Eclusive interview with Ravi Jethwani, CEO, Innovations Global

As the UAE enters the second half of 2026, how would you assess the current state of the job market? What key trends are shaping recruitment today?

The UAE job market remains fundamentally resilient, although it has become more selective. Regional uncertainty created some short-term caution among employers, particularly around the middle of the year, but this has not changed the underlying attractiveness of the UAE as a business and employment hub. Recruiters are already expecting hiring activity to strengthen as companies restart recruitment plans that were temporarily paused.

Despite recent regional uncertainties, hiring activity appears to be picking up. What factors are driving this renewed recruitment momentum?

The biggest driver is the UAE’s continued economic diversification. Businesses are investing across technology, financial services, healthcare, real estate, infrastructure, energy and professional services rather than relying on a single economic engine.

Dubai’s Q1 2026 GDP grew 2.4% year-on-year, with particularly strong performances in healthcare, construction, financial services and utilities. 

There is also a significant amount of investment already committed to long-term projects. As business confidence improves, organisations that delayed hiring are likely to revisit those plans.

Dubai has become one of the world’s most attractive employment destinations. What do you believe has contributed to this transformation, and why does it continue to attract global talent?

Dubai has successfully created something that goes beyond simply being a place to work—it has become a global platform for business. 

Its advantages include world-class infrastructure, connectivity, a highly international business environment, a relatively business-friendly regulatory framework and access to markets across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Importantly, Dubai has continuously reinvented itself. It has moved from being primarily associated with trade and real estate to becoming a significant centre for finance, technology, logistics, tourism, healthcare, professional services and innovation.

Which sectors are expected to lead hiring in the UAE during the second half of 2026, and what roles are currently in highest demand?

I would expect technology and AI, financial services, healthcare, energy and renweables, construction, real estate, logistics, professional services to remain among the strongest areas.

In terms of roles, demand is increasingly concentrated around AI and data professionals, technology specialists, cybersecurity, finance and investment professionals sales and business development, healthcare soecialist, engineering and specialized talent. The important point is that AI is creating demand not only for pure AI specialists, but for people who can combine AI capability with industry expertise

What advice would you give to professionals who are looking to advance their careers or secure new opportunities in the UAE?

My advice would be to be much more strategic about the job search. Don’t simply apply to hundreds of vacancies with the same CV. Understand the industry, identify companies that are expanding and tailor your profile to the requirements of those organisations. Network is also extremely important in UAE. Build relationships with recruiters, industry professionals and decision-makers rather than relying entirely job portals.

Are there any emerging workplace trends—such as flexible work, upskilling, or digital transformation—that will significantly influence the future of work in the UAE?

First is AI enabled work. AI will increasingly become part of everyday workflows rather than a separate technology function.

Second is continous upskilling. The half-life of skills is becoming shorter, so employers and employees will both have to invest in learning. Third is the evolution of flexible working. I don’t think the future will necessarily be completely remote or completely office-based. Instead, organisations will increasingly adopt hybrid models based on productivity, collaboration and the nature of the role. The UAE has an opportunity to become a leader in this new model because of its young, international and digitally sophisticated workforce.

Looking ahead, what is your outlook for the UAE job market over the next 12 months, and what opportunities do you foresee for employers and job seekers?

I am cautiously optimistic about the next 12 months. I expect recruitment to become progressively more active as businesses move beyond the uncertainty of the first half of 2026 and resume investment and expansion plans. The fundamentals remain strong: economic diversification, infrastructure investment, international capital, population growth and the UAE’s continued positioning as a global business hub.

However, I don’t expect every segment of the market to grow equally. The market will remain selective, and employers will continue to demand stronger productivity and specialised skills.

For employers, the opportunity is to access an increasingly sophisticated global talent pool. For professionals, the opportunity is to build careers in sectors that are expanding rapidly.

Ultimately, I believe the UAE job market is moving from a “jobs market” to a “skills market.” The winners over the next few years will be organisations that can attract and retain the right talent, and professionals who continuously upgrade their skills and demonstrate measurable value.

Exclusive interview with Jai Sharma, Founder, Envelop Designs Arabia 

Envelop has worked with major hospitality names including Taj Hotels, Rambagh Palace, Fairmont Udaipur, Ananta Hotels & Resorts and Emaar. What does a hotel or hospitality brand typically come to you wanting, and how does that differ from what a private client wants?

The starting point is actually the same, we begin with the story. Before we think about the space or the visual language, we want to understand who we’re designing for, their personalities, their values, what makes them different from everyone else in the room.

With a private client, that story is personal, a couple’s journey, their relationship, their families. With a hospitality brand, the story belongs to the property itself, its history, its guests, what it wants to be remembered for. The questions we ask change, but the process doesn’t. We’re still uncovering the emotional core before a single design decision gets made.

Hospitality brands are increasingly investing in “experience” as a differentiator rather than just service or amenities. From where you sit, is that a genuine shift in the industry or more of a marketing trend?

I’d call it a genuine shift, and it mirrors what we’ve seen happen with weddings over the last decade. The biggest change has been from display to meaning. Earlier, everything was about grandeur, now it’s increasingly about intention. Guests want experiences that reflect a place’s personality and values, not just its amenities.

The common thread across hospitality, weddings and brand experiences is emotional storytelling. People remember how something made them feel far longer than they remember what it looked like. We call it the memory economy, and hotels are starting to design for it the same way we’ve always designed celebrations, around recall, not just service.

You’ve now partnered with Rayqube to launch Envelop Designs Arabia in the UAE. What made Rayqube the right partner, and what does the division of expertise look like between design and technology in that partnership?

Rayqube brings nearly a decade of expertise in events, exhibition build-outs and technology-driven experiences, and that’s exactly the layer we needed to build properly in this market. Our strength has always been narrative, understanding a story and translating it into a spatial and experiential journey. Rayqube’s strength is production and technology, the infrastructure that makes ambitious ideas actually executable at scale.

Bringing that philosophy into the UAE through Envelop Designs Arabia let us build for a market that’s hungry for experiences with real cultural depth, and Rayqube is the right partner to help us do that. Design and technology under one roof means we’re not compromising on either side.

Hospitality operators think in terms of repeat guests and brand loyalty, not just single events. How do you design an experience that serves that longer-term relationship rather than just the moment itself?

A single celebration has one goal, to be remembered by the people in the room that night. A hospitality brand needs something that keeps working long after the guests have left, that makes them want to come back, or tell someone else about it.

What we’ve found is that the two aren’t actually in conflict. If an experience is built around genuine narrative rather than spectacle, it tends to create exactly the kind of memory that brings people back. We’re not designing for one night when we work with a hotel group, we’re designing for how that property wants to be felt every time someone walks through it.

The UAE hospitality and events market is famously competitive at the luxury end. What gap did you see here that made you confident there was still room for a studio built around narrative rather than décor?

We didn’t come to the UAE because it was the obvious next step. We came because I believe this region understands what it means to design a moment rather than just produce an event. There’s a real appetite here for depth, for culture, for experiences that are felt rather than simply seen.

Much of the region’s industry has been built around production and décor, and it’s genuinely excellent at that. What we saw was a different question waiting to be asked, not what a space should look like, but how it should make guests feel, treating every project as a complete sensory experience and reading psychology, pacing and emotion as real materials of design, alongside light, sound and space.

You’ve said Envelop deliberately limits itself to seven or eight social projects a year. Does that same discipline apply to hospitality partnerships, or does a longer-term brand relationship with a hotel group work differently from a single wedding or celebration?

The discipline is the same, even if the shape of the relationship is different. A hospitality partnership isn’t one project, it’s an ongoing one, so the depth we’d normally put into a single celebration gets spread across a longer relationship instead. That actually suits us. We’re not interested in taking on every hotel group that approaches us, we’re interested in the ones where there’s real alignment on what an experience should be.

The seven or eight number applies specifically to social projects, but the underlying principle, depth over volume, is what governs every relationship we take on, hospitality included.

With Envelop Designs Arabia, you’ve mentioned engaging in early conversations around Dubai’s real estate sector alongside hospitality and brand work. How closely connected are real estate and hospitality experience design from where you sit, and do they draw on the same process?

They’re closer than people assume. A real estate launch and a hospitality brand are both, in a sense, asking people to imagine a feeling before they’ve fully experienced the place, whether that’s living somewhere or staying somewhere. Both are memory economy exercises.

We’re already engaged in conversations for potential pitches with the city’s rapidly evolving real estate sector, and the process we’d bring to that is identical to what we bring to hospitality, understand the story, understand what feeling needs to be associated with the brand, then build the experience backward from there.

Technology is becoming a bigger part of how hospitality brands design guest experiences, from immersive installations to digital touchpoints. How do you decide when technology adds to a narrative versus when it distracts from it?

Technology can accelerate research, visualisation and execution, and we use it for exactly that. But it can not sit with a guest and understand what a particular moment means to them. That part of the work, empathy, intuition, storytelling, will always be human.

The test for us is simple, does the technology serve the story, or is it there because it looks impressive. If it’s the latter, we leave it out, no matter how capable it is. Technology should disappear into the experience, not announce itself.

Looking at Envelop’s growth trajectory, from Jaipur to Abu Dhabi to a full-time UAE presence, what does success in this market look like for you three to five years from now, beyond revenue targets?

The numbers matter, and we’ve set clear targets as part of that growth. But if I look at it purely through revenue, I’d be missing the point of why we came here in the first place.

Success for me looks like the UAE becoming a place where we get to attempt ideas we simply couldn’t have executed before, projects that need this scale, this appetite for depth, this cultural richness. If in three to five years people in this market associate Envelop with experiences that are felt rather than seen, that’s the real marker, the revenue will follow that, not the other way around.

Sylvana Sari, Co- Founder and Managing Partner of Bobi Bowl

As Indonesia marks its Independence Day, Bobi Bowl reflects on how food, culture and hospitality help carry Indonesian identity beyond its borders.

From celebrating familiar flavours in Dubai to introducing Indonesian cuisine to new audiences, the restaurant shares what independence, authenticity and “Made in Indonesia” mean in modern hospitality.

How do Indonesians celebrate Independence Day, and how is Bobi Bowl marking the occasion?

Independence Day for us is a celebration of being Indonesian. Food is one of the easiest ways to bring that feeling with you, wherever you are.

At Bobi Bowl, we do not create a special Independence Day menu because we celebrate Indonesian food every day. Every dish we serve is already a celebration of Indonesia, from our rendang and empal gepuk to nasi goreng, satay and soto. These are dishes that carry memories, culture and a sense of home.

On Independence Day, we simply wanted to share that celebration with everyone. So instead of creating a special menu, we are giving our guests Klepon Merah Putih as a small gesture of sharing, which is such an important part of Indonesian culture.

What does independence mean for Indonesia’s hospitality industry, and how has the sector evolved globally?

I think independence in Indonesia’s hospitality industry is about having the confidence to say: this is who we are, this is what we eat, this is what we celebrate, this is our culture, and we proudly share it with the world.

Indonesia is no longer just a place people travel to for hospitality experiences. Indonesian identity itself is becoming something that can be exported.

Indonesian cuisine, design, wellness, craftsmanship and service culture are increasingly travelling beyond the country’s borders. Restaurants, chefs, hotels and lifestyle brands are introducing Indonesian experiences to international audiences.

How are Indonesian hospitality brands gaining international recognition?

International recognition does not mean making Indonesian hospitality look international. It means making Indonesian hospitality understandable internationally. One of the simplest signs that we are gaining international recognition is when people who are not Indonesian actively choose Indonesian food and hospitality.

For us at Bobi Bowl, we see that every day in Dubai. Our customers are not only Indonesians looking for a taste of home. We have people from different nationalities who come in, discover Indonesian food, come back with their friends, recommend dishes to others and gradually become familiar with flavours they may never have experienced before.

Why is Indonesian identity important in modern and luxury hospitality?

I think we sometimes define luxury too much by price. Luxury hospitality does not mean that it has to be expensive or inside a five-star hotel. For me, luxury is also about rarity, authenticity and emotional value.

Something that is ordinary in Indonesia can become a luxury when you experience it abroad. For Indonesians living overseas, having food that genuinely tastes like home can feel like a luxury. At the same time, for someone who has never experienced Indonesian food, that same dish can be their first introduction to our culture.

How are local talent, suppliers and operators helping bring Indonesian hospitality to new markets?

We do not expect people to already understand Indonesian food. Part of our role is to make it approachable while still keeping the Indonesian character of the food.

Local talent and operators are important because they are the ones who actually bring Indonesian hospitality to life. Indonesian hospitality is not just about the food itself. It is about the people who understand the food, the culture and the way we want people to experience it.

At Bobi Bowl, for example, Chef Bobby brings his knowledge of Indonesian cooking, but operating in Dubai means we also have to work with what is available here. We source locally where we can, find ways to get the ingredients we need and sometimes adapt without compromising the character of the dish.

What does “Made in Indonesia” mean in modern hospitality?

“Made in Indonesia” does not necessarily mean physically produced in Indonesia. Sometimes it means carrying something Indonesian with you and sharing it wherever you are.

We are Indonesian. We live and work abroad. We bring a little bit of Indonesia with us, and we share it.

Culture naturally evolves when it travels. We can modernise a dish, present it differently or introduce it to a new audience while keeping its Indonesian character. That is what we are doing at Bobi Bowl.