Spokesperson – Yassine Mannai, Associate Sales Director at Shure MEA

Across the Middle East, continuity is being shaped by the quality of connection people experience every day. In classrooms, places of worship, and collaborative workspaces, that connection often begins with one essential factor: audio clarity. At Shure, we recognised this gap early and understood its growing importance across these environments.

When sound is clear, people stay present. Students follow lessons more easily, engage with greater confidence, and absorb information with less strain. This becomes especially important in hybrid learning environments, where every participant needs to feel equally included, whether they are in the room or joining remotely. Research cited by Shure shows that poor audio affects one-third of all virtual meetings, while four out of five common video conferencing frustrations are linked to audio issues such as background noise, echo, dropouts, and difficulty hearing others.

The same reality carries into places of worship. The ability to hear with clarity shapes how messages are received, how people remain attentive, and how connected they feel to the moment itself. In these spaces, sound supports focus, presence, and the overall quality of the experience.

In workplaces and institutional settings, audio has become central to how teams communicate and make decisions. Strong collaboration depends on being able to hear and respond without friction. As hybrid work continues to reshape professional life, the need for dependable communication systems has become more visible. [1] Shure’s regional insight, referencing IDC research, notes that 67% of professional workers are now at least partially remote, underlining how important it is for institutions to support communication across distributed teams. That understanding has been reflected in the solutions across our portfolio, including the MXA920 Ceiling Array Microphone for hybrid learning, the MXA320 Table Array Microphone for collaboration environments, and the DCA901 Broadcast Microphone Array for places of worship, where audience capture can bring greater depth to livestream experiences.

Across the region, institutions are moving toward smarter, more adaptable spaces where audio performance, system simplicity, and digital integration work together more effectively. Reliable audio has become part of how organisations sustain engagement, support participation, and deliver a better experience for the people who rely on them every day.

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.