Today's Edition
SAMIHAH ZAMAN (ABU DHABI)
Abu Dhabi-based Inception42 has partnered with Microsoft to accelerate agentic AI adoption across UAE government and enterprise operations.
The partnership supports the UAE's nationwide drive to introduce AI agents in 50% of government operations within two years, according to Inception42, the sovereign agentic AI arm of the tech group G42.
The deal aims to help organisations move from fragmented AI deployment toward a governed, enterprise-wide agent ecosystem - giving users a wider pool of agents while keeping data processing in country.
As governments and enterprises deploy AI across more workflows, many are running into piecemeal rollouts, inconsistent governance, and growing complexity across their technology environments. At the same time, requirements for security, compliance, and data sovereignty continue to grow.
The Inception42-Microsoft collaboration aims to address these challenges by providing access to an integrated ecosystem of AI agents and everyday productivity tools within a governed, sovereign operating layer designed for deployment at the national scale.
"The benefit is twofold. One, users have a wider choice of agents to choose from. Two, they don't have to learn to navigate a new system to access these agents," Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception42, told Aletihad.
Catalyst, Inception42's enterprise and government agent operating system, is built to operate with sovereign infrastructure, with all data processed in-country. It can run on premise, in a sovereign cloud, or in the public cloud, and it works across an organisation's existing data sources building institutional context.
Agents composed in Catalyst are served through Compass, Core42's sovereign model and infrastructure layer and surface directly inside Microsoft 365 Copilot - while agents built inside Copilot compose natively back into Catalyst.
"If an entity works with Catalyst, that same agent is available through Copilot, inside Outlook, Teams, Word, so a request gets handled inside tools people already have open all day instead of a separate destination they have to remember to [access]," Koshy explained.
"That's what the partnership actually changes for the end user: the agent shows up where the work already happens."
Accelerated by Microsoft Forward Deployed Engineers, the partnership gives governments and enterprises a shared operational framework across people, data, applications, and agents. This helps them deploy AI with greater consistency, accountability, and impact as they move from experimentation to production-scale adoption.
It also brings together three layers of enterprise AI that organisations typically source separately: sovereign infrastructure, intelligent agent orchestration, and everyday user adoption - reducing complexity and giving organisations a single foundation for scaling AI across industries and teams.
"This integration reflects how sovereignty and interoperability work together," Koshy said. "Demand for agents is moving faster than any single platform can meet on its own, and this puts Inception42 and Microsoft in a position to meet that demand together."
Amr Kamel, general manager of Microsoft UAE, said customers want AI that is "powerful, trusted, governed, and practical to adopt".
The partnership brings together Compass, Core42's in-country infrastructure, Catalyst's agent orchestration, and Microsoft 365 Copilot's productivity tools, he said, "creating a foundation for organisations to scale AI with confidence".
Focus on Sovereign Capacity
Koshy said the new partnership reflects a wider regional shift toward building sovereign AI capacity, backed by infrastructure, partnerships, and talent.
"Inception plays a central role of being the intelligence layer that works with in infrastructure, compute and data to provide AI agentic products not just for companies' internal consumption but also as a service for government enterprises," he said.
The company is currently focusing on the investment and energy sectors as its key "deep verticals", with its sister company Presight taking the lead in building energy AI.
"The UAE is light years ahead in terms of AI strategy and deployment. We had the first university of AI back in the day, and a minister of AI when these were just buzzwords. The seeds for sovereign AI were [also] planted at the right time, and you can see powerful models like K2 Think, Jais, and Falcon deployed across the region," Koshy said.
"Sovereignty does not just exist on a model level in the UAE but on data residency, inference, human capital, and infrastructure."
One of the UAE's biggest advantages in AI deployment, he added, is its reliable datasets.
AI use is also compressing product development cycles, enabling organisations to move from concept to deployment much faster than before.
"We are building products. My previous cycle of sitting with a customer and sharing a product used to be a year. We are now shipping products in three weeks. Engineers use code to generate this at scale," Koshy said.
