Exclusive interview with Debashish Guha Roy, Director, Covoro^TM

COVORO YouCloud marked its presence as Diamond Sponsor at the Tax Technology Summit 2025, held on 06 December in Dubai, where a joint venture between the companies formally showcased its FTA-aligned e-invoicing and tax compliance platform. The event served as a key platform to highlight YouCloud’s unified approach to tax digitisation, featuring seamless ERP integrations, real-time validation, and end-to-end compliance capabilities designed for enterprises preparing for the UAE’s national e-invoicing mandate. With a strong emphasis on local delivery, in-country data hosting, and enterprise-grade security, COVORO YouCloud demonstrated how organisations can transition from standalone invoicing tools to a fully integrated, future-ready compliance ecosystem.

You mentioned that YouCloud offers a one-stop solution covering invoicing, accounts payable, reconciliation, analytics, legislation management, and tax filing. After this event, what key takeaways were you hoping the audience would leave with?

Our primary objective was to formally announce the new joint venture in the UAE market and make it clear that there is now a new local player offering a complete, end-to-end platform.

Many competitors operate in this space, but most of them deliver from outside the country or rely on offshore support models. Our key differentiator is local delivery, local data hosting, and in-country support. We wanted the audience to understand that this is not just an invoicing solution. It is a comprehensive compliance and finance ecosystem.

Another important takeaway was helping enterprises think beyond solving a single problem. Compliance is not static. What starts as invoicing quickly evolves into reconciliation, analytics, filing, litigation management, and financing enablement. That is what we have already built.

The audience at the event was extremely knowledgeable, which made communication easier. They understood the challenges ahead and could immediately see the value of a unified platform.

How do you see the broader GCC tax digitisation journey evolving in 2025 and 2026?

Globally, Europe set the precedent with the PEPPOL standard, which allows interoperability across countries. A similar journey is unfolding in the GCC.

Saudi Arabia follows its own model and is not PEPPOL-based. The UAE has adopted a PEPPOL-based framework, and Oman is expected to follow next. Over time, we will see the emergence of a GCC-wide tax interoperability framework.

This will enable smoother inter-country transactions, simplified VAT refunds, and unified compliance processes. Similar to how consumers today can claim VAT refunds easily when travelling, enterprises will experience a much simpler, more transparent system.

Because transaction records sit with tax authorities, validation becomes easier. This enables cross-border supplier financing, trade financing, and smoother compliance overall.

How do you see technology, especially AI, shaping the next phase of this journey?

Technology, particularly AI, will play a critical role in automating end-to-end compliance. It will significantly reduce errors, remove delays, and improve accuracy.

From a CFO’s perspective, AI-driven systems ensure real-time visibility, timely compliance, and reduced manual intervention. Processes that once required paperwork, reconciliation, and repetitive validation will become automated and real-time.

This directly improves compliance quality and decision-making while lowering risk.

How does YouCloud address security and privacy concerns for large enterprises?

Security and data privacy are foundational for us. YouCloud is ISO certified, GDPR-compliant, and fully aligned with the UAE’s National Information Assurance Framework (NIAF).

From day one, our approach has been sovereign by design. All data is hosted in-country. There is no external cloud hosting, no offshore disaster recovery, and no remote support from outside the UAE.

This has always been a core requirement for us, especially given our long-term presence in the region. Enterprises and government entities need assurance that their data remains within national boundaries and under strict regulatory control.

How does your solution help CFOs and senior decision-makers manage complexity?

• CFOs typically face three major challenges:
• Conducting accurate risk and gap assessments
• Implementing solutions efficiently
• Ensuring scalability for future requirements

By offering a single, end-to-end platform, we significantly reduce this burden. CFOs do not need to evaluate separate tools for invoicing, accounts receivable, analytics, or compliance reporting.

Everything operates within one framework, with one dashboard, one data model, and one compliance architecture. This simplifies decision-making and provides clear, real-time visibility across all financial and compliance functions.

Could you briefly explain how some of your core modules work, such as e-invoicing and accounts payable?

The e-invoicing module collects invoice data from various ERP and accounting systems and converts it into the format required by the Federal Tax Authority (FTA).

Each ERP or accounting system produces data in a different format, while the FTA expects a standardised structure. YouCloud acts as an intelligent adaptor, performing data homogenisation. If mandatory data is missing, the system flags it and sends it back for correction. Only validated, compliant data is submitted to the FTA.

For accounts payable, the focus is on managing input and output VAT accurately. Traditional processes require manual extraction, spreadsheet matching, and reconciliation. Our platform automates this process by validating transactional data in real time, removing the need for manual intervention and reducing reconciliation errors.

Where do you see YouCloud’s growth in the UAE and GCC over the coming years?

In the UAE alone, we are targeting at least a 20% market share, which represents a significant volume of invoices and transactions.

The initial phase focuses on B2B and B2G transactions above the AED 50 million threshold. The next phase will expand to all enterprises, followed by retail and B2C transactions.

Retail presents the most complex compliance challenge due to volume and diversity. To address this, we are developing a hardware-based solution for retailers. Many small retailers are not equipped to manage API integrations, so we provide a simple plug-and-play device that connects to their existing systems and links directly to our backend.

This approach removes complexity for small businesses while ensuring full compliance. The B2C phase will generate the highest invoice volumes and is the most challenging, but it is also where our combined hardware and software strategy will set us apart.

ATERMES, a French leader in advanced surveillance and security solutions, announces in partnership with The Imperial Electric Company (IEC), the award of a major contract by the Pakistan Airports Authority (PAA) for the deployment of a state-of-the-art Bird Repelling System (BRS) at Lahore International Airport.

This milestone project represents a first-of-its-kind integrated solution combining SURICATE, ATERMES’ advanced AI-enabled multi-sensor surveillance system, with acoustic and laser deterrence technologies. The system delivers a fully automated, intelligent, and environmentally friendly approach to mitigating bird-strike risks; one of aviation’s most persistent safety challenges.

The SURICATE system, developed by ATERMES in France, brings together cutting-edge optronics, embedded AI, and edge computing to continuously monitor airfields, identify potential avian threats in real time, and automatically activate deterrence mechanisms.

Once a bird threat is detected by the system’s deep-learning algorithms, SURICATE autonomously triggers the surrounding acoustic and laser repellers, driving the birds away from critical flight zones such as runways and taxiways.

This unique synergy between AI-based detection and automated multi-modal deterrence marks a turning point in airport security and environmental protection. Unlike traditional manual or time-based repelling systems, the BRS for Lahore Airport operates only when necessary, optimizing energy use and minimizing disturbance to the surrounding ecosystem.

Lionel Thomas, Chairman of ATERMES, stated: “This project is not just about technology; it’s about redefining how airports ensure safety through intelligence. By merging AI, optics, and deterrence, we’re transforming bird control into a predictive, autonomous, and eco-responsible process.”

Sajid Jamal, Executive Director of The Imperial Electric Company, added: “Our partnership with ATERMES reflects Pakistan’s growing commitment to embracing advanced, AI-driven safety systems. Lahore will become the first airport in the region equipped with such an integrated and intelligent Bird Repelling System.”

The project underscores a strong collaboration between France and Pakistan in technological innovation. ATERMES will provide the detection and control systems, while IEC, a key player in Pakistan’s engineering and infrastructure sectors, will oversee integration, installation, and local support. Together, they will ensure the delivery of a robust, scalable, and sustainable system that sets a benchmark for other international airports in the region.

Kayvan Karim, Assistant Professor at School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University Dubai

The year 2025 will likely be remembered as the moment the global economy stopped simply automating tasks and started handing over the keys to autonomous agents. For decades, the promise of automation was simple: machines doing repetitive work faster than humans. But the last twelve months have ushered in a fundamental paradigm shift. We have moved from the era of static scripts to the age of “Agentic AI”, systems that don’t just follow orders but perceive, reason, and act to achieve complex goals.

In their 2025 Technology Trends report, Accenture’s analysts have termed the explosion of these capabilities as “The Binary Big Bang”. As generative AI becomes central to enterprise technology, the cost of development has plummeted, leading to a proliferation of new systems where digital agents act autonomously. These systems have given rise to Agentic AI, which acts as a proactive partner rather than a passive interface. These agents are now capable of “Superagency,” a collaboration architecture that orchestrates multi-agent systems to handle complex workflows that require specialised knowledge across different domains.

This shift is nowhere more palpable than in the Middle East. From the giga-projects of Saudi Arabia to the smart logistics hubs of Dubai, the region is leveraging this technological inflection point to decouple its economic future from hydrocarbons and rebuild it on a foundation of silicon and code.

The Economics of Intelligence

The catalyst for this revolution is a dramatic collapse in the cost of cognitive labour. When examining the economics of intelligence, Stanford University reported in its 2025 AI Index Report that the catalyst for this explosion in autonomy is the radical democratisation of computing power. Between late 2022 and late 2024, the inference cost for a system performing at the level of GPT-3.5 dropped over 280-fold. This trend accelerated through 2025, with hardware costs declining by approximately 30% annually and energy efficiency improving by 40% each year.

These economic shifts have lowered the barriers to entry, moving advanced AI from the realm of massive research labs to the operational budgets of mid-sized enterprises. As Menlo Ventures noted in their mid-year update, enterprise spending on model APIs more than doubled to $8.4 billion in the first half of 2025 alone, signalling a decisive shift from experimental “training” budgets to production-grade “inference” budgets.

The Middle East’s Sovereign Pivot

In the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), this technological wave is being ridden with strategic intent. The region is not content to merely import Western or Eastern models; it is building its own “Sovereign AI.”

In the UAE, the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) has continued to push boundaries with its Falcon series. As highlighted by ITU in 2025, the Falcon LLM has evolved into a multi-modal framework capable of processing vision and audio, enabling it to interpret complex documents and charts locally without data leaving the country. Similarly, G42’s Inception has solidified Jais’s position as the world’s premier Arabic-centric model. By integrating Jais into the Microsoft Azure Model Catalogue, they have provided generative AI access to over 400 million Arabic speakers, ensuring that the nuances of the region’s language and culture are preserved in the digital age.

Saudi Arabia has matched this ambition with the launch of Humain, a PIF-backed AI champion. According to Reuters reports from late 2025, Humain is not only building massive data centre capacity but is also developing a voice-first operating system designed to replace traditional icon-based interfaces. This aligns with the Kingdom’s broader Vision 2030 goals, where AI is expected to contribute over $135 billion to the economy.

From Automation to Autonomy in Industry

The distinction between “automation” (following rules) and “autonomy” (making decisions) is best illustrated in the region’s critical infrastructure.

In the energy sector, Saudi Aramco and Yokogawa achieved a historic milestone at the Fadhili Gas Plant. As reported by Oilfield Technology, they successfully deployed autonomous control AI agents that utilise reinforcement learning to optimise the Acid Gas Removal unit actively. Unlike traditional systems, these agents adapt to changing environmental conditions without human intervention, reducing chemical and steam consumption by up to 15%.

Similarly, ADNOC partnered with G42 and Microsoft to launch “EnergyAI.” This agentic system automates complex tasks such as seismic analysis and geological modelling, compressing workflows that used to take months into mere days.

In logistics, the shift is physical. DP World has revolutionised container handling at Jebel Ali with the BoxBay system. As described by Marine Insight, this high-bay storage technology stacks containers up to 11 tiers high in a steel rack, allowing fully automated cranes to access any container without having to reshuffle others. This change increases terminal capacity by 300% and creates a safer, more efficient operating environment.

The GenAI Divide: Enterprises vs. SMEs

While giants like Aramco and DP World forge ahead, the picture for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is more complex. Project NANDA’s 2025 research highlights a “GenAI Divide,” revealing that while 95% of organisations are investing in AI, only 5% are extracting significant value.

For SMEs, the barriers are talent and infrastructure. However, the rise of Low-Code/No-Code platforms is providing a bridge. As reported by Gulf News, Zoho has seen 50% growth in the region, driven by businesses modernising legacy systems without the need for expensive engineering teams.

To further support this sector, the Saudi SME Bank launched Phase II of its Agency Model in 2025. By partnering with crowdfunding platforms like Manafa and Lendo, they have allocated SAR 240 million specifically to finance SME growth and digital transformation.

The Future of Work: A Divergent Path

The impact on the job market is profound. The World Economic Forum’s “Future of Jobs 2025” report predicts a divergent effect: while routine roles in administration and manual labour are declining, demand for AI and big data specialists is surging.

In the GCC, this dynamic intersects with nationalisation agendas. Governments are using AI to solve the skills mismatch. The Massar Al Ghurair platform, launched in the UAE in 2025, uses AI algorithms to match Emirati youth with career paths and upskilling opportunities. By automating career counselling and recruitment, the region aims to replace low-skilled expatriate labour with high-skilled local talent.

Looking Ahead to 2026

As we look toward 2026, the focus will shift from adoption to governance and integration. Gartner forecasts that IT spending in the MENA region will reach $169 billion in 2026, an 8.9% increase mainly driven by AI infrastructure.

We can expect the realisation of “Cognitive Cities.” In Saudi Arabia, NEOM is moving from earthworks to deploying a cognitive operating system that predicts resident needs. Meanwhile, Dubai’s Cashless Strategy aims to have 90% of all transactions be digital by 2026, creating a data-rich environment for further autonomous innovation.

The year 2025 was the year the machines started to think. The year 2026 will be the year we learn to live and work alongside them.