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UAE’s AI ambitions drive urgent push for security as agentic systems reshape risk landscape
As the UAE accelerates AI adoption across government and business, experts warn that governance and cybersecurity must evolve just as quickly to manage new risks
- PUBLISHED: Tue 30 Jun 2026, 3:35 PM
The UAE’s aggressive push towards artificial intelligence is creating new opportunities — but also a new generation of cybersecurity challenges, a senior expert said.
With the government targeting 50 per cent of public services to be powered by agentic AI within two years, organisations are increasingly being forced to balance innovation with security. “Agentic AI does change the risk profile,” said Salah Suleiman, Managing Director, South Gulf at TrendAI. “These systems do not simply process information; they act, connect with other systems, access sensitive data and make decisions within defined workflows.”
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Despite concerns over the pace of adoption, Suleiman believes the UAE is better positioned than most markets to achieve its goals securely because cybersecurity has been embedded into the country’s broader digital transformation agenda. “What stands out about this market is that ambition and security have advanced together,” he said. “The same leadership driving AI adoption has invested heavily in the National Cybersecurity Strategy.”
The challenge is becoming increasingly urgent as AI deployment accelerates globally. TrendAI’s research found that 57 per cent of organisations believe AI is advancing faster than they can secure it, while 67 per cent of decision-makers feel pressured to approve AI initiatives despite security concerns.
The stakes are particularly high in the UAE, where AI is becoming deeply embedded in government services, business operations and critical infrastructure. According to Suleiman, “When organisations deploy AI faster than they can secure and govern it, the risks scale just as quickly as the innovation.”
The country already faces around 800,000 cyberattacks daily, many of them increasingly AI-driven. At the same time, the average cost of a data breach in the Middle East stands at about $7.29 million, among the highest globally.
Against this backdrop, Trend Micro has rebranded its enterprise business as TrendAI, reflecting what the company says is a long-term shift towards AI-native cybersecurity. “This is not a cosmetic name change or a reaction to the AI trend,” Suleiman said. “It represents a deeper transformation in how we innovate, how our platform evolves, how we support customers, and how we secure the next compute layer for the enterprise.”
The company chose the UAE for its regional launch, citing the country’s ambitions to become a global AI hub. AI is projected to contribute nearly 14 per cent of the UAE’s GDP by 2030, underlining the scale of the opportunity.
Looking ahead, governance is expected to become one of the defining issues of the AI era. As organisations move from managing human users to overseeing fleets of autonomous agents, questions around accountability, access controls and oversight will become increasingly critical. “The answer is not to slow AI adoption,” Suleiman said. “In AI, speed matters; but control matters just as much.”
