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52% of UAE, Saudi employees admit they could be tricked to deepfake scam at work
88% of employees in the two Gulf countries say that deepfake voice and video content is now so realistic it is impossible to know what to trust, says a new survey
- PUBLISHED: Tue 30 Jun 2026, 3:39 PM
More than half – 52 per cent – of employees in the UAE and Saudi Arabia openly admit that they could be tricked by a deepfake scam at work, according to a new study.
Released by digital workforce security company KnowBe4, the survey found that nearly 9 out of 10 – 88 per cent – of employees in the UAE and Saudi Arabia say that deepfake voice and video content is now so realistic it is impossible to know what to trust.
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More than half – 54 per cent – of cybersecurity leaders in the two countries reported that mistakes during everyday work have had the greatest impact on their organisation's cybersecurity in the past 12 months.
Compounding this, 44 per cent of employees acknowledge that time pressures and workplace distractions actively drive them to make critical security mistakes, even when they know the safe protocol.
This research is based on a global survey conducted by Vanson Bourne, polling 4,000 professionals, 800 security decision makers and 3,200 employees, across the Americas, EMEA, and APJ regions, representing organisations with 250 or more employees.
The new findings expose a dangerous reality for modern organisations in the Gulf countries: autonomous AI tools are expanding the corporate attack surface faster than security teams can implement guardrails.
With agentic AI now widely embedded in day-to-day work, 84 per cent of cybersecurity leaders in the UAE and Saudi Arabia report that AI agents are already taking actions within organisational workflows.
However, a lack of governance is leaving organisations exposed. The report showed that around 1 in every 4 organisations report their use of AI is unapproved or ungoverned.
“Cybersecurity has entered a volatile phase where organisations are trying to secure a hybrid human and AI workforce that's changing more quickly than security leaders can keep up,” said Dr. Martin Kraemer, CISO Advisor at KnowBe4.
“Attackers are moving at machine speed, using attacks such as deepfakes to target employees and prompt injections to hijack AI agents. Leaving almost a quarter of your corporate AI usage ungoverned is a massive open invitation to threat actors,” he added.
