ISIDORA CIRIC (ABU DHABI)
Nine in 10 UAE organisations place themselves in the top two resilience tiers for technology disruption, the highest level recorded across all regions surveyed in a new KPMG report.
The "UAE Tech Report 2026: Scale, Confidence and Acceleration", published on Wednesday, surveyed 2,500 technology leaders on how they are investing, adopting, and governing digital capabilities as the operating environment grows more complex.
KPMG data found that UAE organisations are outperforming global peers in several areas, including organisational resilience, investment scale, maturity of core technology capabilities, and confidence in returns from digital spending. None of the 70 UAE respondents reported zero or negative value from their technology investments.
The report describes the UAE model as one "shaped by complexity, connectivity, and control". In practice, that means companies are trying to keep innovation moving while managing the basics that make scale possible, including system integration, data protection, compliance and exposure to global supply chains.
"As a highly internationalised economy, UAE organisations balance sustained innovation with the demands of integration, cybersecurity, and regulatory alignment — producing a technology posture that is confident, disciplined, and deliberately paced," the report explained.
AI Goes From Pilot to Payroll
When it comes to AI, the survey suggests that the UAE market has moved past the experimentation phase, with nearly every respondent using the technology in their day-to-day operations.
Organisations across the country are focused on “integrating AI into core business platforms rather than treating it as a standalone initiative”, said Maher Kilani, Partner and Digital Foundation Centre Leader at KPMG Middle East.
Ninety-seven percent of those polled are actively embedding AI agents into workflows and value streams, and 96% agree that managing AI agents will become an important skill within the next five years.
Twenty-one percent are already running AI at scale and seeing returns, while 60% expect to reach that point within the next 12 months. Another 93% added that their talent strategies now include AI-native roles such as prompt engineers, AI ethicists, and machine learning operations specialists.
UAE organisations also reported the largest planned increases in digital and AI-enabled workforce capacity among all surveyed regions, with AI agents, robotic process automation, and bots expected to rise from 23% of total tech capacity today to 35% within two years.
Permanent human staff, meanwhile, are expected to drop from 51% to 43% over the same period.
Spending Big, Moving Deliberately
Half of the surveyed UAE organisations spend between $50 million and $99.9 million a year on digital technologies, well above global benchmarks. The report also found that 96% of respondents have a long-term, innovation-led technology strategy.
Budget allocation "reflects a balanced posture", split between maintenance (32%), growth (35%), and business transformation initiatives (33%).
Most of that money is going toward proven bets rather than early-stage gambles, with 69% of organisations identifying as fast followers and only 23% calling themselves innovators or early adopters. At the same time, 93% of organisations expressed preparedness to take bold risks to capture opportunities.
That risk appetite, however, is not being matched by a loose approach to security. More than a quarter of UAE organisations said they follow zero-trust principles even when this slows innovation, compared with 16% globally.
Another 66% also reported optimised cybersecurity capability, placing UAE respondents ahead of global benchmarks in one of the report's core maturity areas.
The discipline extends to how UAE organisations respond to external pressures in managing their technology supply chains.
More than half plan to hire onshore technology talent over the next 12 months — nearly double the global average of 36% — and the same share intend to tighten data sovereignty audits across partner ecosystems.
Forty-nine percent are moving away from enterprise software licences in favour of open-source alternatives; 43% plan to apply stricter geographic scrutiny to cybersecurity partners; and 41% intend to reduce technology exposure to adversarial countries altogether.
"The UAE's approach to disruptive technology is defined not by hesitation, but by strategic patience — focusing on core infrastructure today to enable faster, more confident adoption tomorrow," said Mohamad Majid, Partner, Digital Transformation, KPMG Middle East.
What UAE Tech Leaders Are Betting On Next
When asked what would make or break their technology strategy over the next 12 months, UAE respondents ranked skills, talent and strong data foundations as the top success factors, followed closely by execution and agile delivery.
Rather than clustering around one breakthrough technology, UAE respondents appear to be strengthening the full stack that allows digital transformation to scale.
Cybersecurity was cited by 87%, followed by modern delivery approaches such as Agile, DevOps and LCNC at 81%, AI and automation at 80%, data and analytics at 76%, and cloud and XaaS platforms at 64%.
On emerging technologies, UAE organisations are tracking close to global averages, with digital twins at 71%, edge computing at 67%, spatial computing at 64%, Web3 at 63% and post-quantum cryptography at 49%.
When it comes to returns, 60% of UAE respondents expect improved cybersecurity outcomes from their technology spending by the end of 2027, 49% anticipate accelerated innovation cycles, 41% expect new revenue growth and 31% hope for improved operational efficiency.
The report attributes much of this alignment to national strategies such as Centennial 2071, We the UAE 2031 and the UAE Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2031, which it said are helping steer how public and private sector organisations prioritise spending on AI, cloud and digital government capabilities.
"Resilience is a defining characteristic of UAE leaders," the report said.
"In the UAE, resilience is defined by strategic confidence, proactive governance, and a willingness to take bold risks without compromising control — and it significantly outpaces global norms across nearly every dimension."