GCC AI News — 24 Oct 2026

On 22 October at the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit, M42 launched Ossi, its multi-agent AI clinical platform, built with Microsoft on Azure. Ossi launches with four agents: an ambient scribe that transcribes consultations and drafts documentation for clinician review, a health-record agent that summarises patient history, a clinical Q&A agent that prepares patient-friendly material, and a coding agent that suggests medical codes for team review. It is already live across seven M42 facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, including Healthpoint, HealthPlus and Mubadala Health Dubai. M42 estimates Ossi could give doctors up to 60% more time with patients, and digital chief Kareem Shahin called it a platform built by and for people in Abu Dhabi.

Clinician burnout from documentation is a global problem, and a home-built platform that automates the admin while keeping doctors in control shows the UAE producing its own healthcare AI, not just importing it. Deploying across real hospitals, with human review on every agent, is responsible adoption in action.

Before a consultation, a doctor can open Ossi to read an AI-generated summary of the patient's history, let the scribe capture the visit, and review the draft notes and codes afterwards, spending the saved minutes with the patient instead of the keyboard.

On 21-22 October, HUMAIN and DataVolt announced a preliminary framework with Netherlands-based AI cloud company Nebius, making it the anchor customer for a planned AI giga campus at Oxagon, NEOM's industrial city on Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast. Nebius would take up to 50 megawatts, half of the initial 100MW now under construction as part of a planned 360MW first phase, with capacity coming online in stages from the fourth quarter of 2027. The agreement, reached just six weeks after construction began, is HUMAIN's first commercial milestone for the campus and signals international demand for Saudi-hosted compute. Nebius is expected to deploy Nvidia-powered infrastructure to serve its global customers. HUMAIN, a Public Investment Fund company, is central to the Kingdom's Vision 2030 Year of AI.

Building data centres is one thing; filling them with paying global customers is the real test. Landing an international anchor tenant weeks into construction shows Saudi-hosted AI compute is becoming a genuine export business, turning the Kingdom's energy and infrastructure into globally relevant cloud capacity.

A global AI company needing large-scale compute could rent capacity at the NEOM campus through providers like Nebius, tapping sovereign Saudi infrastructure and abundant energy instead of waiting in long GPU queues in more saturated markets.

On 18 October, Qatar University, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) and Scale AI signed an agreement to build the National Co-Advisor Platform, an AI-powered system to strengthen academic advising and student success. It pairs an interactive virtual assistant, giving students 24/7 personalised guidance on program requirements, policies, course eligibility, deadlines and progress toward graduation, with analytical tools that help advisors spot students needing extra support, prepare for meetings, document outcomes and follow up. Integrated with QU's databases, it gives advisors a single digital workspace while keeping human oversight over administrative decisions. The project falls under MCIT's national government-AI agenda and Qatar National Vision 2030.

Academic advising is often stretched thin, leaving students without timely guidance. An AI co-advisor that handles routine questions around the clock, while automating the paperwork advisors dread, lets human advisors spend their time on the complex, personal support that actually changes a student's path.

A QU student unsure which courses they are eligible for, or how close they are to graduating, can ask the virtual assistant any time of day, while their advisor arrives at meetings already briefed by the platform on where the student needs help.

On 20 October at Fintech Forward 2026 in Manama, Bahrain FinTech Bay, the Kingdom's leading fintech hub, signed a partnership with Dyna.Ai, a Singapore-headquartered AI-as-a-service provider, to deliver practical AI solutions across Bahrain and the wider GCC. The agreement supports Bahrain FinTech Bay's expanded strategy, announced days earlier at the same forum, to design and deliver AI products for banks and financial institutions in partnership with technology providers, and to offer AI training for senior leaders and operational teams. The two-day forum, themed 'Finance in the Age of Intelligent Infrastructure', was supported by the Central Bank of Bahrain, Tamkeen and the Bahrain Economic Development Board.

Many financial institutions know they need AI but lack both the tools and the trained people to deploy it safely. A hub-led model that builds products and upskills staff at once tackles both gaps together, helping Bahrain's banks adopt AI responsibly and reinforcing the Kingdom's position as a regional fintech centre.

A Bahraini bank could work through the fintech hub to deploy a ready-made AI tool for customer service or fraud detection, while sending its managers and operations teams through AI training so they can run the systems confidently rather than depending entirely on outside vendors.

On 20 October in Abu Dhabi, alongside the UAE-France Business Dialogue and President Macron's visit, G42, its portfolio company Analog and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) signed three separate memoranda of understanding with Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI Labs), the Paris research company co-founded by Yann LeCun. The non-binding agreements span frontier AI research, advanced compute infrastructure and sovereign-enabled cloud, plus potential applications of 'world models', AI systems that learn about physical surroundings, predict the effects of actions and plan what to do next, in robots and other physical AI. G42 would contribute computing infrastructure and cloud, MBZUAI would focus on research, and Analog would explore industrial and robotics uses.

World models are seen as a path toward AI that can reason about and act in the real world, not just generate text. Connecting Abu Dhabi's compute and research institutions to one of the field's pioneering labs positions the UAE at the frontier of physical AI and deepens its research ties with Europe.

A UAE robotics or industrial team could eventually build on world-model research from this collaboration to create machines that anticipate how objects will move and behave, planning actions in a warehouse or factory rather than reacting blindly to what a camera sees.

On 22 October, Oman and the United Kingdom signed agreements including a memorandum of understanding between Oman's Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology (MTCIT) and investment firm Yamna for strategic cooperation on an AI data-centre project, with a first phase expected to exceed £1 billion, according to Oman News Agency. The project is expected to generate returns for UK-backed investors and create more than 100 highly skilled jobs in Britain through the export of British expertise, while building advanced AI compute capacity in Oman. The data-centre agreement sat within a broader package of cooperation covering investment, export financing, space and education, building on the existing UK-Oman sovereign investment partnership.

Reliable local AI compute is the foundation every digital-economy ambition rests on. A billion-pound international investment in Omani data-centre capacity accelerates the Sultanate's Vision 2040 digital goals and shows global investors backing the Gulf as a place to build, not just buy, AI infrastructure.

An Omani business or public body could eventually run AI workloads on new in-country data-centre capacity, keeping data and processing local while supporting the skilled technology jobs the investment is designed to create on both sides.

Abu Dhabi has connected 60 operating rooms across its hospitals to Johnson & Johnson MedTech's Polyphonic platform in what the company describes as a world first, Khaleej Times reported on 22 October. The programme, run with the Department of Health, Abu Dhabi, links providers including Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, PureHealth, Mediclinic Group and NMC Healthcare into an open digital ecosystem, backed by technology partners including AWS, Nvidia and Core42. Polyphonic aggregates surgical video data to identify patterns linked to bleeding and other complications, alerting surgeons in real time. Officials said the emirate's connected, sovereign health infrastructure made the network possible, with Abu Dhabi positioned as the anchor of a global ecosystem advancing surgical AI.

Surgical skill has traditionally been siloed in individual operating rooms. Pooling anonymised surgical data so AI can flag complications as they develop turns every procedure into collective learning, and Abu Dhabi anchoring a global network shows the emirate shaping, not just adopting, the future of AI in medicine.

A surgeon in one of Abu Dhabi's connected operating rooms could receive a real-time alert that a pattern in the live procedure resembles cases that led to bleeding, prompting a precaution before a complication occurs, informed by data from thousands of past surgeries.

On 23 October, Tax Star, which describes itself as the UAE's first AI-powered corporate tax software platform, announced a $1.75 million seed round backed primarily by angel investors. The company is a pre-approved Accredited Service Provider for the country's e-invoicing system, and the funding will go toward product development, go-to-market expansion and tools to simplify compliance for businesses. The raise is timed to the UAE's upcoming mandatory e-invoicing rollout: businesses generating annual revenue of AED 50 million or more must appoint an Accredited Service Provider by 30 October 2026, ahead of the first mandatory implementation phase.

Tax compliance is a real, recurring pain for businesses, and AI applied to it delivers immediate, practical value. A UAE startup building compliance tooling for a new national e-invoicing mandate shows the local AI ecosystem solving concrete business problems, not just chasing frontier-model headlines.

A UAE company facing the e-invoicing mandate could use Tax Star's platform to automate invoice formatting, validation and corporate-tax filing, reducing the manual work and error risk of adapting to the new rules before the compliance deadline.

At the Abu Dhabi Future Health Summit on 21 October, Mediclinic Middle East and Commure announced a collaboration to advance the use of ambient artificial intelligence in clinical care, with a shared focus on using technology to support clinicians and make care more patient-centred. Ambient AI captures and documents the clinical encounter in the background, reducing the administrative load on doctors and nurses so they can give more attention to patients. Mediclinic framed the move as part of its shift toward more connected, intelligent and patient-centred models of care, adopting technologies that strengthen clinical work rather than add to it.

Documentation steals time from the bedside across every health system. Bringing ambient AI into a major UAE hospital group signals that the technology is moving from demos into routine clinical practice in the Gulf, with the explicit goal of giving care back to patients, not just cutting costs.

During a consultation at a Mediclinic facility, ambient AI can listen and draft the clinical notes automatically, so the doctor can maintain eye contact and conversation with the patient instead of typing throughout the visit, then simply review and approve the record afterwards.

Arab News reported on 22-23 October that AI agents are moving beyond chat in Saudi Arabia to execute multistep tasks across two sectors central to Vision 2030. At Saudia Cargo, AI workers are integrated into commercial operations: they classify incoming freight-quote emails in multiple languages, compare multi-leg routing options, select specialised service tiers such as pharmaceutical or fresh cargo, and prepare complete personalised quotes within seconds, with non-standard or high-value cases escalated to human sales teams. Separately, a tourism initiative involving Globant, Tourise, Red Sea Global and AlUla is testing an 'Agentic Tourism Corridor' where AI agents representing different destinations coordinate a traveller's itinerary, while separate rule-based systems handle bookings, payments and compliance. Every agent action is logged, auditable and bounded by pricing and compliance rules.

This shows agentic AI delivering concrete operational value in the Gulf, not just demos, while keeping humans and rule-based systems in control of anything sensitive. Applying agents to logistics and tourism, two pillars of Saudi economic diversification, is a practical template for responsible, bounded automation.

A freight customer emailing Saudia Cargo for a quote can receive a complete, tailored multi-leg quotation within seconds instead of waiting for manual processing, while a tourist's trip across Red Sea Global and AlUla can be coordinated by AI agents that hand off payments and bookings to secure, rule-based systems.