution for those who are unwilling to be exposed to those kinds of risks.
If the US takes the lead in accommodative regulation, other nations will follow. Because of this, 2025 could be the year general adoption is accelerated, leaving the digital asset market positioned to do very well.
Artificial Intelligence – Show me the customers
It almost feels like a must mentioning AI as a 2025 trend. Obviously, it has been one of the most traded and talked about trends in past years, but it feels like there is a shift coming. Spending on AI will likely increase, as overall corporate capital investment has been at an annual 2.5%, whereas the average peak capex in the last three trends (energy, housing, and dot-com) was around 8%. So there seems to be enough room there, but valuations in AI are even higher both in public and private markets. Investors will start to look more for ROI and proof-of-concept through a growing customer base.
This will feed into the trend that the focus of investment within the AI sector will change. Where in the past years we’ve seen companies in the infrastructure part of the ecosystem do very well. Our expectation is that emphasis in 2025 will shift more towards the mid- and downstream of AI, focussing on the products and services, and especially to companies where revenues actually get enhanced by the use of AI. That being said, also energy supply for these solutions will become a more important topic.
As a sub-trend, we expect identity to be a hot topic going forward. AI-generated news, images, text, and speech are spreading more and more around the internet. The need for an actual confirmation of real human output (or conversation) will increase. Ironically, this can only be solved by AI.
We have seen adaptation of multiple tools like ChatGPT, but more in a ‘getting-to-know-the-product’ kind of way. More structured solutions built on these LLMs are getting traction now that models are improving at such a fast pace, with an accuracy increase from 10% to 90% from 2021 to 2024 for competition-level math questions (source: Jensen, G., Narayan, A., Greene, A., & Simon, L. (2024). Is an AI Bubble Ahead of Us or Behind Us? Bridgewater.). Beneficiaries will be sectors where the share of tasks that can be handled by AI can reduce labor costs and increase revenue by incorporating this into their business.
All of this does not mean replacing employees, as you have probably read before, but increasing the share of value-added hours. For example, we now utilise AI-ensembles to provide our fundamental team with trading signals. This allows us to react faster to investment opportunities, and also signal more opportunities that are overlooked by humans in the first place.
In general, capital will continue to flow towards AI as a sector, but with a more stricter view on market adoption and value-addition. Ultimately adoption and ability to incorporate these tools efficiently will lead to productivity gains, but in my opinion, this will be a much longer-term trend and won’t crystallize in 2025.
M&A – Consolidation on all fronts
Last but not least, falling interest rates, cash-rich companies, and a less restrictive regulatory environment from a new Trump administration is a fertile ground for a lot more M&A activity, which has already seen a pick-up in 2024. Beneficiaries would be banks that are big in M&A, private equity and credit firms, and private business owners.
In my experience, consolidation, if rightly managed, not only leads to a better market position but can also help companies let their teams focus on their strong suits. To give a personal example, our core strength is creating AI solutions which we apply in fund management. Now, with our partnership with Dutchyard, we can outsource fund management and fundraising, leaving more time to focus on our expertise.
With the upcoming US administration giving a boost to entrepreneur confidence through a less restrictive environment, this is a trend that we expect to continue in 2025.
In conclusion, 2025 shapes up to be generally a decent year for equities globally, but with a bit more unknowns. On the digital assets front, the outlook is good, as Trump might legitimize the asset class as a whole. While AI spending will increase, the focus will shift to actual use cases as users are past the discovery phase.
2025 will belong to those with the muscle to flex less traditional assets and the foresight to leverage innovation, driving value in an evolving financial landscape.
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