Expert commentary by Andreas Hassellöf, CEO of Ombori, on how enterprises are turning AI investment into measurable operational value and shifting from experimentation to disciplined adoption centred on workflows, governance, and business outcomes.

Large enterprises are beginning to speak more openly about the growing gap between AI adoption and measurable business outcomes, as companies reassess whether rising AI costs are translating into meaningful productivity gains.

Uber President and COO Andrew Macdonald recently said the company is finding it “harder to justify” increasing AI spending after internal discussions highlighted the difficulty of linking higher usage of AI coding tools such as Claude Code to a proportional increase in useful consumer-facing features. The comments followed reports that Uber had exhausted its 2026 budget for Claude Code within the first four months of the year, while CEO Dara Khosrowshahi confirmed the company is slowing hiring as it increases investment in AI initiatives.

At the same time, Microsoft has reportedly begun reducing internal use of Anthropic’s Claude Code within parts of its business, shifting developers toward GitHub Copilot CLI instead. Reports suggested the move was tied to Microsoft’s broader push toward its own AI ecosystem and internal tooling strategy rather than a retreat from AI adoption itself.

The developments have triggered wider debate around whether enterprises are entering a more measured phase of AI adoption, with greater focus on operational value, integration, and cost management rather than usage alone.

However, Andreas Hassellöf, CEO of Ombori, believes the issue is less about the capability of AI and more about how organisations are adapting to it.

“The real challenge has nothing to do with whether AI can increase productivity. It clearly can,” Hassellöf said. “The harder part is getting people and organisations to adapt how they actually work so the technology delivers results.”

According to Hassellöf, many companies are seeing high adoption rates and surging token consumption but are struggling to convert that activity into measurable business value. “The bottleneck is rarely the technology itself,” he said. “It is how teams change their processes, measure real outcomes, and build new habits around the tools.”

He added that the industry is now entering a more mature phase of enterprise AI adoption, where businesses are beginning to move beyond experimentation and focus instead on operational discipline, governance, and measurable outcomes. Companies that succeed, he said, will be the ones that redesign workflows around AI rather than simply layering tools onto existing processes.

“Just chatting casually with an AI coding tool and expecting it to handle everything is not enough,” Hassellöf said. “It wastes tokens and often creates more problems than it solves.”

Instead, he argues that successful AI implementation requires structured workflows where multiple AI agents handle specialised tasks such as coding, reviewing, testing, and formatting, while humans remain responsible for setting goals, reviewing outputs, and ensuring alignment with business outcomes.

“The technology is powerful, but the human side of adoption will decide whether a company succeeds with AI or whether it becomes just another expensive experiment,” he said.

Ahmad Shakora, Group Vice President- META, Cloudera

We are now in an era where digital connectivity underpins many areas such as commerce, security, governance, and social life.

In the Middle East, with ever-changing external factors, access to data has transitioned into a critical asset, with organisations and nations increasingly focused on protecting a vast array of information.

 For businesses operating in this region, traditional efficiency-focused IT strategies are no longer sufficient. Robust business continuity and disaster recovery must take center stage.

The expanding risk matrix

The current operating environment highlights several areas of vulnerability for global digital infrastructure, demonstrating that risks can be either planned or entirely unexpected:

• Government interventions can result in significant, sudden internet restrictions. Additionally, physical data center infrastructure is susceptible to multiple external factors. Severe and unpredictable environmental events, including extreme heat and unexpected flooding, can place a strain on the physical and cooling infrastructure of centralized data centers, forcing facilities offline
• Unexpected impact on physical infrastructure can arise, causing noticeable latency
• Total reliance on centralized third-party platforms amplifies operational risks. These can stem from planned events, such as routine maintenance and vendor migrations, or unplanned events, such as global software updates that inadvertently lead to widespread, cascading outages

In response to these varied and potentially compounding threats, the Gulf Cooperation Council is shifting from efficiency-first cloud adoption to resilience-first planning. Nations are accelerating investments in localized data centers, sovereign cloud environments, and multi-channel data access architectures that can withstand both cyberattacks and physical military threats.

In the UAE, the sovereign cloud market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 23% through 2033, signalling a sustained commitment to securing critical data and reducing exposure to fragile global dependencies.

When resilience becomes the backbone of survival

These external forces elevate Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery from a regulatory checkbox to a fundamental requirement for corporate survival. For CIOs and CTOs operating in the Middle East, ensuring operational resilience requires highly specific architectural choices.

Tech leaders who view infrastructure through a purely technical lens may be vulnerable. Data infrastructure must function as a strategic fortress. Resilience must supersede efficiency as the primary design goal. To continue operating amidst disruptions, tech leaders should look for the following differentiators when building their enterprise data infrastructure:

1. Cloud power, local control: do not put all the eggs in the public cloud basket. Organizations need a setup that works the same way whether it is in a giant data center or a small server at a remote branch. By running mini-clouds locally, enterprises keep the speed and control without being at the mercy of a service provider’s outage. Infrastructure must allow organizations to run data and AI workloads anywhere, converging the best of public cloud with on-premises deployments, including secure air-gapped environments.

2. Maintain internal control over enterprise AI: if there are disruptions to internet access or travel is restricted, AI shouldn’t stop working. Sovereign Private AI, by design, brings the thinking power to where the data actually sits. This keeps sensitive data secure and ensures automated systems stay online even if the rest of the world goes offline.

3. Diversify technology partners: tech leaders should implement an Open Data Lakehouse architecture that unifies 100% of the organization’s data to avoid vendor lock-in and catastrophic single points of failure. A critical design principle to look for is the strict separation of compute and storage. By utilizing highly scalable, S3-compatible object storage independently from computing power, enterprises can leverage robust data replication and erasure coding to ensure high durability, guaranteeing that all backup data remains safely within sovereign boundaries.

4. One view, no silos: managing fragmented data across a region during a crisis can be chaotic. CIOs need a Unified Data Fabric that breaks down silos and provides a single view of all organizational data with centralized, end-to-end security and governance across complex hybrid environments. Coupled with this, infrastructure must support Data in Motion: the ability to seamlessly move and process real-time data from any source to any destination. If a subsea cable is damaged or a data center goes offline, this capability ensures business-critical decisions can still be made seamlessly as traffic reroutes.

5. Visibility & isolation: Operational survival requires extreme visibility. A resilient infrastructure must feature granular observability across the full IT stack for proactive health monitoring, incident response, and data-flow policy enforcement. By using containers to isolate different tasks, enterprises can ensure that if one part of the business encounters technical issues, the risk is contained, protecting critical operations.

The future of business in the Middle East belongs to leaders who treat their infrastructure as a sovereign fortress.

True resilience requires moving past simple cloud adoption to build localized, hyper-resilient architectures that remain fully functional when global networks fail. CIOs and CTOs must now prioritize digital autonomy by anchoring their most critical operations in hardened, local environments that can withstand physical and international uncertainties. By designing for total isolation, leaders can ensure their organization remains operational and secure regardless of regional instability. The ultimate competitive advantage is the ability to maintain power and connectivity.

Healthcare and wellness businesses across the GCC are growing in a market that is becoming more digital, specialised, and commercially active. The GCC healthcare market is projected to grow from $121.9 billion in 2025 to $170.5 billion by 2030, according to Research and Markets, creating stronger demand for trusted platforms that connect buyers, sellers, service providers, and investors. Yet many businesses still rely on personal networks, fragmented supplier searches, and informal channels when selling equipment, finding operational support, or exploring business transactions.

MedSahra, the first B2B MedTech ecosystem platform focused on healthcare and wellness trade across the GCC, outlines five facts that show how marketplaces can bring more structure to this evolving sector.

Verified businesses build trust

Healthcare transactions often involve high-value assets and licensed businesses, which makes trust essential from the first interaction. A B2B marketplace becomes stronger when sellers and buyers are verified before they engage with others. This can include requesting documentation that confirms a company is legally registered and operational. For buyers, this reduces uncertainty. For sellers, it creates a more credible environment where serious business conversations can begin with greater confidence.

Private listings support business sales

Selling a healthcare or wellness business is often sensitive because owners may not want staff, competitors or the wider market to know they are exploring a transaction. In many cases, owners are left to rely on word-of-mouth or private referrals because there is no clear, specialised marketplace for these opportunities. Public listings can create unnecessary concern among employees, patients, and competitors before a deal is even serious. Private listings can make this process more practical by allowing sellers to present opportunities discreetly, while helping buyers discover small private clinics to large hospitals in different sectors, including general, dental, dermatology, cosmetology, pediatric and others areas, with existing infrastructure, equipment, and customer bases.

Equipment access becomes more efficient

Medical equipment is a major investment, yet many owners struggle to sell pre-owned devices through the usual channels. In some cases, distributors may only buy back equipment when the owner is purchasing a new device, which leaves clinic owners with limited options when they simply want to sell. A dedicated marketplace creates a clearer route for listing and discovering all types of medical and wellness equipment, whether new or pre-owned, across healthcare and wellness categories, including  dental, diagnostic, general medical, cosmetology and others. This is increasingly relevant as the UAE medical devices market is projected to grow from $3.18 billion in 2025 to $4.71 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. Marketplaces can also help users find providers for repair, calibration, upgrades and spare parts.

Support services become easier to find

Running a clinic or wellness business requires more than medical expertise, and finding reliable service providers can be a constant operational challenge. Owners often depend on search engines, personal recommendations, or scattered supplier contacts when they need support for digital marketing, accounting, logistics, customs, software development, printing, pest control, equipment repair, calibration, hardware upgrades, or software upgrades. A B2B marketplace can make supplier discovery more structured by bringing relevant service providers into one professional ecosystem where businesses can compare options and start conversations more efficiently.

Consulting adds structure to transactions

Complex business decisions often require specialist support, especially when buying equipment, selling a clinic, or preparing for a larger transaction. Consulting partners can support areas such as M&A, accounting, audit, legal guidance, equipment planning, and operational readiness. This advisory layer is becoming more important as healthcare providers adopt more connected technologies, with GCC connected medical devices and wearables projected to grow at a CAGR of around 20.19% between 2025 and 2030, according to MarkNtel Advisors. A marketplace that connects businesses with relevant experts can help transactions become more informed, secure, and commercially viable.