UiPath’s Eight Years in Dubai: Inside the Strategy for Winning in the Middle East Agentic AI Market

Few names have featured as often in The Recursive as UiPath. With 14 articles/ podcasts dedicated to its impact over the years, it remains our most editorially covered company. Originally founded in Romania, UiPath became Central and Eastern Europe’s first decacorn and has long since established itself as a global technology leader, including in the Middle East, where it first entered Dubai in 2018.

Eight years later, UiPath FUSION Dubai 2026 brings founder and CEO Daniel Dines to the stage for a keynote on turning AI potential into enterprise performance. The agenda also features sessions on agentic automation, AI governance, security and sovereignty, insights from Etisalat’s automation journey, and a panel on AI transformation across the public and private sectors featuring representatives from Etihad Airways, Power International Holding and Dubai Health.

Ahead of the event, Etien Yovchev, co-founder of The Recursive, interviewed Karl Crowther, Vice President for Middle East, Africa, India and Southeast Asia at UiPath, about the region’s evolution from RPA to agentic AI, what it takes to succeed in the Middle East as an international technology company, and how enterprises and governments are turning ambitious AI strategies into operational results.

UiPath entered Dubai in 2018. What has actually changed about how UAE enterprises think about automation since then?

Back in 2018, much of the conversation was around RPA and identifying repetitive tasks that could be automated. Today, the conversation has moved from automating individual tasks to orchestrating entire business processes - deciding how agents, robots, systems, and people work together from end to end, including what happens when an exception occurs or human judgment is required.

Scale changes the problem. According to KPMG’s recent UAE Tech Report, 97% of organizations in the UAE are embedding AI agents into workflows, products, and services, compared with 87% globally. 

For instance, the UAE’s state-owned oil company recently deployed more than 115 AI agents across functions including finance, HR, procurement, and audit. 

At that level of adoption, the challenge is no longer adding another agent. It is orchestrating agents, robots, systems, and people as one process, with clear control over exceptions, approvals, and outcomes. Existing automation becomes the launchpad for that model rather than something enterprises need to replace.  

Data residency, cybersecurity and governance have also become far more important as AI moves closer to sensitive data and starts taking actions. UiPath's launch of Automation Cloud in the UAE in October 2025 reflects this shift, offering local data residency to help organisations scale agentic AI while meeting local requirements. That combination of local deployment choice, governance and end-to-end orchestration is what allows organisations to move AI from experimentation into business-critical processes.

What does it take for a technology company as big as UiPath to scale successfully in the Middle East? What are the main localisation decisions across positioning, messaging, GTM and organisational culture?

The most important thing is recognising that you cannot take a global playbook and copy and paste it into the Middle East. It's about understanding what each market is trying to achieve and aligning technology with those priorities. 

Positioning follows from the national strategies countries have in place. Public sector buyers are measured on service delivery and transformation mandates rather than on the technology itself, so the conversation has to start with the outcome.

The technology model must also reflect local requirements. Data residency and security can determine whether organisations can move forward, but enterprises also need the freedom to operate across their existing systems, models and deployment environments without having to rip and replace what they already use. KPMG's 2026 research shows how seriously this is taken locally: 54% of UAE organisations plan to hire more onshore technology talent and 43% are strengthening data sovereignty audits across their partner ecosystems, both well above global averages.

The go-to-market model is an ecosystem sale. Government bodies, regulators, cloud providers, systems integrators and local partners all shape whether a deployment happens.

Then there is the investment itself. Our Riyadh office and our work with the Saudi Digital Academy are examples of what that looks like in practice. Ultimately, localisation means giving customers and regional teams optionality across partners, deployment models and technology choices while maintaining one consistent layer of orchestration and governance.

How does UiPath's work align with UAE’s National AI Strategy 2031? And what are the most important AI skills to develop across government and society?

Our partnership with the UAE AI Office is closely aligned with the National AI Strategy 2031 because it goes beyond simply adopting new technology. It includes developing AI-powered government solutions, supporting pilot projects and building AI skills, including a training framework for up to 100 government employees and students who can earn UiPath credentials.

Since then, we have seen the country going through a paradigm change. The UAE has most recently set a target to deliver 50% of government sectors, services and operations through agentic AI within two years, which raises what the skills conversation has to cover.

AI literacy remains essential, but organisations increasingly need people who understand how to put AI into practice, manage it responsibly and connect it to real outcomes. In practice, that means process and workflow design, managing and orchestrating AI agents, data literacy, governance, testing, and knowing where a person still needs to make the decision.

The bigger skills gap is learning how to redesign work around agents. More than three-quarters of organisations have not yet redesigned roles or workflows around AI. The skill of the future will be understanding how to design an end-to-end process in which agents, automation, systems and people each play the right role, with clear guardrails, accountability and human judgment where it matters.

UiPath recently achieved Dubai Security Standard (DESC) Certification, a milestone toward deploying agentic automation at scale. What else do you expect to unlock even greater AI adoption in enterprise and government?

AI transparency is now the top future AI risk cited by UAE organisations. Security certification is an important part of building trust, particularly for enterprise and government organisations, but there are several layers that move projects from interest to deployment. Organisations need the ability to choose between cloud, locally hosted cloud, and self-hosted options depending on their regulatory needs.

Integration and interoperability matter just as much. Businesses have already invested significantly in their existing technology, so adopting AI should not mean having to replace those systems. As organisations begin using agents from multiple vendors alongside existing applications, APIs, robots and legacy systems, all of those actors need to operate as part of one managed process.  

Governance is the next layer. Organisations need to know what every agent was allowed to do, what action it took, what policy was applied, where a human intervened and what happened across the complete business transaction. That level of accountability has to exist while the process is running, rather than after something goes wrong. The last is measurement. Adoption will accelerate when organisations can demonstrate improvements in efficiency, customer service, risk or processing time, rather than simply showing that an AI pilot works.

The choice isn't between speed and governance. Governance is what allows organisations to scale with confidence. Moving too slowly risks falling behind, but moving quickly without clear processes or accountability leaves organisations with a lot of pilots and very little transformation.

The starting point should be the business problem or process that needs improving, rather than asking where an AI agent can be deployed. From there, organisations can decide where different technologies are most useful. Some steps should be deterministic automation, some may require agentic reasoning, and others still require human judgment. The important thing is that they operate within one governed process rather than as isolated technologies.

Last year UiPath announced its expansion into Saudi Arabia. What's the actual state of AI adoption in the Kingdom, and how do you see UiPath's role and impact in the local ecosystem?

There is significant AI investment and adoption taking place in Saudi Arabia. 2026 research suggests 46% of Saudi organisations already running AI in production at scale, against 21% globally. The focus now is on turning that investment into scaled workflows and measurable ROI. Organisations understand the potential of the technology; the harder task is integrating it into real processes and demonstrating clear outcomes.

We are seeing particularly strong opportunities across the public sector, financial services and healthcare. Vision 2030 continues to drive transformation across government, while sectors such as banking can build on existing automation investments to address more complex and compliance-heavy workflows.

Another example is a utility provider we work with in the Kingdom. When a customer contacts the call centre, agentic AI summarises their history, previous interactions, and recommended next steps before the conversation begins. Handling times come down, and employees spend more time on the cases that need judgment. The value comes from connecting that intelligence into the wider service process - the customer data, existing systems, employee actions, and downstream workflows that determine whether the issue is actually resolved.

That is where we see UiPath's role in the Kingdom.  To provide the orchestration and automation layer that allows agents, existing systems, automation and people to work as one governed process while giving organisations the flexibility to use the models and technologies that make sense for them.

What are your next biggest goals and priorities for the next 12 to 18 months?

The next 12 to 18 months are about turning the ambition we're seeing across the region into production-scale outcomes. Across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East and Africa, organisations are moving quickly from asking what AI can do to asking how they operationalise it securely, govern it and demonstrate measurable value.

For our customers, the priority is helping more of them move beyond pilots and put AI to work inside the processes that matter.  For our partners, it's about continuing to strengthen the ecosystem of systems integrators, technology partners and local capabilities that can take that transformation from strategy into production, including building on the investments we've made in Riyadh.

Ultimately, success isn't measured by how much AI activity an organisation has. It's whether that AI is working in production, improving how the business operates and delivering outcomes customers can measure.