Trends, what product and revenue leaders are saying, market moves and 52 AI and revenue tools rated for the Gulf and Egypt. Every fact linked to its source.
Thanks. The next index arrives in your inbox early next month.Weeks starting Monday, since 31 August
Same period and scope
Share of tools in each category that pass each check (partial support counts half)
Score out of 4: Arabic interface, works in Arabic, GCC data, local presence
He argued that UAE enterprises must make their readiness keep pace with fast AI adoption, putting governance, security and clear accountability in place so they can scale AI with confidence.
He said AI has moved from a talking point to a budget line for a growing number of UAE businesses, based on Pemo's SME software spending index.
He reported that SaaStr's AI agent on its contact form booked hundreds of meetings and helped source over $1 million in closed deals, calling inbound qualification the simplest high-return place for an agent.
In his newsletter he wrote that Saudi venture had its strongest quarter in two years at $760m, but the barq and Tabby mega-rounds made up most of it while Saudi deal count fell 39% year to date.
He argued that product and tech stopped being a startup's moat, and so did go-to-market; he said a founder's ability to raise capital is now the real advantage.
He argued that AI agents capture a smaller share of the value they create than conventional SaaS, with the median ratio trending toward about 5%.
She said Claude Duet has polished design and onboarding, but slow task completion and no team sharing kept it from becoming her main agent.
He argued that buyers pay only for value they can see, and that what competitors charge, even when free, shapes that value.
He said an Epoch AI analysis found the cost of hitting a fixed level of AI performance drops roughly 13-fold each year.
He argued that adopting AI tools is simple compared with changing how an entire product team operates and deciding how people's roles shift as a result.
Number series we track. Each value is dated and linked to how it was measured.
Market moves per week
Approved rows on the Moves tab, counted by the week (Monday start) of their date. Computed from the Moves tab. Source: Taken Cake Growth Index: market moves
Funding announced per month
Sum of amount_usd of approved Moves with type Funding, by calendar month of their date. Computed from the Moves tab. Source: Taken Cake Growth Index: market moves
100 voices worldwide and 86 across the Middle East and North Africa, split between product and revenue: operators, founders, advisers and writers, each with their latest public statements, dated and linked to the source.
Showing 24 of 186 voices
He leads the commercial function at CPX, an Abu Dhabi cybersecurity company, and has more than 25 years in business and technology leadership.
He argued that UAE enterprises must make their readiness keep pace with fast AI adoption, putting governance, security and clear accountability in place so they can scale AI with confidence.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗He co-founded and runs Pemo, a UAE spend management and business payments platform, and speaks publicly about AI in finance operations, e-invoicing and building lean B2B fintech products.
He said AI has moved from a talking point to a budget line for a growing number of UAE businesses, based on Pemo's SME software spending index.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He argued that AI is now removing expense-claim admin altogether rather than just digitising it, and that regulators want clean, structured data captured at the point of transaction.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He said after the Accounting Refigured event that AI is no longer optional in accounting, e-invoicing still leaves many open questions, and SMEs need support to adopt AI.
UAE e-invoicing deadlines and Saudi Fatoora Wave 25Source ↗Founder of SaaStr, the large B2B software community, who writes daily about sales, scaling and running go-to-market with AI agents.
He reported that SaaStr's AI agent on its contact form booked hundreds of meetings and helped source over $1 million in closed deals, calling inbound qualification the simplest high-return place for an agent.
AI agents for prospecting and deal administrationSource ↗He argued that AI agents now research, rank and drop software vendors on behalf of buyers, so companies must win the agent's recommendation with clear docs, fast MCP servers and defensible pricing.
Buyers using their own AI agents to research and buySource ↗Founded MAGNiTT, a venture data platform for MENA and other emerging markets, and regularly explains where startup capital in the Gulf is flowing.
In his newsletter he wrote that Saudi venture had its strongest quarter in two years at $760m, but the barq and Tabby mega-rounds made up most of it while Saudi deal count fell 39% year to date.
Startup funding concentrates in Saudi and UAE fintech mega-roundsSource ↗On Bloomberg's Horizons Middle East and Africa he said MENA raised close to $3bn in the first nine months, but rounds of $100m or more made up about half of it while regional deal volumes fell roughly 35%.
Startup funding concentrates in Saudi and UAE fintech mega-roundsSource ↗He co-founded and runs Gameball, a loyalty and customer engagement platform started by an Egyptian founding team, and writes about retention, loyalty programs, AI-run marketing and MENA startup funding.
He argued that product and tech stopped being a startup's moat, and so did go-to-market; he said a founder's ability to raise capital is now the real advantage.
Source ↗He congratulated Braze on its deal with Salesforce, called it a good deal, and said he is watching how the market develops over the next four years.
Revenue technology consolidation: platforms adding engagement, analytics and dataSource ↗He argued that marketing is becoming self-driving: AI agents read customer behaviour and run retention, loyalty, referral and CRM campaigns, while marketers set goals and guardrails.
Source ↗He is a principal at PatternMind and co-author of Pricing for the Agent Economy, and he writes frequent analysis of how agentic AI is priced.
He argued that AI agents capture a smaller share of the value they create than conventional SaaS, with the median ratio trending toward about 5%.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He argued that AI pricing debates fixate on the billing metric, when the more useful question is which risks the vendor will carry.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He argued that teams should plan AI pricing with scenarios and early indicators, treating value attribution and credit adoption as critical uncertainties.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗She is a former product executive who founded ChatPRD and hosts the How I AI podcast, where she reviews AI agents and shows hands-on AI workflows for product teams.
She said Claude Duet has polished design and onboarding, but slow task completion and no team sharing kept it from becoming her main agent.
Source ↗She argued at the Lenny and Friends Summit that AI now lets teams ship even their bad ideas, so ambition means asking which experiments can run in weeks instead of a year.
Source ↗He is a pricing author and CEO of Impact Pricing, and he hosts the weekly Impact Pricing podcast on value-based pricing.
He argued that buyers pay only for value they can see, and that what competitors charge, even when free, shapes that value.
Source ↗He argued that credits work as a company currency for broad platforms with many uses, but expected solution-focused vendors to move to direct pricing.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗
He created the 10 usability heuristics and co-founded Nielsen Norman Group, and he now writes a regular newsletter on how AI is changing UX design.
He said an Epoch AI analysis found the cost of hitting a fixed level of AI performance drops roughly 13-fold each year.
Source ↗He argued that AI now has three interaction styles, namely answering questions, doing assigned tasks and always-on agents that act on their own, and that each has its own usability problems.
Source ↗Founder of The Daily Sales and host of The Social Selling Podcast, he writes about and trains salespeople on using LinkedIn to sell.
He said direct messaging is the top LinkedIn activity for generating sales, and that personalization only works when it is relevant to a business conversation.
Source ↗He said AI agents have large potential to make salespeople more productive.
AI agents for prospecting and deal administrationSource ↗He argued that changes in LinkedIn, AI and buyer expectations call for a new approach he calls Social Selling 2.0.
Source ↗Founder and strategy director at Funky Enterprises who writes the Commercial Systems newsletter about B2B positioning, pipeline and founder-led sales.
He argued the best B2B teams use AI for research and call preparation but leave introductions and closing to humans, and that positioning will decide the winners.
Proof and human trust in AI-assisted buyingSource ↗He argued that an honest, data-driven report on a prospect's own market wins attention better than cold outreach because readers forward it to decision-makers.
Source ↗He argued that, with oil prices and interest rates rising, 2027 AI investment plans should fit on one page and name a senior owner, and that companies should fix process and data before adding AI.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗Founder of Wynter and CXL, known for message testing and research on how B2B companies position themselves.
He argued that AI has raised marketing output but not impact, because trust and attention are now the real limits.
Source ↗He said a review of 323 category-leading B2B homepages found about a third now say 'agentic', which leaves room for brands that avoid the buzzword.
Source ↗Founder of the B2B content agency Foundation, who writes about content distribution and about getting brands cited in AI answers.
He argued that teams should track AI visibility for each platform separately, since Google's AI surfaces and ChatGPT cite very different sources.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗He said a study of 129,000 domains found backlinks were the strongest predictor of ChatGPT citations, while llms.txt and FAQ schema mattered little.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗
Writes the RevOps Impact Newsletter on forecasting, GTM systems and the practical use of AI in revenue operations.
He argued that dashboards built quickly with AI assistants are a weak long-term reporting layer, and that self-serve analytics should sit on a shared, version-controlled semantic layer.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He argued that an AI tool costs far more than its contract once rollout, upkeep, unused seats, likely vendor price rises and unsupervised agents are counted.
Source ↗He founded Product Folks, an Amman-based community for product people that has run events, training and career coaching across the Arab world since 2016.
He argued that adopting AI tools is simple compared with changing how an entire product team operates and deciding how people's roles shift as a result.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He said many product people he knows look like they are doing well on the surface while quietly running on empty, and that taking time off by itself does not solve burnout.
Source ↗She manages AppsFlyer's Middle East and France markets from Dubai and writes about mobile measurement, attribution and retail-season marketing in the region.
She argued that the GTA VI launch just before White Friday could reshape November demand. She said marketers should separate genuinely new demand from purchases that only move earlier, and judge campaigns on repeat buying.
Source ↗SEO and AI search consultant whose weekly SEOFOMO newsletter tracks how brands get found and cited in AI answers.
She said teams can use AI workflows to scale AI search optimisation while keeping their quality standards.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗She argued that AI search cannot be optimised by one team working alone, and noted that local domains account for a large share of AI citations in some markets.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗Runs global revenue operations at Aircall and argues that RevOps should work like a product team.
He argued that RevOps should run as a go-to-market product team with its own roadmap and backlog, as AI and GTM engineering speed up delivery.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗He said forecasting definitions must stay consistent worldwide so leaders report one number, while regional managers adapt the supporting evidence locally.
Source ↗Widely called the godfather of martech, he created the Marketing Technology Landscape and has analysed how marketing and GTM stacks change since 2008.
He called Salesforce's Braze deal a smart, textbook consolidation move but warned that less choice weakens buyers' leverage, and expects infrastructure vendors to open up data and services so customers can build their own apps and agents.
Revenue technology consolidation: platforms adding engagement, analytics and dataSource ↗He argued that human-in-the-loop covers very different kinds of oversight, and that where people sit relative to AI agents should depend on uncertainty, stakes and how reversible actions are.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗He co-founded PricingSaaS, which tracks the pricing pages of more than 4,000 SaaS and AI companies, and leads its weekly newsletter on AI monetisation.
He argued that Notion's new split AI credit balances are too complicated, and that vendors, not customers, should absorb pricing complexity.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He traced AI monetisation from add-ons to plan credit allowances to agents, and called seat-plus-credit hybrids a low-disruption way to introduce AI.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He argued that AI weakens the link between seats and value, pushing SaaS vendors toward hybrids of a fixed fee plus usage credits.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗Atlassian marketing leader, Stanford instructor and author of Human-Centered Marketing who writes about thought leadership, B2B creators and buyer journeys.
She used her own winding software purchase to argue that enterprise buying behaves more like a playground than a funnel, which attribution tools miss.
Source ↗She argued that brands need a bench of experts, influencers and thought leaders, since audiences trust peers and firsthand experience stands out amid AI content.
Proof and human trust in AI-assisted buyingSource ↗One of Clay's founding GTM engineers, he writes the GTM Engineering newsletter about AI-driven revenue workflows.
He said most GTM workflows are still rule-based today, but expects reasoning agents that use more data to become the main way teams reach outcomes.
AI agents for prospecting and deal administrationSource ↗He argued that GTM teams should move slow, manual learning loops into software, with AI agents that act, check their own output and improve over time.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗Co-founder of SparkToro and Moz, known for audience research and data-driven views on search, zero-click marketing and AI visibility.
He argued marketers should not move large budgets into AI visibility because studies show AI assistants send little traffic, and said AI should be treated and measured as a brand channel.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗He writes The Signal, a newsletter on signal-based selling, GTM engineering and AI-native go-to-market, drawing on GTM roles at Apollo.io and Zoom and two SaaS startups he founded.
He argued that GTM engineering and RevOps are distinct, with RevOps owning data and structure while GTM engineers build the automated workflows that act on it.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗He argued that users do not want vendors' built-in agents and instead want their own AI agents to reach products through APIs, MCP and command-line tools.
CRM access from inside AI assistantsSource ↗Co-founder of ProdPad and Mind the Product, known for the Now-Next-Later roadmap and writing on discovery and product strategy.
She argued that board updates listing shipped features make product look like a cost, and should be framed as investment reports on bets, evidence and returns.
Source ↗She argued that teams drop discovery first under deadline pressure, which only moves risk downstream into failed launches.
Source ↗
He is a Munich-based product coach and author of Untrapping Product Teams who writes weekly about escaping feature-factory habits.
He argued that stale backlogs become riskier now that AI agents can build whatever is queued, so teams should prune items that miss their goal.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗He said internal product teams get little dedicated advice, and with guest Melissa Appel discussed aligning stakeholders, saying no and keeping judgment human when using AI.
Source ↗Leads content marketing at Ahrefs and publishes data-backed analysis of AI search and of AI's effect on marketing work.
He argued that some brands now publish headless content built for AI retrieval and summaries rather than human visitors, a rational response to changing search.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗He said visibility in AI answers is becoming a marketing channel of its own, and that Google penalises bad content rather than AI-written content.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗Founded lemlist, a bootstrapped sales prospecting and cold-outreach platform, and talks often about founder-led distribution and outbound.
He argued that founders should judge their content by the meetings it books rather than likes, and give consistent posting about 100 days before deciding.
Source ↗He co-founded and runs Ziina, a UAE payments platform, and writes about open finance, AI agents and payments in the Arab world.
He said Ziina's new UAE central bank approvals give it the regulatory footing to move faster and bring spending, storing and international transfers into a single app, so users have more control over their money.
Source ↗He argued that Open Finance combined with AI could produce financial agents that act for customers within permissions they set, but that unresolved questions of liability, ongoing consent and how much authority to delegate will decide whether people trust them.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗
He is a senior UI/UX designer at EY AI Hub MENA who co-founded the UX League hackathon in Egypt and now organises and mentors its Product League edition through the UX Breakfast design community.
He said this year's UX League is growing into a Product League, where product managers, product owners, developers and designers work in mixed teams on real-world problems.
Source ↗Founder of SVPG and author of Inspired, Empowered and Transformed, known for defining the product operating model.
He argued that as AI makes building cheap, experimentation should become a core product competency, with experts coaching teams that run their own experiments.
Source ↗He argued that the real trade-off is predictability versus outcomes, and that the wish for predictable roadmaps pushes companies toward output.
Source ↗He argued that even though AI lets anyone write software, most people will not, so the product role of finding valuable, viable solutions stays essential.
Source ↗
Hamburg-based coach to product leaders, author of Strong Product People and co-host of the All Things Product podcast with Teresa Torres.
She argued that AI customer personas are useful for rehearsing ideas but cannot replace real customer conversations, so leaders must define what counts as evidence.
Source ↗She said demand for her work has shifted toward helping product organisations with AI transformation, operating model assessments and offsite design.
Source ↗Coaches and trains CS teams on renewals, NRR and commercial skills, and publishes a weekly newsletter and a podcast on customer success as a revenue function.
She argued CSMs can back renewals with customer-approved dollar values for outcomes, citing a RELEX AI agent that removes about three quarters of the data work.
Source ↗She argued a CS team only becomes a revenue team when its operating rhythm, revenue visibility, executive conversation skills and rewards all change.
Source ↗She argued that missed NRR targets usually come from how the work is designed, not from the people doing it.
Source ↗He leads MNT-Halan, an Egyptian lending and payments fintech that listed on the Egyptian Exchange in October 2026, and talks about lending growth and AI in operations.
He said strong IPO demand shows investor confidence in Egypt, and that MNT-Halan will widen its product range and deepen customer engagement.
Source ↗He said MNT-Halan's risk and call-centre teams already use Apollo, an in-house AI tool for querying company data, and he expects it in many more departments within three months.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗
He leads business development at Cicero & Bernay, a Dubai communications advisory, and has written about responsible deal-making and client partnerships.
He argued that firms should test a deal's fee, scope and deadlines with the team that will deliver it before signing, and let their concerns change the offer.
Source ↗VP of Product and Engineering at Arabic-first AI contact-centre company Maqsam, formerly CPO at Foodics with earlier product roles at Booking.com, who writes the Mastering Product newsletter on product leadership and AI agents.
He argued that Arabic voice agents can transcribe speech well yet still fail on exact values such as phone numbers, so teams should measure exact-value accuracy and add a text normalisation step.
Arabic dialect, speech and document AI modelsSource ↗He argued that teams should judge AI workflows by cost per verified outcome, including failed attempts and human correction, before deciding to fund, fix or stop them.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He argued that companies hand AI agents responsibility before deciding who owns their decisions, and should set a delegation contract for each decision, enforced in software and tied to a named accountable person.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗
He co-founded and leads Abu Dhabi-based Open Innovation AI, whose Sovereign AI Fabric platform helps governments and enterprises build and run AI on infrastructure they control.
He argued that sovereign AI goes beyond compute capacity to controlling the technology stack, so governments and companies can run AI securely inside their own borders and at scale.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗He argued that sovereign AI depends on its data foundation, so governments and large companies building national AI capability need to run it on infrastructure under their own governance.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗He argued that artificial intelligence and cyber defence must now be tackled together, so public and private organisations can adopt AI safely without losing control of their data or models.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗
She leads FedEx's Middle East, Indian Subcontinent and Africa business and writes about how trade corridors, alternative routes and shipment data shape cross-border growth for businesses.
She argued that business resilience now depends on having options such as alternative suppliers, routes, gateways and transport modes, plus the visibility to act on them, with AI and predictive analytics helping firms anticipate disruption.
Source ↗He is the COO of dopay, a digital salary-payments platform for employers in Egypt, and a former Yahoo VP and managing director focused on revenue growth.
He argued that Egyptian HR software stops at payroll calculation and leaves payment to bank portals or cash, and said dopay is built to plug into the HR tools companies already use, starting with ZenHR.
Source ↗
He led product and growth teams at Snyk and CloudBees and writes about product-led growth and AI search for developer tools.
He argued that teams drift apart as small gaps in assumptions compound, and AI speeds this up when people delegate their thinking.
Source ↗He argued that a mid-October drop in ChatGPT referral traffic came from untagged links, so citations are a better demand signal than referral counts.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗He said AI search tools cite explanatory and comparison content far more than homepages, so dev-tool teams should build pages answering single buyer questions.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗
He was Chief Strategy Officer at Faire, previously led growth at Thumbtack, and writes on marketplaces, moats and growth strategy.
He argued that Amazon should worry less about AI shopping agents because marketplaces handle trust, fulfilment and fast shipping, while travel is more exposed.
Buyers using their own AI agents to research and buySource ↗He argued that most durable startup value comes from switching costs, network effects, scale and data effects, and gave a framework to test for them.
Source ↗He writes a regular newsletter on B2B pipeline, sales and marketing alignment, and runs a B2B marketing agency.
He said automated signal tracking and follow-up doubled his firm's pipeline yield, but credited results to an 18-year reputation.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗He argued that marketing's AI gap comes from unresolved IT, legal and workflow issues rather than from model limitations.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He co-founded and runs UAE-based CNTXT AI, which makes the Munsit Arabic speech model and Arabic voice agents for enterprise and government.
He said customers keep choosing CNTXT AI because it handles AI's hardest part: supplying real-world training data at the quality and scale models need.
Source ↗He argued that AI experimentation has ended and execution has begun, with new funding going into sovereign infrastructure and talent to deploy AI at scale.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He said the Actualize deal turns Arabic voice AI into task-completing agents that understand local dialects, helping customers move from pilots to live voice agents faster.
Arabic dialect, speech and document AI modelsSource ↗He co-founded Tap Payments, which started in Kuwait, and leads it as CEO while it builds a payments platform for merchants across the GCC and wider MENA.
He said Tap aims to help businesses work across MENA with payment infrastructure tailored to each local market.
Source ↗Co-founder of MKT1, whose newsletter and podcast on building B2B startup marketing and go-to-market teams are widely read by startup marketers.
She analysed more than 1,100 open marketing job posts and found only about half ask for AI skills, arguing that job descriptions lag behind how marketers now work.
Source ↗She profiled how Buffer, LangChain and Mintlify run shared, team-wide AI setups for marketing and urged teams to adapt them to their own culture rather than copy them.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗Organic growth advisor who previously led SEO and growth at Shopify, G2 and Atlassian, and whose Growth Memo newsletter studies how AI search changes traffic and attribution.
He found that much of the rise in GA4 direct traffic was bot activity, and that AI visibility could not be reliably linked to direct or branded search.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗He argued that referral clicks and citation counts undercount AI search impact, and proposed a ladder measuring retrieval, citation and trust through to pipeline.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗
He is a UK product consultant and coach who hosts the One Knight in Product podcast and co-runs the State of B2B Product Management survey.
He said a new State of B2B Product Management survey will test how product practices relate to business results, giving leaders evidence for change.
Source ↗Snowflake's CMO for more than ten years, during which the company grew from about $1 million to more than $4 billion in revenue; she now leads a marketing team of about 700 people.
She said she discards her playbook every year, and that holding a brand steady is a challenge when any employee can now generate branded material.
Source ↗He co-founded and runs TEDMOB, a Beirut-based software development company that builds web and mobile platforms for fintech, telecom and e-commerce businesses, and talks about how to build AI into those products.
He said TEDMOB applies AI at every stage of building a product, puts all AI-generated work through internal security and quality reviews, and avoids locking clients into a single model or vendor.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He argued that trust now matters as much as innovation and that AI must never operate as a black box, so users can see why a system suggests an item or flags a payment.
Source ↗He is a senior product manager at Luciq (formerly Instabug) in Cairo who presents its Outcomes Series webinars on mobile release health, rollouts and app quality.
He argued that teams can contain a bad mobile release without shipping a new app version, sharing a webinar where he shows how to fix it remotely.
Source ↗He urged mobile teams to stop bad releases before they reach the full customer base and pointed to a Luciq webinar on automating that check.
Source ↗He argued that a 100% crash-free rate can let bad releases through, and described Luciq's frustration-free sessions score, which also weighs performance degradation.
Source ↗Runs Geidea's UAE business, which sells integrated payments and point-of-sale technology to merchants ranging from small shops and restaurants to large retailers and major events.
He said small businesses are the backbone of any economy and argued that Geidea's payment technology delivers value both in customer experience and in merchants' profit and loss.
Source ↗He co-founded Igloo, a Dubai digital marketing agency, and writes about marketing, social media and how AI changes professional work.
He argued that AI can take over routine work, but trust, consistent follow-up and ownership still drive growth, so professionals should use AI to free up time for relationships.
Source ↗He founded Mashurah, a Riyadh firm that trains and advises Saudi product managers and product teams, and he writes Arabic articles on consumer app product strategy.
He argued that many consumer apps are not complex by nature but misunderstood by their teams, because the B2C experience mostly depends on the user's purchase intent and how easily they can find the right option.
Source ↗He argued that a company should expand into a super app only after its core product is mature, not to cover a weak foundation, and should pilot new services with small user groups and show each user only relevant offers.
Source ↗A product-led growth leader who ran growth at Miro, SurveyMonkey, Amplitude and Dropbox and now leads growth at Lovable.
She criticised confusing AI credit, multiplier and token pricing and said whoever makes AI pricing understandable and predictable will gain a major competitive edge.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗She wrote that product-led companies moving from self-serve into enterprise sales keep running into the same predictable problems, so teams should not treat theirs as unique.
Source ↗He writes for MENA SaaS founders on revenue retention, sales hiring, ideal customer profiles and packaging product-led and sales-led offers, drawing on his years as COO of Crowd Analyzer, an Arabic social listening platform.
He argued that SaaS founders should read gross and net revenue retention together. A strong NRR can hide churn, and in inflationary MENA markets price rises can inflate it.
Source ↗He argued that hybrid product-led and sales-led SaaS needs separate packaging layers, keeping SSO, data residency and local invoicing for a sales-assisted tier. He added that companies under about $500K ARR should pick one motion first.
Source ↗
Leads customer and AI strategy at Network International, a payments processor and merchant acquirer for the Middle East and Africa, including its merchant financing partnerships.
He said the wider partnership with Commercial Bank of Dubai gives merchants practical ways to invest, manage liquidity and grow through their payments relationship.
Source ↗A HubSpot marketing leader and co-host of Marketing Against the Grain who now leads the company's agentic GTM and systems team.
He argued that AI-era marketing teams will add new roles such as growth producers, internet comedians and creator dealmakers to win attention.
Source ↗Speaking with co-host Kipp Bodnar at HubSpot's UNBOUND, he said HubSpot's traffic fell by about 140 million visits in a year while demand generation still rose 20% thanks to new AI-era marketing playbooks.
Source ↗He co-founded Taken Cake, which publishes this index, and runs RIVET Labs, which trains B2B sales, customer success, RevOps and GTM engineering teams across MENA and builds AI agents for revenue work.
He said RIVET Labs has built 38 Claude-based agents that work as one revenue team across prospecting, closing, retention and account growth, and will release one every two days through year end.
AI agents for prospecting and deal administrationSource ↗He argued that in AI-era outbound, relevance to a problem you can solve matters more than personalization, that signals lose value as more sellers use them, and that AI should go into account preparation rather than more messages.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗He writes The Beautiful Mess newsletter about product operations, operating models and how product organisations work, and he wrote the widely cited 2016 feature factory post.
He said that ten years after his feature factory post, outcome-versus-output binaries oversimplify the work, and teams are better treated as multi-quarter bets with a real business case.
Source ↗He argued that using AI to automate every step from customer call to shipped code removes the positive friction where teams used to apply judgement.
Source ↗
Product leader with past roles at Roblox, Reddit, Twitch and Meta who publishes practical AI tutorials and builder interviews.
He argued that software is getting easier to build but harder to monetise, and that money is moving to products built for AI agents first.
Source ↗He co-founded and runs Linear, the product-development tool for software teams, and writes regular essays on product craft and building with AI agents.
He argued that good products carry the conviction of the people who make them, and warned that everyone running their own agent workflows can leave products bloated and unfocused.
Source ↗He said output is not the product, since customers do not pay for lines of code, and that context is now the product.
Source ↗He argued that agents make teams faster at producing output but not better at building products, so teams should automate routine work and keep people close to customer problems.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗Works in Network International's value-added services product team and writes about authorisation optimisation and decline management for issuers and acquirers in the Middle East and Africa.
He argued, in an article Network International shared, that issuers and acquirers should treat authorisation as an ongoing growth lever, using decline analytics, governed rules and AI to approve more legitimate payments without weakening fraud controls.
Source ↗Cairo-based B2B growth consultant who runs Digits Marketer, a GTM engineering and AEO practice for MENA B2B companies, and writes about how B2B buyers build vendor shortlists.
He argued that AI assistants now shape a B2B buyer's first list of vendors, so GTM teams should test category and comparison prompts and keep their case in sources AI can read.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗He argued that buyers settle their supplier shortlist before the first sales call, and that GTM engineering should join research, positioning and demand generation to get onto it.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗He argued that falling SaaS close rates often reflect a trust gap, because CFOs and technical leads check the vendor on their own after the demo.
Proof and human trust in AI-assisted buyingSource ↗He coaches product teams on connecting product strategy, OKRs and discovery, and writes the Product Practice Newsletter.
He argued that a good strategy is defined by what it rules out, and that AI should amplify customer value rather than be the pitch.
Source ↗He argued that AI can widen the options a team weighs but cannot be held accountable, so leaders must understand and defend the reasoning.
Source ↗
Leads CX at Belfry, has built digital customer success programs, and hosts The Digital CX podcast on scaled, AI-assisted customer success.
He said single-reason churn fields miss the full story, and described a four-step process using Claude to test churn explanations against customer data.
Source ↗He described having Claude audit his business, which suggested 36 managed agents, and said similar agent teams could help CSMs track churn and upsell signals.
Source ↗He argued that customers who stop logging in or raising tickets can still look green on health scores, and that going quiet is often an early churn signal.
Source ↗Wrote the Go-To-Market Strategist book and publishes a weekly newsletter with B2B go-to-market frameworks and survey data.
She said the 2026 State of B2B GTM survey she co-ran ranks AI search and signal-based outbound as top planned 2027 investments, while cold outreach looks saturated.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗He is Chief Product Officer at Mal, an Abu Dhabi AI-native Islamic finance app, and has spoken at ProductTank Abu Dhabi about using AI in product work.
He said, in a ProductTank Abu Dhabi talk at Hub71 on becoming a 10x product owner with AI, that AI is changing how product people work day to day, and discussed which tools and skills are growing in importance and how to get more value from tools teams already have.
Source ↗Leads Dubai-based Network International, a merchant acquiring and payment processing provider that is expanding its acquiring business into Saudi Arabia.
He said Saudi Arabia is the largest payments market across the Middle East and Africa and that, after investing over $100 million there, Network International is now expanding into merchant acquiring for small businesses and enterprises.
Source ↗He writes widely read essays on product management and agile, focused on helping teams escape the feature factory.
He argued that cutting scope to hit deadlines locks teams into a flawed design, and they should rethink the problem and how work is sliced instead.
Source ↗He argued that rules designed around the weakest performers hold back the strongest, and leaders should raise expectations and fix root causes.
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A former chief customer officer who now advises B2B SaaS companies on retention and expansion, and writes The Journey, a regular newsletter on post-sale work.
She argued that onboarding stalls when customers bring a problem but no defined goal, so CSMs should work back from that pain to measurable outcomes.
Source ↗She argued that retention plans should account for CAC payback, giving accounts that have not yet paid back their acquisition cost a more intensive first year.
Source ↗Social selling coach and founder of AMP Social who trains B2B sales teams on LinkedIn prospecting and outbound pipeline.
He explained how Sales Navigator filters and saved searches, plus signals like job changes, profile views and recent posts, help reps find warmer leads others miss.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗He runs Orange Egypt's business segment as the operator shifts revenue toward IT, AI and smart-city services.
He said IT and AI services are Orange Egypt's fastest-growing area, and that smart-city bundles for property developers sell at higher prices than basic connectivity.
Source ↗He argued that AI and government investment in Egyptian data centres will reshape the market over the next decade, rewarding firms that build technical teams.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗CMO of the account-based marketing platform Demandbase, who speaks about how AI search is changing the way B2B buyers find and assess vendors.
She said Demandbase research found ChatGPT referrals to B2B sites grew about 300% in a year, so much buyer research now happens out of vendors' view.
Buyers using their own AI agents to research and buySource ↗A former IDC analyst credited with coining the term SaaS, she studies subscription and recurring-revenue models at Zuora's Subscribed Institute.
On Topline she explained why AI proofs of concept no longer signal real pipeline, and how to tell experimental AI revenue apart from true recurring revenue.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He leads Google Labs, the Gemini app and AI Studio, where Google tests and scales new AI products such as NotebookLM, now called Gemini Notebook.
He argued that every company should now work like a labs team, building for capabilities that change weekly and knowing when to kill an idea.
Source ↗He said NotebookLM is being renamed Gemini Notebook and will stay a standalone research tool, with each notebook getting a cloud computer that can write and run code.
Source ↗SparkToro's Chief Evangelist and co-author of Zero Click Marketing, who writes the company's Audience Research newsletter and is known for zero-click, audience-first marketing.
She argued that as AI makes content cheap, visibly human-made creative work will become more valuable, so leaders should protect time for experimentation.
Source ↗She argued that marketers should stop trying to reverse-engineer algorithms and instead earn trust with work people want to save and share.
Source ↗He founded HelloPM, an Indian product management school, after product and growth leadership roles at Scaler, INDmoney and SHEROES.
He said his review of 12,500 PM job posts found over 30% now ask for AI skills, and PMs should start from a real use case rather than a tool.
Source ↗He writes Growth Unhinged, a widely read newsletter on B2B pricing, product-led growth and go-to-market strategy.
He argued that AI pricing is shifting away from selling access toward billing on usage and outcomes, and that go-to-market teams must make these variable costs feel predictable to customers.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He argued that third-party intent signals are now widely available, so stronger GTM plays combine them with first-party data such as product usage and closed-lost deal context.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗
He leads Salesforce in the Middle East and talks about how Gulf enterprises are putting AI agents to work in sales and service.
He said Gulf businesses have moved from AI trials to full deployment faster than most regions. He added that return on investment now dominates boardroom talks in Dubai and Riyadh, with companies wanting agents that do real sales, service and operations work on their own data while people stay in control.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He co-founded Riyadh-based MOZN and was its Chief Product & Technology Officer until mid-2026, leading its financial-crime platform and agentic AI products for Saudi banks and fintechs.
He said financial institutions do not experience risk in separate silos, so they should be able to manage fraud, AML and compliance risk on one connected platform.
Source ↗He argued that legacy sanctions screening struggles with complex names and context, and that bilingual Arabic-English AI helps separate real risk from noise.
Arabic dialect, speech and document AI modelsSource ↗He argued that high-assurance bank workflows need purpose-built AI agents that reason over the institution's own data and leave the final decision with a person, not one generic assistant added on top.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗He founded Wafeq in 2019, an accounting and e-invoicing software company based in Dubai with an office in Riyadh, and he posts practical guidance on getting businesses onto its e-invoicing product.
He argued that UAE e-invoicing is now mandatory, so complying should not cost businesses extra, and said Wafeq became an accredited provider so its customers would not need to.
UAE e-invoicing deadlines and Saudi Fatoora Wave 25Source ↗He said Wafeq aims to give UAE businesses one platform for accounting, invoicing, VAT and e-invoicing, with no outside vendors involved.
UAE e-invoicing deadlines and Saudi Fatoora Wave 25Source ↗He is Wio Bank's Chief Commercial Officer and the bank's voice on commercial partnerships, such as embedded finance for clinics and one-click card checkout.
He said switching on Mastercard Click to Pay by default lets Wio customers complete online purchases in a single tap, with added reassurance.
Source ↗He said the Toothpick partnership brings Wio's financial services to both clinics and patients, and shows how embedded finance can add value across a whole sector.
Source ↗He argued that building banking and lending into tools merchants already use, through the Geidea partnership, makes financing easier for UAE SMEs.
Source ↗A former Stripe chief business officer who now leads Vercel's go-to-market and is a leading voice on agent-run sales and support.
She explained that Vercel's inbound sales agent started with one part-time engineer and a top SDR's prompt, with humans reviewing its work until it proved reliable.
AI agents for prospecting and deal administrationSource ↗She explained how AI is changing Vercel's go-to-market, noting that an AI agent already resolves 91% of the company's support volume.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗Leads Capgemini's delivery centre in Egypt and speaks on how AI is changing Egypt's outsourcing offer to international clients.
At the EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum he warned that AI is eroding the multilingual edge behind Egypt's outsourcing industry, citing a Capgemini tool that already handles 56% of one client's service desk traffic without humans.
Egypt as a delivery and outsourcing hub for Gulf clientsSource ↗
He writes Kellblog on SaaS metrics, go-to-market and board practice, drawing on years as an enterprise software CEO.
He argued that handling churn and renewals can sap new-business sellers' conviction, which is a reason to consider splitting off the new-business team.
Source ↗He argued that executives chase plan and efficiency but rarely check whether the company is gaining or losing market share.
Source ↗He argued that AI notetakers do not belong in board meetings, because a detailed record makes directors less candid and could be discoverable.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗He runs the Copenhagen pricing consultancy Willingness to Pay, wrote the B2B SaaS pricing book The Pricing Roadmap, and writes the Monday Price Point newsletter on SaaS and AI pricing.
He argued that units of a usage metric vary widely in value, so companies should tighten the unit's definition before adjusting price.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He argued that moving from seats to usage billing shifts payment risk but does not make pricing value-based unless the metric tracks customer outcomes.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗
Long-standing writer and trainer on product strategy, vision and roadmaps who now covers how AI changes product operating models.
He argued that ethics should sit beside desirability, feasibility and viability as a core product success factor, tracked with dedicated metrics.
Source ↗He argued that bolting AI onto existing product practices brings limited gains, and organisations must redesign their product operating model to benefit.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He is a product designer and the author of Mobile First, he led product and design work at Google, Yahoo and eBay, and he now writes about designing interfaces for AI agents.
He argued that chat threads stop working once agents manage other agents, so tools need more specific views such as diagrams, walkthroughs and before-and-after screenshots to steer them.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗He argued that when AI agents write most of the code, a design system acts as a steering layer that keeps everyone's agent-made changes on brand.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗He founded and runs n8n, a Berlin-based workflow automation platform that teams use to build and run AI agents with human approval steps.
He argued that Claude Code only covers describing the work, while n8n keeps growing by adding human approval for risky agent actions, step-by-step run logs and team handoffs.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗The founder of Outreach who now runs Paid, a billing platform for AI agents, and speaks often about how agents should be priced.
He argued that AI agents should be priced on the work they do rather than on seats or tokens, with itemised bills that let buyers see the value delivered.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗She researches and writes regularly about how Google and AI answer engines choose and cite sources.
She argued that Google is signalling a major update aimed at AI spam and manipulative AI-search tactics such as self-promotional listicles.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗She said ChatGPT increasingly limits fan-out searches to trusted sites, so fewer domains get cited in each answer.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗He leads ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI, and his work includes Codex, ChatGPT Work and the Dots personal agent platform.
He argued that AI agents will come to dominate internet traffic, and that today's loop, graph and fine-tuned agent workflows are a passing phase.
Source ↗She founded and runs Sales Techies, a Cairo-based, Arabic-first learning platform that trains sales and business development teams to use AI. She also hosts free public sessions with hundreds of registrants on connecting LLMs to CRMs and sales workflows.
She ran an ALX workshop at Techne Summit 2026 on connecting large language models to CRMs, support tools and knowledge bases to automate EdTech operations.
CRM access from inside AI assistantsSource ↗She co-hosted a free online session on how revenue leaders can connect ChatGPT and Claude to CRMs, Gmail and Slack to automate follow-up and reporting.
CRM access from inside AI assistantsSource ↗She has led commercial strategy and partnerships at Paymob, one of MENA's largest payments platforms, for more than eight years, working on merchant payments, SME card acceptance and AI-driven commerce.
She spoke on a Techne Summit 2026 panel about how AI agents are changing the way people discover, choose and pay, and what that means for merchants.
AI agents on WhatsApp and agentic commerceSource ↗She said merchants that offer customers flexible payment options see conversions rise 18% and basket sizes rise 33%.
Source ↗She argued that Egypt's large unbanked population, high mobile use and shortage of card terminals open a big market for fintechs, especially low-cost soft POS tools.
Source ↗He co-founded Taager, a social e-commerce platform started in Egypt in 2019 that handles sourcing, storage, shipping and payment collection for online sellers, and he leads its growth. He has spoken publicly about Taager's expansion beyond Egypt into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq and Morocco.
He shared that he would lead a Techne Summit Alexandria workshop on Taager's story, its inspirations and lessons from its early days.
Source ↗He argued that Morocco pairs a connected young population with a strong digital ecosystem, and said Taager aims to cut the barriers that stop young people starting online businesses.
Source ↗Founder of Saudi AI customer experience company Lucidya and a prominent voice on Arabic-first CX AI and governed service agents.
He said Lucidya's AI agent now closes cases within clients' own systems under policy controls and audit logs, citing one deployment that handled about 85% of eligible cases without staff, and predicted governance will become a purchasing criterion.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗She helps product organisations change how they operate during AI adoption, reorgs and leadership changes, and she writes regularly about product operating models.
She argued that AI is still used single-player, so PMs, designers and engineers each work faster alone and the product trio no longer builds together.
Source ↗She said making her AI write a short log after each work session showed she was still doing most of the execution herself instead of delegating it.
Source ↗He leads BASF's country business and sales in Egypt and covers the wider Middle East, where BASF sells through distributors.
He said he wants BASF to become a solution provider in Egypt that goes beyond crop protection, while it relies on distributors in the Gulf and Levant.
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He runs the Microsoft organisation that builds Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Agent 365, Power Platform and Dynamics 365.
He argued that putting unlimited AI token use inside a per-user licence leads to negative gross margin, and that consumption pricing will win for new companies.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He argued that thin SaaS apps must go headless behind AI super apps, because agents are demanding customers that switch quickly to the cheapest, fastest and most reliable option.
Buyers using their own AI agents to research and buySource ↗Leads commercial work at NymCard, a UAE card-issuing and payments infrastructure provider, including its SME credit partnerships.
He said technology has a large opportunity to change how SME credit is delivered in the UAE, speaking about NymCard's partnership with Abhi.
Source ↗She is a former Faire CPO and Meta product leader, including on WhatsApp, who now runs product at Anthropic and speaks on how AI changes product management.
She argued that product managers are still needed to connect people's real problems with fast-changing technology, which means discarding old technical assumptions every few months while staying anchored on the user's problem and testing several versions in parallel.
Source ↗He leads product at Cisco and writes regularly about AI infrastructure, security and controls for enterprise AI agents.
He argued that trust, not model capability, will set the pace of AI adoption, which calls for per-action authorization, discovery of unregistered agents and revocable permissions.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗He argued that model choice should balance intelligence, cost and control, with post-trained open-weight models letting regulated organisations run AI on infrastructure they control.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗She is a former Slack CPO and Glean president of product and technology who now leads product and AI at Atlassian and speaks on how PM roles are changing.
She argued that AI is expanding product roles rather than merging them, so Atlassian PMs write prototype code early in a project and then switch to steering and unblocking the team once coding stops being their highest-leverage work.
Source ↗
He runs growth, strategy and marketing for WPP Media in MENA and talks about using agentic AI tools to get business results for advertisers.
He argued that AI should be a system that helps people make better business decisions rather than just a tool, and described WPP Media letting its staff experiment with agents to find what works.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗Founder of Pavilion, the community for go-to-market leaders, and co-host of the Topline podcast on revenue and SaaS.
He argued that companies growing faster than 200 percent can tolerate poor margins for a while if they show a path to a sound business, using AI firms like Harvey as context.
Source ↗He leads product at Ramp, which he joined as VP of Product, and is known for the company's shipping speed and its use of AI agents across product development.
He argued that AI has moved the bottleneck from writing code to defining, coordinating, testing and releasing work, so product teams should use agents across the whole build process, and that PMs will split into technical factory builders, tastemakers and general managers who own business outcomes.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗Former CPO whose Product Compass newsletter publishes practical guides on product discovery, AI prototyping and building products with AI tools.
He argued that AI has made building the easy part, so deciding what to build and reaching first users is now the real challenge.
Source ↗He argued that PMs should iterate on working AI prototypes instead of upfront specs, while checking tools like Lovable for overly open data access.
Source ↗He is a former Google product manager who worked on Gmail and YouTube, and he created the GIST framework and the Confidence Meter for evidence-guided product work.
He argued that the usual launch-and-iterate process kills off most rare high-impact ideas, while evidence-guided development gives them much better odds.
Source ↗He argued that AI lets people produce work they cannot properly judge, creating a danger zone where PMs ship weak code and engineers back weak ideas.
Source ↗She was VP of Product Design at Facebook, wrote The Making of a Manager and co-founded the data analysis startup Sundial, and her newsletter The Looking Glass covers design, teams and AI adoption.
She argued that consumer AI agents spread when they pass a mom test of approachability by matching mental models people already have.
Source ↗She argued that top-down AI-first mandates fail because fear makes teams optimise for appearances, and she set out a path from personal belief to shared wins to systems with evals.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗She leads the Editor group, which covers Figma Design, as VP of Product at Figma. Before that she led core product and AI at Asana, and she held earlier roles at Intercom and Intuit.
She argued that with AI making prototypes easy, strong teams keep their speed all the way to launch, weigh many directions, and build something only they could make.
Source ↗HubSpot's chief marketing officer, who sets the company's global marketing strategy and talks publicly about how HubSpot is changing its marketing as AI changes search.
He said HubSpot lost about 140 million website visits over a year as AI changed search, and described how the company tests AI marketing ideas in focused six-week sprints.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗A former LinkedIn sales leader and creator of the Show Me You Know Me outreach method who trains B2B sales teams on prospecting and LinkedIn selling.
In a Growth Unhinged feature on what GTM teams should keep human as selling goes AI-first, she shared her frameworks for writing replies-worthy cold outreach, emailing executives on weekends, structuring intro calls and answering common buyer objections.
Proof and human trust in AI-assisted buyingSource ↗
She held senior product roles at Google, Spotify and Microsoft and now teaches her Product Delight framework.
She said a year after her book launch that structuring ideas clearly and cutting long-held favourites were the hardest lessons, and the framework now runs as workshops and courses.
Source ↗She argued that delight is a describable product quality and that companies calling it unmeasurable are making excuses, citing Google, GitHub and Lovable.
Source ↗He runs the product organisation at Mozilla and writes the FishmanAF newsletter on growth systems, product leadership and AI adoption in teams.
He argued that AI transformation fails when companies add LLMs to old org charts, and that leaders must build cultural momentum and remove friction to drive adoption.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He argued that teams should map the mechanism that creates value and find its current bottleneck before picking growth tactics or reorganising.
Source ↗Leads revenue operations at PandaDoc, earlier spent six months as interim global sales leader at Eventbrite, and talks about how RevOps should use AI.
She said AI-enabled analytics and tools handed to her sometimes reach wrong conclusions because they assume things that do not hold for her business.
Source ↗She argued that order-taking RevOps work is the easiest to automate, so a consultative point of view is what keeps the function valuable.
Source ↗He is a former CMO with more than 20 years in digital marketing, and he founded Takumi AI, a Dubai consultancy that works on AI marketing, agentic marketing and generative engine optimisation.
He argued that visual search makes product design a discovery signal, so marketers should check whether AI recognises their product without the logo.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO): getting cited in AI searchSource ↗He argued that CMOs gained control of AI before building the capability, citing a BCG survey where only 8% run autonomous multi-agent campaigns.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗
Co-founder of Marketo and Engagio who helped create the marketing automation category; now founder of Phave and co-host of The B2B CMO Podcast.
He argued that the lead-scoring and nurture model he helped build no longer fits B2B buying, and that AI should reason about each buyer's context and timing.
Source ↗Heads ITIDA, the Egyptian government agency that promotes the country's IT and outsourcing exports to US, European and Gulf clients.
He expects Egypt's outsourcing exports to rise by more than 23% to USD 6.4bn in FY2026/27, and he lists the Gulf among ITIDA's target markets even though the war there is hurting a key export region.
Egypt as a delivery and outsourcing hub for Gulf clientsSource ↗Former enterprise seller turned sales trainer and keynote speaker, known for discovery, executive selling and sales kickoff workshops for B2B revenue teams.
She argued that sales kickoffs should replace panels of satisfied customers with reviews of lost deals that reveal where those deals fell apart.
Source ↗She argued that sellers should build discovery calls around the CEO's top priorities rather than small operational pain points.
Source ↗AI product leader with Google and Meta experience who founded AI Product Academy and teaches AI product management.
She argued that shipping an AI feature depends on which hallucinations occur and how recoverable they are, not the overall error rate.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗She argued that a prototype only tests an idea, while an MVP people rely on needs evals, error handling and monitoring.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗A Dubai-based B2B sales consultant who spent six years in enterprise sales and Middle East expansion at LinkedIn and now writes playbooks on how B2B SaaS companies enter and scale revenue in the GCC.
He argued that scaling in the Gulf means replacing reliance on a few star sellers with documented processes, tracked data and a regional P&L that stands on its own.
Source ↗He argued that AI-native sales teams win by redesigning which workflows AI owns and how roles and quotas work, and that the industry needs a new way to train junior sellers as AI agents take over SDR work.
AI agents for prospecting and deal administrationSource ↗He argued that B2B SaaS firms should treat the GCC as six distinct markets, adapt hosting, procurement and pricing, and sell founder-led for about a year before building a regional sales engine.
Source ↗He is MOZN's Chief Commercial Officer, leading sales of its enterprise AI and financial-crime platforms to banks, fintechs and public-sector clients in Saudi Arabia and the region.
He argued that getting enterprise AI into production takes more than the technology itself, so MOZN partnered with NourNet, MDS and Ejada for infrastructure, integration and delivery.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗Leads Zoho's Middle East and Africa business, speaking for its CRM, business software and app development platforms in the region.
He said AI coding assistants have sped up building business apps but getting that code running in production is still hard, which Zoho's Catalyst platform now targets for developers and AI agents.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗She co-founded the seed-stage firm F6 Ventures, spun out of Flat6Labs, and is an outspoken voice on how Egyptian startups should, and should not, take their go-to-market into Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
She said many Egyptian startups that rushed into Saudi Arabia burned cash in a very different market, and that Gulf expansion only works after stabilising at home and taking time to learn local buyers.
Source ↗Product consultant and coach who has written the Product Bytes blog since 2002 and wrote the book Money Stories, about linking product work to revenue, pricing and go-to-market.
He argued that faster AI-assisted coding will not by itself speed up revenue, and that PM roles may move away from delivery toward customer discovery and commercial work.
Source ↗He argued that working code alone does not make a revenue product, which also needs reliable operations, positioning, pricing and go-to-market work.
Source ↗Australia-based product coach and founder of Product Pathways whose newsletter covers product strategy, prioritisation, discovery and how AI companies run product.
He argued that leading AI companies prize customer understanding, taste and judgement, but warned teams against copying their practices blindly.
Source ↗He argued that telling teams to prioritise by value is unhelpful because value depends on each company's strategy and is only known after shipping.
Source ↗She joined Seedtag as MENA sales director when it opened its Dubai office in 2022 and now runs its MENA business. She writes about agentic and contextual AI in media buying.
She argued that almost 40 percent of UAE and Saudi organisations already run agentic AI in production rather than in pilots. She said advertisers must pair it with contextual signals and human judgement.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗She argued that keyword blocklists exclude safe, quality journalism and cost brands reach. She said AI that reads context and sentiment protects brands without losing scale.
Source ↗Runs Tap Payments' UAE business, which provides licensed online payment acceptance to merchants and platforms across the GCC.
He said Tap's card payments partnership with Tribe aims to make the step from investment decision to payment simpler while meeting regional rules.
Source ↗
Author of Continuous Discovery Habits who teaches discovery practices to product teams and now publishes hands-on guides to AI evals.
She said fixing one customer complaint about her AI product took four new evals, sixteen experiment variants, calibrated LLM judges and an auditor step that makes the agent revise its output.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗She argued that product teams, not vendors, must define what good AI output looks like and treat evals as an ongoing discovery habit.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗
He ran marketing and retail media at ALDI Sued after senior roles at Schwarz Group (LIDL) and Iceland Foods, and since October 2025 he has led Omnicom's Flywheel commerce network in MENA from Dubai.
He argued that GCC retail media spending is growing faster than shared measurement, and that the region should agree common definitions of attributed sales and incrementality now.
Source ↗A venture investor whose daily blog analyses SaaS and AI metrics, pricing and go-to-market data.
He wrote that Vercel now handles most inbound sales development with AI at low cost, arguing the real constraint is how well a team systematises its workflow, not the model.
AI agents for prospecting and deal administrationSource ↗On the Topline podcast he argued that investors now reward a software company's AI narrative more than its growth rate, and the episode noted a shift away from mid-market toward fast-closing enterprise deals.
Source ↗Built Tabby into the Gulf's largest fintech and is a reference point on scaling consumer payments and growth across Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Announcing Tabby's $233m raise, he said the funding lets the company keep building on its founding idea of giving people more from their money, without altering its approach to growth or discipline.
Startup funding concentrates in Saudi and UAE fintech mega-roundsSource ↗He runs product at Together AI, an AI cloud company, and shares how his product team works now that AI agents are among its main users.
He said AI agents are already the main users of many Together AI products, and called agents checking that products match their docs the new standard for UX.
Source ↗He co-founded and runs Foodics, a Saudi restaurant management and payments platform used across MENA, and speaks about agentic AI, embedded finance and SaaS pricing.
He argued that the performance data restaurants produce every day should be turned into access to funding, and presented Foodics Capital 2.0 as the product that does this inside the platform.
Source ↗He discussed what happens to software once AI agents stand in for human users, and argued that SaaS pricing is moving from paying for logins to paying for usage and outcomes.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He said buying Norma speeds up Foodics' agentic AI roadmap and product releases for restaurant operators, whose data has grown more complex.
Source ↗He co-founded and leads Synapse Analytics, an Egypt-founded company that builds AI risk and credit-decisioning software for banks and other regulated lenders.
He said Synapse Analytics aims to give financial institutions the decision infrastructure to make quicker, safer decisions that lower risk and support growth.
Source ↗He co-founded Synapse Analytics, an Egypt-founded AI decisioning company for lenders, and is steering its move into AI agents that work with bank and fintech risk teams.
He said Synapse is building AI agents with banks and fintechs that work beside their teams to refine credit policies, monitor portfolios live and respond fast to market shifts.
Source ↗She runs Go Nimbly, a long-standing RevOps consultancy whose clients include some of the fastest-growing AI companies.
She argued that RevOps should embrace being a support function for the sales team, and the episode examined whether the GTM engineer role is more than rebranded RevOps.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗As Chief ICT Officer at du, he leads du Tech, the operator's enterprise ICT and sovereign cloud business. He writes about how it packages and sells cloud, security and AI infrastructure to UAE enterprises and government.
He argued that the next step beyond prompt-driven AI assistants is autonomous multi-agent systems on certified in-country infrastructure, and urged leaders to avoid offshore black-box models.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗He argued that Chinese firms and EV makers expanding into the UAE are slowed by fragmented network, cloud, data hosting and security setups, and offered an integrated managed bundle as the fix.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗He was Head of Product at Linear, now works on Codex at OpenAI, and writes and speaks about how software teams build and ship products.
He said on OpenAI's panel at the Lenny and Friends Summit that the main limit today is how well people can grasp and take in what product teams deliver to them.
Source ↗
He leads TikTok's advertising sales and business solutions team for the Middle East, Turkey, Africa, Pakistan and Latin America.
He argued that Saudi startups scale through sound fundamentals and a network of mentors and partners, and that platforms like TikTok only produce lasting growth when the product and value are solid.
Source ↗He advises B2B companies on positioning and brand and created the Everyone Hates Marketers podcast.
He argued in his Drive 2026 keynote, titled Be More Intense, that marketers need more intensity to stand out in the AI era.
Source ↗He argued that core positioning should stay fixed across audiences while messaging flexes, and warned against gradual message drift.
Source ↗A former chief product officer at Vezeeta, he now runs Keep Converting, a UAE startup whose AI tailors online merchants' product pages to each shopper.
He argued that AI will not make merchant websites obsolete, since shoppers still want to see the real product on a brand's site before buying.
Buyers using their own AI agents to research and buySource ↗He leads Tap Payments' commercial work with businesses and financial institutions, including bank partnerships such as its 2026 tie-up with HSBC Kuwait.
He said Kuwaiti businesses want modern payment collection without extra operational complexity, and that the HSBC Kuwait partnership gives them easier card acceptance and clearer visibility of receivables.
Source ↗He founded and runs MarkApp, a programmatic and contextual advertising company with offices in Dubai, Athens, London and Limassol. He writes about media quality and how automated buying is measured.
He argued that cheap impressions carry hidden costs in attention and environment quality. He said brands must define acceptable environments, and require explanations from AI agents, before those agents optimise buying.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗Has led revenue operations at six companies, now at ZoomInfo, and talks about how RevOps teams will manage AI agents in go-to-market.
She argued that managing AI agents will be a skill operators learn rather than a separate job, covering drift, quality checks and usage costs.
Governing AI agents: control, trust and shadow agentsSource ↗Head of Product at B2B workforce performance platform Lumofy who writes the Off the Roadmap newsletter on B2B product management and go-to-market.
He argued that startups without a defined ideal customer profile end up building for the loudest client, and should protect it with a negative ICP and a capped budget for off-target work.
Source ↗He argued that B2B product managers should route large enterprise accounts' custom requests through a reuse test and then reject, configure, extend or build a contained, priced variant.
Source ↗He argued that because AI lets teams build in days, the hard part is getting buyers to commit, so he had his product managers lead calls and close deals.
Source ↗He leads AI and product at JobNimbus, a Utah-based contractor software company, and writes a newsletter on running AI agents and models in practice.
He argued that shipping faster with AI only helps if quality also improves, and suggested PMs ask engineering for a quality watchdog loop.
Source ↗He has led Accenture's experience and marketing business in the Middle East (Accenture Interactive, now Accenture Song) since at least 2019, and has worked in the region for 13 years.
He argued that AI agents increasingly handle the final steps of buying, so brands must win human preference and make their claims verifiable to machines.
Buyers using their own AI agents to research and buySource ↗Author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch, and a consultant who helps B2B tech companies with positioning and sales pitches.
She argued that fast-changing AI features do not automatically call for new positioning, and that companies should reposition only if they can now deliver new value.
Source ↗He co-founded and runs Alaan, a Dubai-based spend-management and finance-automation platform for businesses in the Gulf.
He said that after licensing, Alaan will treat the Central Bank's standard as the benchmark for everything it builds, not as a one-off milestone.
Source ↗He said Alaan's new embedded business account cuts supplier invoice processing for UAE finance teams from hours to a few minutes.
Source ↗He co-founded Riyadh enterprise AI company MOZN and, as chief strategy officer, speaks for its channel and technology partnerships, including the five with Redington, sirar by stc, HPE, Microsoft and Edarat announced at LEAP 2026.
He argued that enterprise AI's next phase will be about running it in production at scale, and that partners make secure adoption easier for Saudi organisations.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He founded and runs MOZN, a Riyadh enterprise AI company whose products cover financial-crime prevention and knowledge and decision intelligence for more than 150 banks and public-sector customers.
He said MOZN's job is to help institutions link up their data, draw intelligence from it and turn that intelligence into action.
Source ↗He argued that rising complexity and regulation mean institutions need sovereign, trusted AI, and said MOZN and HUMAIN will co-create such solutions for banks and public bodies.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗
A Dubai-based independent product advisor and fractional CPO, formerly at Meta and VP of Product at MUBI, who writes essays at narain.io on AI, products and agent engine optimisation.
He argued that cloud AI risks repeating the WhatsApp pattern, where poorer markets get access while a foreign platform keeps ownership and control, and that small distilled models run locally could let communities own their AI capacity.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗She founded Tarjama in 2008 and now leads Arabic.AI, an Arabic-first company that sells translation, document intelligence and Arabic language model products to enterprises in the Gulf.
Announcing HUMAIN's strategic investment, she said Arabic is the hardest test for enterprise AI and that the partnership will help Saudi organisations take Arabic-first AI from ambition to production.
Arabic dialect, speech and document AI modelsSource ↗He leads HUMAIN, the PIF-owned AI company behind HUMAIN Chat, the ALLaM Arabic models and the HUMAIN ONE operating system for enterprise AI agents.
He argued that Arabic is one of the hardest languages for enterprise AI to serve, and that combining HUMAIN's stack with Arabic.AI and Tarjama gives businesses production-ready language tools.
Arabic dialect, speech and document AI modelsSource ↗He argued that the software layer, including model routing and an open model marketplace, sets AI providers apart more than data centres and GPUs do.
Sovereign AI compute and data residencySource ↗He said enterprises now want measurable AI value rather than experiments, and that the AWS partnership helps HUMAIN ONE take them from pilots to full production.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗Co-founded and runs Unifonic, a Riyadh-based customer engagement platform, and speaks about agentic AI handling customer journeys from start to finish while humans keep control.
Speaking around Unifonic's LEAP 2026 showcase, he said customer experience is moving from AI that helps to AI that takes action. He said the real opportunity is to tie AI decisions to execution throughout the customer journey rather than just automate more interactions, with humans kept in control.
Service agents and support as a revenue sourceSource ↗She leads product for ChatGPT Work at OpenAI. Before that she spent more than six years as one of Stripe's first product managers and led product at Watershed.
She argued that as AI takes over execution, human judgment and ambition become the differentiators, and that teams should build for model capabilities two to three months out.
Source ↗He is an AI product manager at Luciq, the mobile observability company formerly called Instabug, and writes about building tools for AI coding agents, such as the company's CLI and MCP server.
He argued that agent skills installed once from a marketplace go stale, and said Luciq moved them into its MCP server so agents fetch the latest skills automatically before each task.
Source ↗He argued that mobile app data locked in a dashboard is useless to scripts and coding agents, and positioned a CLI for repeatable automation and an MCP server for open-ended agent questions.
Source ↗A long-standing voice on B2B content and writing, author of Everybody Writes, and a partner at MarketingProfs.
She argued that reports of physical books being destroyed to train AI show that human writing is becoming scarcer and more valuable.
Source ↗She argued that treating em dashes and other common habits as proof of AI writing is wrong, and urged people to stop hunting for AI in others' work.
Source ↗He co-founded and runs Bayzat, a Dubai-based HR, payroll and benefits software platform for SMEs, and speaks openly about pricing, runway and building AI into the product.
He said Bayzat is using AI to cut the cost of building the last 10% of customer-specific features that win deals, aiming to deliver in hours what once took months.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He said that starting to charge for software Bayzat had previously given away free, after Covid pushed the company into a death spiral, was its most transformational shift.
Source ↗He leads strategic deal pricing for Databricks in the Americas and writes and speaks about pricing AI around business problems, outcomes and agent economics.
He argued that subscription, licence and consumption models fit AI poorly, pushing pricing toward outcomes that are hard to standardise.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He argued that every production AI agent needs its own P&L, with cost per business outcome replacing token counts as the main measure.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He co-founded and runs XSquare, a Dubai-based B2B payments platform that combines invoicing, collections, supplier payments and reconciliation for businesses in the UAE and Qatar.
He argued that B2B payments in the region have been neglected for years, with businesses pushed onto tools designed for consumers.
Source ↗
Co-founder of JJELLYFISH, known for teaching founders and early sales teams how to win enterprise deals.
A former VP of GTM operations at Carta who founded GTM Council, a community for RevOps leaders, and writes about AI in go-to-market.
He argued, citing a survey of about 90 senior RevOps leaders, that AI coding makes GTM software easy to build but maintaining it is the harder problem.
GTM engineering and signal-based sales playsSource ↗He argued that companies need their own GTM context layer above the data warehouse, owned by RevOps, because AI models cannot infer their definitions or history.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗Founder of Sixteen Ventures and co-author of the 2016 book Customer Success, who writes often on retention, expansion and customer lifetime value.
He argued that automating a new customer's first message just for speed is a mistake unless the team first defines what that moment is for.
Source ↗He argued that retention figures can mislead when calendar-driven purchase cycles are blended in, so each revenue type should be measured against its own cadence.
Source ↗Managing Partner of Algebra Ventures, one of Egypt's leading venture capital firms, who speaks about how AI changes the way regional startups are built, funded and defended.
He said AI lets regional startups chase global markets with little capital, but model output is guesswork that needs human supervision, and defensibility still comes from domain expertise, data and staying close to customers.
Source ↗He co-founded and runs Dsquares, a loyalty and rewards company that works with banks, retailers and telcos across the Middle East and Africa.
He argued that agentic AI will take loyalty beyond personalisation toward systems that act for customers and manage reward value in real time.
AI agents on WhatsApp and agentic commerceSource ↗He founded HeyBreez, a Jordan-founded startup with offices in Amman and Dubai that builds the operational layer for running enterprise voice AI agents, including telephony, callbacks, follow-ups and integrations.
He said voice AI vendors helped businesses place calls but nobody helped them run the operations behind those calls, which is the gap HeyBreez was built to fill.
Moving AI from pilots into productionSource ↗He leads Raya CX, a Cairo-based customer experience outsourcing subsidiary of Raya Holding that is growing its business with Gulf and European clients.
He said Raya CX's second-half growth plan rests on geographic expansion, more services and tech investment, with the Gulf and Europe as key markets.
Egypt as a delivery and outsourcing hub for Gulf clientsSource ↗Dubai-based enterprise software sales leader who built the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region for TIBCO, Hortonworks/Cloudera and New Relic, and writes about how Gulf and Egyptian enterprises buy software.
He argued that consumption pricing moves revenue creation to after the contract is signed, so forecasting, sales compensation and team structure must change too.
AI pricing shifts from seats to credits, usage and outcomesSource ↗He argued that UAE software deals need multi-threaded relationships because expatriate buyers change jobs often, while Egypt needs pricing and payment terms built around hard-currency limits.
Source ↗He argued that the traditional partner model is breaking down for mid-size software vendors in the Gulf, with project implementers declining while managed-service partners do better.
Source ↗He founded and runs Dubai-based Gromi, which sells AI software and advisory to help startups scale, and writes Scaling OS, a LinkedIn newsletter for MENA founders on traction, decision-making and fundraising.
He argued that MENA remains a good place to start a company despite a first-half 2026 funding drop, advising founders to pick sectors with government mandates such as fintech and keep unit economics strong.
Startup funding concentrates in Saudi and UAE fintech mega-roundsSource ↗He argued that MENA startups are more often undone by slow decisions than by weaker ideas, and said each decision needs a deadline and a single accountable owner.
Source ↗He argued that many MENA founders polish their product while neglecting how customers will find it, and urged small channel tests with set success criteria and close tracking of acquisition cost and retention.
Source ↗HubSpot's founding CRO, co-founder of Stage 2 Capital, author of The Science of Scaling and a Harvard Business School senior lecturer.
He argued that founders often misdefine product-market fit and offered a formula for building a leading indicator of retention.
Source ↗She was Anthropic's first technical product manager, helped ship every Claude model since Claude 2, and helped incubate Claude Code, MCP and computer use.
She argued that Claude's readiness to disagree with users is central to its success, and described an eval-driven development process her team is pioneering.
Source ↗
She leads product and marketing strategy at Network International and was previously chief product and marketing officer at Signicat and led global payment product strategy at Worldpay.
She said extending Jaywan acceptance from in-store to online payments gives UAE cardholders the same secure, consistent experience wherever they pay.
Source ↗Product and growth executive who writes Leah's ProducTea on product-led growth, activation and connecting product to revenue.
She leads product and technology at Netflix and talks about which skills product and engineering teams need as AI spreads.
She said systems thinking has become the skill she values most when hiring, and that Netflix treats AI fluency as an expectation for everyone, not just some levels.
Source ↗
Sitecore appointed him in May 2026 to lead its business across the Middle East and Africa, after more than two decades in enterprise sales, digital transformation and digital marketing in the region.
He argued that UAE consumers still want a human available when automation handles service, and that brands should be open about AI use to close a digital trust gap.
Proof and human trust in AI-assisted buyingSource ↗She co-founded Spare, an open banking company that gives Gulf businesses and lenders APIs for bank account data, verification and pay-by-bank payments.
She said regional B2B payments remain fragmented, costly and complex to operate, and that the Xsquare partnership lets companies use open finance in their day-to-day payment processes.
Source ↗She leads Visa's business in the UAE and has written about checkout and payments as levers for merchant growth.
She argued that businesses should treat checkout as a growth lever, because friction there wastes acquisition spend, and should cut manual steps with tokenisation and biometric authentication.
Source ↗
He leads marketing, customer experience and the air network for FedEx across the Middle East, Indian Subcontinent and Africa, and writes about data-driven logistics tools and helping SMEs reach export markets.
He said that anticipating and responding to supply-chain problems has become a clear competitive advantage, and that FedEx Surround gives Saudi businesses data-driven tools to build resilience and make better decisions.
Source ↗She is a senior product manager at Luciq (formerly Instabug) in Cairo who speaks on agentic observability for mobile teams, including a PlatformCon talk and Luciq product webinars.
She argued at PlatformCon that a 99.9% crash-free rate is now only the entry ticket, and that feeding raw telemetry to an LLM yields guesswork, not fixes.
Source ↗He leads product at Lean Technologies, an open banking and account-to-account payments infrastructure provider working in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and speaks publicly about building Pay by Bank for businesses.
He argued that customers have little reason to pay by debit card over account-to-account payments, with merchant fee savings funding incentives such as cashback.
Source ↗He said agentic commerce leaves open questions about how agents authenticate, which fraud rules apply, and who is liable if an agent goes rogue.
AI agents on WhatsApp and agentic commerceSource ↗He said bringing Lean's deposits, collections, checkout and subscriptions together under Pay by Bank builds on four years showing the model works at scale.
Source ↗He leads Adyen's commercial operations in the Middle East, where Adyen sells payments infrastructure to large merchants and platforms.
He said Adyen's new UAE payments licence means it can now give merchants more control, reliability and innovation through its local operations.
Source ↗He co-founded DOO, a Bahrain-born startup now run commercially from Riyadh that builds Arabic dialect-aware AI customer service agents for WhatsApp, web chat and call centres at GCC enterprises.
He said Bahrain let DOO build, test and refine an enterprise product with institutions willing to move fast, and that local ecosystem support helped it expand across the GCC.
Source ↗He is Pendo's Field CPO, helped launch MailOnline in 2005, and created Dex, an MIT-licensed personal AI operating system starter kit.
He argued that now anyone can build software, the barrier is knowing what to build, and the edge goes to teams that catch market signals early and turn them into working product fastest.
Source ↗He hosts the Growfy podcast on B2B growth in MENA and says he has helped more than 45 B2B companies plan their go-to-market in Saudi Arabia.
He co-presented a free live webinar on how B2B teams with slow deal closes, unqualified leads and meetings that end without a decision can raise close rates and shorten the sales cycle.
Source ↗No voices match these filters.
Each topic is backed by at least two dated sources from the last 90 days. Momentum shows the direction, not a score.
Saudi Arabia will raise the salary a Saudi employee must earn to count fully toward Nitaqat quotas, from SR4,000 to SR5,000 after six months and then to SR6,000 twelve months later. Each sales hire who counts toward the quota will cost more. Detailed rules for each worker category have not yet been published.
Why new: King Salman ordered the change on 25 Oct 2026. On 26 Oct the HRSD vice minister said it covers five groups: full-time, part-time, flexible-work, student part-time and workers with disabilities. It is the first change since the SR4,000 threshold was set in 2020-21. The start date of the six-month period is not stated in the announcements.
On 26 Oct 2026 YouTube opened its Shopping affiliate programme in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, with Amazon as the first retail partner. Creators with 500 or more subscribers can tag products and earn commission, which gives brands a commission-based creator channel alongside ads and paid collaborations. YouTube says more than 40 million logged-in users in five Arab markets ran shopping searches in June 2026.
Why new: The programme launched on 26 Oct 2026, and The National and Wamda reported it the same day. The first phase is limited to Amazon, and YouTube says more retailers will follow.
UAE businesses with revenue of AED 50m or more must appoint an Accredited Service Provider by 30 October 2026 and go live on 1 January 2027, while smaller businesses have until 31 March and 1 July 2027 for the same two steps. Delays carry a penalty of AED 5,000 for each month. In Saudi Arabia, ZATCA's Wave 25, covering businesses with VAT revenue above SAR 187,500, must connect to the Fatoora platform by 1 February 2027, which brings small sellers into the system.
Why rising: On 25 Oct the FTA issued a public call for businesses to meet the e-invoicing deadlines and avoid administrative penalties. On 19 Oct the Ministry of Finance amended the rules: transactions within a tax group are excluded for 24 months from 1 January 2027, and e-invoice data no longer has to be stored inside the UAE. More than 700 people attended the FTA's awareness meeting on 29 Sep. ZATCA announced the Wave 25 criteria on 24 July 2026.
Gulf discussion has moved from which AI model to buy to why pilots stall, with integration, data readiness, governance and people cited as reasons. On 26 Oct, UAE AI minister Omar Al Olama urged firms to focus on how they use AI. A Wamda opinion piece on Gulf SMEs says merchants want simple, trusted answers about sales before they try forecasting or automation.
Why rising: Four pieces on the gap between pilots and production appeared between 19 and 26 Oct. An Arab News opinion piece by the co-CEO of UnifyApps, a vendor, cites McKinsey figures showing that 84% of GCC firms use AI but 31% have scaled it. IMD's Michael Wade wrote in The National that the bottleneck is organisational. Wamda published an opinion piece by the CMO of Fortis on AI adoption among Gulf SMEs, and Al Olama spoke at the Dubai AI Festival. A Saudi HRSD news item dated 28 Sep says HRSD, MCIT, Microsoft and Gulf Intelligence launched an AI Center of Excellence during LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, with sessions on turning AI use into measurable economic value; the launch date is not stated. GITEX Global 2026 takes place in Dubai from 7 to 11 December.
Sellers and payment firms are preparing for AI agents that answer questions, give advice and buy on a customer's behalf, and WhatsApp is one channel these agents already use. Paymob raised $35m in September partly to build agentic commerce products. A vendor-written opinion piece describes a WhatsApp advisory agent in the GCC that was built and launched in three days.
Why rising: Paymob, which now earns close to half its revenue in the GCC, named agentic commerce as one use of the funding round announced on 22 Sep. An Arab News opinion piece by the co-CEO of UnifyApps (22 Oct) says Gulftainer's WhatsApp Advisory Agent served more than 200 users within weeks. A Meta-sponsored IDC post on the WhatsApp Business blog (12 Aug) predicts that agents and answer engines will handle 64% of customer interactions by 2029; that figure is global, not specific to the Gulf.
Recent Arabic AI launches focus on dialects, voice and documents rather than general Modern Standard Arabic chat, which is relevant to calls, meetings and paperwork. Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute (TII) released Falcon-Emirati, Falcon-ASR and Falcon-OCR-Arabic in October. Egypt launched the locally built Karnak Chat in September as part of a digital sovereignty push, and the BelMasry speech system was released in August.
Why rising: TII announced three models on 6 Oct and published technical blogs on 6 and 7 Oct. They include a 7B Emirati-dialect model that scored 84.83% on the Alyah benchmark, and a speech recognition model whose training data included background noise and telephony effects. Egypt's ICT minister announced Karnak Chat on 9 Sep. Open-weight availability and licence terms for the new Falcon models are not stated by TII. Falcon-Emirati is offered on TII's chat platform, and TII describes Falcon-ASR API access as planned.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE continue to add AI capacity at home and abroad, from Humain's expanded Nvidia deal (up to 84MW, partly for Humain Cloud customers including government and business) to G42's new AI infrastructure agreements in Greece. Data rules are changing at the same time, and the UAE has removed its requirement that e-invoice data be stored inside the country. An IBM 2026 UAE study, cited in a vendor-written Arab News opinion piece, found that 74% of respondents say meeting data residency and sovereignty requirements across geographies is challenging.
Why rising: Several announcements came within two weeks. On 22 Oct Humain set out plans for up to 84MW of Nvidia capacity in two phases; the 70MW Vera Rubin phase still needs final agreements, and 50MW of it is for an unnamed US client. On 23 Oct G42 and its units signed AI infrastructure memoranda of understanding in Greece. On 26 Oct Scale AI opened a Dubai office at DIFC, and G42's chief said the UAE aims to become an 'intelligence exporter'. On 14 Oct an Nvidia policy lead said Gulf AI 'imperatives' have not changed despite the conflict. On 19 Oct the UAE Ministry of Finance announced that the in-country e-invoice storage rule was removed, effective 1 Oct.
MENA startups raised $1.65bn in Q3 2026, according to Wamda data, with Saudi Arabia again in first place at about $1bn and fintech taking about 62% of the total, led by Barq, Tabby and Lendo. MAGNiTT data for the first nine months show early-stage deal count down 45% year on year. MAGNiTT data also show Egypt's funding down 20% to $206m; the period for that figure is not stated by the source. A GIZ-backed pilot now offers venture debt to Egyptian scaleups.
Why rising: Q3 funding was 108% higher than in Q2 (Wamda, 12 Oct), and mega-rounds reached a record $813m in MAGNiTT data (EnterpriseAM, 13 Oct). Funding for the first nine months is still down 7% year on year, so the rise comes from a small number of large deals.
Global service firms continue to add capacity in Cairo to serve Gulf and European clients. ITIDA's chief expects outsourcing exports to grow by more than 23% to $6.4bn this fiscal year. FPT's new Cairo team already serves clients in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait.
Why rising: On 14 Oct FPT opened its first Africa office in Cairo, and the team there already serves clients in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait. On 25 Oct Deloitte said it will invest a further $40m in its Cairo hub over the next 12 to 18 months, completing a $110m plan; the hub serves clients in Europe and the Middle East. Outsourcing exports reached $5.2bn in FY2025/26, about 70% of $7.4bn in digital exports. A 9 Sep article on ITIDA's site says Egypt targets $8bn in outsourcing exports but does not give a deadline.
Revenue plans in the Gulf are being set around the conflict involving Iran that began on 28 February 2026, with shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb disrupted and oil prices near six-month highs in October. Demand is uneven: UAE hiring recovered in Q3 while prime Dubai property volumes fell, and The National reports an IMF projection that the UAE economy will contract by 3.9% in 2026.
Why steady: The conflict has shaped business planning in the region since February, and coverage now focuses on operating through it rather than on a new shock. On 26 Oct Brent crude eased to $114.51 from near six-month highs on hopes that hostilities will ease, following strikes on a Saudi airport and oil facilities on 24 Oct (Arab News, citing Reuters). Cooper Fitch data reported by The National show hiring rose 2% in Q3 after a 3% fall in Q2, with sales and marketing hiring up 3%. Knight Frank says the conflict is weighing on Dubai's property market. A podcast from The National (16 Oct) covered how the UAE kept trade flowing and signed new trade deals during the conflict.
Analysts and vendors expect buyers to make more use of their own AI agents to find suppliers, compare offers and review renewals. That would require websites, catalogues and service desks to respond to software agents as well as to people. Forrester's 2027 B2B predictions (21 Oct) centre on this shift, and consumer agents such as Meta's Muse are already in use.
Why new: The headline of Forrester's 2027 B2B predictions (21 Oct) says AI agents will influence 75% of B2B purchase decisions; the release does not state how that figure was derived. Meta said on its Q3 earnings call that Muse has more than 10 million users, with shopping among the main activities (TechCrunch, 21 Oct). Walmart opened Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets approved buying agents connect, while Amazon blocks agents from buying (TechCrunch, 21 Oct). Salesforce published guidance on preparing for customers' personal agents (9 Oct), and Profound published an analysis of personal agents including Muse (2 Oct). Most of the published data so far concerns consumer buying rather than B2B.
CRM and revenue-tool vendors now offer AI agents that research accounts, draft outreach and update deal records. Discussion has shifted from AI that assists sales reps to AI that performs sales development and deal-administration tasks. Salesforce, HubSpot, Gong and Microsoft each announced or expanded such agents between mid-September and early October 2026.
Why rising: Four vendors announced or expanded sales agents within about three weeks: HubSpot updated its Prospecting Agent, which monitors more than 40 buying signals (16 Sep); Salesforce cited its prebuilt Hunter outbound agent in its Dreamforce recap (24 Sep); Gong launched Agent Builder for custom agents triggered by events (30 Sep); and Microsoft released its Sales Development Agent in public preview (8 Oct). In a Clay test published on 22 Sep, about two-thirds of 6,346 demo requests received no reply, which is the follow-up gap these agents are marketed to close.
Vendors are opening their CRMs so that sellers can check pipeline and take governed actions from Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot or Slack without opening the CRM itself. Between August and October 2026, Salesforce and Microsoft launched assistant connectors built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and HubSpot upgraded the ChatGPT connector it first launched in 2025.
Why rising: Salesforce announced Claudeforce, with 37 prebuilt sales skills inside Claude (26 Aug), and then AIforce, which opens the Salesforce platform to any interface (15 Sep). HubSpot announced a deeper partnership with OpenAI and an upgraded ChatGPT connector (16 Sep). Microsoft added 30 Copilot skills for Dynamics 365 that run on MCP servers (8 Oct). Clay published use cases for its Agent Plugin, which works inside coding agents such as Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Cursor (23 Sep). Anthropic said more than 70 agent platforms have adopted Agent Skills (22 Oct).
Marketers are reworking content so that ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants cite their brand, because B2B buyers now build shortlists in these tools before visiting vendor sites. Between August and October 2026, new data showed how quickly AI citations fade, and AEO scores began to appear inside marketing suites.
Why rising: HubSpot added an AEO visibility score to Marketing Studio (16 Sep). Profound reported that the share of ChatGPT conversations with commercial intent rose from 13.9% to 19.2% between June 2025 and June 2026, and that weekly volume more than doubled (13 Aug). Profound also reported that the median page loses half its AI citation share within 11 days of peaking (30 Sep). LinkedIn published two guides on AI search (11 Aug and 29 Sep). ChatGPT links were missing their UTM tracking tags between 8 and 16 Oct, which shows that AI referral tracking remains fragile (Profound, 14 Oct, updated through 16 Oct).
Software vendors are moving AI products from per-seat prices to credits, usage-based fees and pay-per-outcome models, and buyers are concerned about unpredictable bills. Revenue leaders face two questions: how to budget for AI tools, and whether to price their own products in the same way.
Why rising: HubSpot added spend caps, seat-to-credit swaps and flexible payment options (15 Oct), after moving its Customer Agent and Prospecting Agent to outcome-based pricing earlier in the year. Salesforce introduced an AI control plane that includes cost governance for agents (Dreamforce recap, 24 Sep). Forrester predicts that rising AI costs, driven by growing usage and vendors' usage-based pricing, will force B2C marketing leaders to scale back a third of their AI initiatives (21 Oct). In a survey of 865 finance leaders commissioned by Salesforce, 87% said their company plans to add more consumption-based products (9 Sep).
Companies are building go-to-market (GTM) engineering teams that create automated sales and marketing plays from data, buying signals and agents. Clay raised $115M at a $7.1B valuation in September and argues that sales plays should be versioned, tested and improved in the same way as software.
Why rising: Clay raised a $115M Series D at a $7.1B valuation and set up a $1M scholarship fund to train GTM engineers (9 Sep). It also profiled its own Head of GTM Engineering (3 Sep) and published an article arguing that sales plays will ship like software (21 Oct). LinkedIn promoted buying-group plays built on shared signals (14 Oct), citing EMARKETER and LinkedIn data that only 31% of teams have a documented retargeting playbook. Three of the four sources for this topic are published by Clay.
Large vendors are buying or building the tools that sit around the CRM, such as real-time customer engagement, analytics and contact data, so that fewer tools cover more of the revenue process. On 20 October 2026 Salesforce announced a planned purchase of Braze at about $5.66B enterprise value.
Why rising: Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for about $5.66B enterprise value, or $47.50 a share, with closing expected in its fiscal 2028 (20 Oct). It also agreed to buy Loops, whose agentic analytics will be folded into Tableau (12 Oct). Gong added third-party contact and account data with Gong Enrich (30 Sep). Gong announced that it was named a Leader in Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration, and its release quotes Gartner describing the category as the primary system of seller action (16 Oct). Microsoft launched Dynamics 365 Activate, which assesses a customer's current CRM and recommends a path to Dynamics 365 (8 Oct).
As AI writes more outreach and content, buyers rely more on people they trust, such as experts, peers, references and creators, to check vendor claims. Forrester and LinkedIn both argue that verifiable proof and human voices, rather than higher volume, now win deals.
Why rising: Forrester's 2027 B2B predictions (21 Oct) say buyers will double their human interactions to validate AI recommendations, and that two-thirds of providers will lose deals because buyers cannot verify their claims. Forrester's B2C predictions (21 Oct) say 50% of brands will again prioritise human-generated content. LinkedIn published on creator-led trust (28 Sep), citing LinkedIn data that 63% of B2B buyers rely on creators early in their research, and on brand point of view (29 Sep).
As companies run more AI agents, leaders want to know who controls them, what data they can reach and what they cost. Salesforce launched a control layer at Dreamforce, and Forrester warns that unofficial agents built by employees are multiplying faster than governance can keep up.
Why rising: Salesforce introduced an AI control plane and an Enterprise AI Harness (Dreamforce recap, 24 Sep) and published guidance on agent trust and accountability (7 Oct). Forrester predicts that one in three large Asia Pacific enterprises will find at least 10 employee-built shadow AI agents for every sanctioned one (22 Oct). Anthropic donated Agent Skills to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation, which already holds MCP (22 Oct).
Customer service and success leaders use AI agents to resolve routine requests, which frees staff for selling, retention and personal service. Discussion now focuses on measured results and the balance between agents and staff, and Forrester expects service staffing to rise again after cuts that went too far.
Why steady: This is an established use case with incremental launches rather than a new discussion. Salesforce's Agentic Enterprise Index (7 Aug) says agents resolved about 7 in 10 service chats without human help, with escalations holding at 32%. Canada Goose says AI resolves 89% of its routine messages and that its former call centre now brings in revenue (Salesforce, 1 Oct). Microsoft launched Contact Center Intelligence (21 Oct). Forrester predicts that CX staffing will rise 20% after overzealous cuts (21 Oct).
Region fit counts four things: an Arabic interface, work in Arabic, data kept in the GCC, and a presence in the Gulf or Egypt. Open any row for the details and sources.
52 tools
| Arabic UI | In Arabic | GCC data | Replaces | Latest move | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
HUMAIN Chat (ALLaM)AI assistants | Yes | Yes | YesSaudi Arabia | Free | Translating English AI output into Arabic, and manual Arabic drafting | HUMAIN announced plans for 27,000 NVIDIA GPUs across 84MW of capacity, partly for HUMAIN Cloud. | |
Arabic-first chat assistant built on the Saudi ALLaM model, with live web search and dictation in Arabic dialects. chat.humain.com ↗ Price The app is free on iOS, Android and the web in Saudi Arabia, and availability in other countries is not stated. No business plan or business pricing is published. arabnews.com ↗Arabic According to Arab News, users can dictate in multiple Arabic dialects and switch between Arabic and English. The app runs on the ALLaM 34B model. arabnews.com ↗Data hosting According to Arab News, the service runs on infrastructure hosted entirely in Saudi Arabia, under national jurisdiction. arabnews.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt HUMAIN is a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund focused on AI, and the service runs on infrastructure hosted in Saudi Arabia. nvidianews.nvidia.com ↗ arabnews.com ↗Latest move HUMAIN announced plans for 27,000 NVIDIA GPUs across 84MW of capacity, partly for HUMAIN Cloud. 2026-10-22 middleeastainews.com ↗Region fit · 4 of 4
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Microsoft 365 CopilotAI assistants | Yes | Yes | YesUAE, Qatar, US, EU and others | $21 per seat a month | Manual meeting notes, follow-up emails, and deck and report building | Microsoft previewed a Sales Development Agent and 30 CRM skills for Dynamics 365, aimed at sales and service teams. | |
Copilot inside Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint that recaps meetings, drafts follow-ups and proposals, analyses data, and runs agents for sales processes. microsoft.com ↗ Price Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is an add-on to a Microsoft 365 Business plan, priced at $21 per user a month with an annual commitment. Eligible existing Business customers pay $18 per user a month for the first year under an offer running from 1 July to 31 December 2026. microsoft.com ↗Arabic Arabic has full display-language support in Microsoft 365, and Copilot supports Arabic prompts and responses for work and school accounts. The Copilot Voice language list that includes Arabic applies to personal Microsoft accounts, and Arabic voice for work accounts is not stated by the vendor. support.microsoft.com ↗ support.microsoft.com ↗Data hosting Microsoft commits to store Copilot data at rest within the local region for tenants signed up in 17 locations, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates; Saudi Arabia is not on the list. Microsoft has also announced in-country Copilot processing for qualified UAE organisations in its Dubai and Abu Dhabi cloud data centres. learn.microsoft.com ↗ news.microsoft.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Microsoft runs cloud data centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which host in-country Copilot processing for qualified UAE organisations. news.microsoft.com ↗Latest move Microsoft previewed a Sales Development Agent and 30 CRM skills for Dynamics 365, aimed at sales and service teams. 2026-10-08 microsoft.com ↗Region fit · 4 of 4
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Zoho CRMCRM | Yes | Yes | YesSaudi Arabia, UAE, US, EU, India and others | $14 per seat a month | Spreadsheets and manual follow-up reminders | Zoho launched Zia Chat, an AI interface that works across Zoho apps, and announced seven industry-specific applications. | |
Manages leads, deals and contacts, automates follow-ups and forecasts revenue. zoho.com ↗ Price The Standard plan is $14 per user a month billed annually, or $20 billed monthly. Professional is $23, Enterprise $40 and Ultimate $52 per user a month, and the CRM is free for up to 3 users. zoho.com ↗Arabic Arabic (Egypt) is listed as a fully supported language, and 16 other Arabic regional variants are partially supported. zoho.com ↗Data hosting Zoho lists data centres in Riyadh and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE, along with the US, Canada, the EU, India, Singapore, Australia, China and Japan. The data centre is set by the country chosen at signup. zoho.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Zoho opened data centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in January 2026, has an office in Dubai and runs data centres in Riyadh and Jeddah. The company says it has served over 7,000 UAE businesses in five years. zoho.com ↗ zoho.com ↗Latest move Zoho launched Zia Chat, an AI interface that works across Zoho apps, and announced seven industry-specific applications. 2026-09-23 zoho.com ↗Region fit · 4 of 4
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ChatGPT BusinessAI assistants | Yes | Yes | PartlyUAE on Enterprise only; not Business | $20 per seat a month | Manual account research, first drafts and ad-hoc spreadsheet analysis | OpenAI launched UAE inference residency for API, ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Edu customers, with GPT-5.2 the only model available at launch. | |
Shared ChatGPT workspace that drafts emails and proposals, researches accounts, analyses spreadsheets and searches connected company files. chatgpt.com ↗ Price ChatGPT Business Standard seats cost $20 per user a month billed annually, or $25 billed monthly. Premium seats cost $100 per user a month billed annually. appwrite.io ↗Arabic The ChatGPT app lists Arabic among its languages. Users on the OpenAI community forum report that right-to-left Arabic layout is still uneven. apps.apple.com ↗ community.openai.com ↗Data hosting ChatGPT Business is not named as eligible for data residency. OpenAI offers UAE data storage on Microsoft Azure UAE and UAE inference to eligible ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu and API customers, alongside US, European and other regions. tbreak.com ↗ middleeastainews.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Named UAE customers include G42, Mubadala, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, Aldar and Tabby. Emirates NBD runs OpenAI models on UAE-based inference. middleeastainews.com ↗ middleeastainews.com ↗Latest move OpenAI launched UAE inference residency for API, ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Edu customers, with GPT-5.2 the only model available at launch. 2026-08-12 tbreak.com ↗Region fit · 3.5 of 4
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Microsoft Dynamics 365 SalesCRM | Yes | Yes | PartlyUAE, US, Europe, UK, India and others | $65 per seat a month | Spreadsheets, Outlook-only selling and older on-premise Dynamics CRM | Microsoft added 30 prebuilt Copilot skills for Sales, Service and Customer Insights and put the Sales Development Agent into public preview. | |
Provides an enterprise CRM built into Outlook and Teams, with Copilot skills that flag at-risk deals and a sales development agent. microsoft.com ↗ Price Sales Professional is $65 per user a month, paid yearly. Enterprise is $105 and Premium is $150 per user a month. microsoft.com ↗Arabic Arabic is a supported language in Dataverse, which Dynamics 365 Sales runs on, and language packs display the interface and Help in Arabic. Arabic support in Copilot is not stated by the vendor. microsoft.com ↗ microsoft.com ↗Data hosting Dynamics 365 Sales has a UAE region, which sits in a macro region covering Europe, the UK, the Middle East and Africa. Keeping data pinned to the UAE requires Advanced Data Residency for all of the tenant's Microsoft 365 seats, and no Saudi Arabia or Qatar region is listed. microsoft.com ↗ microsoft.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Microsoft runs a Dynamics 365 Sales data centre region in the UAE. microsoft.com ↗Latest move Microsoft added 30 prebuilt Copilot skills for Sales, Service and Customer Insights and put the Sales Development Agent into public preview. 2026-10-08 microsoft.com ↗Region fit · 3.5 of 4
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Odoo CRMCRM | Yes | Yes | PartlySaudi Arabia, India, US, Europe, Asia-Pacific | $8.95 per seat a month | Separate CRM, quoting and invoicing tools, and spreadsheets | Odoo released Odoo 20, with AI agents instructed in plain language, lead generation from a directory of more than 580 million companies, and automatic lead routing across pipelines. | |
Manages pipelines and leads inside an all-in-one suite, so a lead flows into quotes, invoices and inventory. Odoo 20 adds AI agents and automatic lead generation. odoo.com ↗ Price The Standard plan shows US$8.95 and US$11.20 per user a month with a yearly or monthly toggle, and a discount for initial users that lasts 12 months. Prices vary by country, and Odoo also offers a free One App plan. odoo.com ↗Arabic The official Odoo repository includes an Arabic translation for the CRM app, and the Odoo website is available in Arabic. github.com ↗ odoo.com ↗Data hosting Odoo's Middle East and Southern Asia region runs production in India and Saudi Arabia, and the customer cannot choose the specific country. Backups are stored in Europe and Canada, and Odoo says backup regions cannot be chosen or restricted. odoo.com ↗ odoo.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Odoo lists an office in Dubai South in the UAE, hosts data in Saudi Arabia and provides a module for Saudi ZATCA e-invoicing. odoo.com ↗ odoo.com ↗Latest move Odoo released Odoo 20, with AI agents instructed in plain language, lead generation from a directory of more than 580 million companies, and automatic lead routing across pipelines. 2026-09-24 odoo.com ↗Region fit · 3.5 of 4
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 FanarAI assistants | Yes | Yes | Not statedNot stated | Free, non-commercial use only | Manual Arabic translation and drafting | No recent move. | |
Free Arabic-first assistant from Qatar for writing, summarising, translating, speech and images, with a developer API available on request. fanar.qa ↗ Price The app is free, and its terms limit use to personal, non-commercial purposes. API access is by request, and API terms and pricing are not published. fanar.qa ↗ fanar.qa ↗Arabic The app works in English, Modern Standard Arabic and Arabic dialects, by text or speech. Fanar 2.0 added longer-audio speech-to-text with speaker separation and eight new voices in Arabic and English. apps.apple.com ↗ fanar.qa ↗Data hosting Hosting location not stated by the vendor. Fanar's terms of service are governed by Qatar law. fanar.qa ↗ fanar.qa ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Fanar is developed by the Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and sponsored by Qatar's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. Listed partners include Qatar National Library, Qatar University, Al Jazeera, Awqaf and Google Cloud. fanar.qa ↗Latest move No recent move.Region fit · 3 of 4
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 Google Gemini (Workspace)AI assistants | Yes | Yes | NoUS and EU | $7 per user a month | Manual email writing, meeting notes and separate chatbot subscriptions | Google made the Gemini desktop app for Windows available to all Google Workspace customers. | |
Gemini inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet and Drive, plus the Gemini app, to draft emails, summarise threads and meetings, and analyse sheets. workspace.google.com ↗ Price Google Workspace Business Starter costs $7 per user a month with an annual commitment and includes the Gemini app and Gemini in Gmail. Gemini in Docs and Meet requires Business Standard at $14 per user a month. workspace.google.com ↗Arabic Google lists Arabic as available for the Gemini app, the Gemini side panel in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive, and speech translation in Meet. knowledge.workspace.google.com ↗Data hosting Google Workspace data regions cover the US and the EU only, and in-region storage and processing for the Gemini app is offered on Enterprise Plus and Frontline Plus. No GCC data region is offered for Workspace. workspaceupdates.googleblog.com ↗ workspace.google.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Google Cloud agreed in October 2024 to set up an AI hub in Dammam, including work on Arabic for Gemini. Google Cloud is listed as a partner of Qatar's Fanar assistant. gulfnews.com ↗ fanar.qa ↗Latest move Google made the Gemini desktop app for Windows available to all Google Workspace customers. 2026-09-11 workspaceupdates.googleblog.com ↗Region fit · 3 of 4
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 Insider (Insider One)Marketing and customer engagement | No | Yes | YesIreland (default), UAE, US and others | On request | Separate personalisation, email, SMS, WhatsApp and customer data tools | Insider One launched Agent One, which it describes as an autonomous customer engagement system. | |
Combines customer data, AI personalisation, customer journeys and messaging across web, email, SMS, WhatsApp and mobile app channels, aimed at conversion and retention. insiderone.com ↗ Price No public plans or prices are published. Pricing is quoted on request. insiderone.com ↗Arabic The panel is available in English, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese and Traditional Chinese, not Arabic. Emails can be set to right-to-left for languages such as Arabic. insiderone.com ↗ insiderone.com ↗Data hosting Insider One's subprocessor list says the AWS hosting location depends on the customer's selected deployment region, with Ireland as the default. The listed regions include MENA-UAE, alongside the US, Turkiye, India, Singapore and others. insiderone.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Insider One lists an office in Dubai at The Dome Tower, Jumeirah Lake Towers. insiderone.com ↗Latest move Insider One launched Agent One, which it describes as an autonomous customer engagement system. 2026-09-17 insiderone.com ↗Region fit · 3 of 4
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 MaqsamWhatsApp, calls and voice AI | Yes | Yes | Not statedNot stated | On request | On-premise PBX, manual call logging and missed after-hours calls | No recent move. | |
Provides a cloud call centre with local numbers, call routing, recording, dashboards and CRM integrations, plus an Arabic AI voice agent that answers calls, qualifies leads and books appointments around the clock. maqsam.com ↗ Price Prices are available from sales, with a charge per agent seat plus prepaid, usage-based billing pro-rated monthly. A 7-day free trial is offered with no setup fees. maqsam.com ↗Arabic Users can switch between English and Arabic interfaces. Maqsam says its AI agent understands major Arabic dialects, including Gulf, Levantine and Egyptian. maqsam.com ↗ maqsam.com ↗Data hosting The hosting location is not stated by the vendor. Maqsam says it is CST-licensed in Saudi Arabia. maqsam.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Maqsam says it is CST-licensed in Saudi Arabia, and a 2022 company profile says it has employees across Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Jordan. A May 2026 case study covers Calo, which serves customers across the Middle East and the UK. maqsam.com ↗ maqsam.com ↗Latest move No recent move.Region fit · 3 of 4
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 Salesforce Sales CloudCRM | Partly | Partly | YesUAE, US, UK, Germany, India, Japan and others | $25 per seat a month | Spreadsheets, email follow-up lists and older on-premise CRMs | At Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce launched job-ready agents including Piper for inbound SDR work, long-horizon agents for re-engaging at-risk deals, and Agentforce Voice for field reps. | |
Tracks leads, accounts, deals and forecasts in one place. Agentforce AI agents can qualify inbound leads and book meetings. salesforce.com ↗ Price Starter Suite is $25 per user a month, billed monthly or annually. Pro Suite is $100 and Enterprise is $195 per user a month billed annually, and a $0 Free Suite is also listed. salesforce.com ↗Arabic Arabic is available as an end-user language, so standard pages are translated, while Setup and Help stay in English and right-to-left support is limited. Agentforce in Arabic covers Service Agent and Employee Agent, not sales agents. webkul.com ↗ tradingview.com ↗Data hosting Salesforce's Hyperforce platform offers a UAE location that stores data locally, plus options in the US, UK, Germany, India, Japan and other countries. A Saudi Arabia location was announced in February 2025, and its launch is not stated by the vendor. Not all services are available in every Hyperforce location. salesforce.com ↗ salesforce.com ↗ salesforce.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Salesforce has a regional headquarters in Riyadh, announced with a $500M investment in Saudi Arabia in February 2025, and hosts customer data in the UAE on Hyperforce. salesforce.com ↗ salesforce.com ↗Latest move At Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce launched job-ready agents including Piper for inbound SDR work, long-horizon agents for re-engaging at-risk deals, and Agentforce Voice for field reps. 2026-09-28 salesforce.com ↗Region fit · 3 of 4
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 UnifonicWhatsApp, calls and voice AI | Not stated | Yes | YesLocal GCC residency, country not named | $499 a month | Separate SMS gateways, manual campaign sends and legacy IVR | Unifonic relaunched its brand as an AI-native customer experience platform built around its Agentic Studio. | |
Runs SMS, WhatsApp, voice and email campaigns, Arabic-first AI chatbots and agents, and an agent console for sales and service conversations on a Saudi customer-engagement platform. unifonic.com ↗ Price The Connect plan costs $499 a month for WhatsApp, SMS, voice and email with 10,000 campaign messages, and Engagement costs $999 a month with one Agent Console seat. Prices exclude taxes, and usage above plan limits is billed extra. unifonic.com ↗Arabic Unifonic describes its conversational AI as Arabic-first and says it recognises Arabic dialects with 95% or higher accuracy. The website is available in Arabic, but whether the agent console is in Arabic is not stated by the vendor. unifonic.com ↗ unifonic.com ↗Data hosting Unifonic offers cloud deployment with local data residency options for regulated GCC industries, but does not name the country or data centre. Its Trust Centre says it complies with NCA cloud-hosting controls. unifonic.com ↗ unifonic.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Unifonic is based in Riyadh, and its Trust Centre says it has a physical office and legal representation in Saudi Arabia. Customer logos and testimonials include Tabby, Arab National Bank, Panda, Careem and Aramex. unifonic.com ↗ unifonic.com ↗Latest move Unifonic relaunched its brand as an AI-native customer experience platform built around its Agentic Studio. 2026-07-08 unifonic.com ↗Region fit · 3 of 4
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 BrazeMarketing and customer engagement | No | Yes | NoUS, EU, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea | On request | Legacy email service providers and in-house messaging scripts | Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Braze for about $5.66 billion in enterprise value ($47.50 per share in cash). Braze says the deal is expected to close in Salesforce's fiscal 2028, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. | |
Enterprise customer engagement platform that runs personalised journeys across push, email, SMS, WhatsApp and in-app messages, using AI to choose which message each customer receives. braze.com ↗ Price The entry plan, Braze Go, and the other plans are quoted on request. Pricing scales with monthly active users, profiles and Action Credits. braze.com ↗Arabic The dashboard is available in German, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese, not Arabic. Braze supports right-to-left messages, including Arabic. braze.com ↗ braze.com ↗Data hosting Braze lists instances in the US, the EU (Frankfurt), Australia, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea, with no Middle East instance. braze.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Braze lists an office in Dubai on Level 13 of the DQuarters Dubai Science Park South Tower. braze.com ↗Latest move Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Braze for about $5.66 billion in enterprise value ($47.50 per share in cash). Braze says the deal is expected to close in Salesforce's fiscal 2028, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. 2026-10-20 braze.com ↗Region fit · 2 of 4
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Shared Claude workspace that drafts and edits proposals, analyses long documents and data, creates files and works with connected tools. claude.com ↗ Price Claude Team Standard seats cost $20 per seat a month billed annually, or $25 billed monthly, for teams of 2 to 150 seats. Premium seats cost $100 per seat a month billed annually. claude.com ↗Arabic Arabic is not among the interface languages listed for the Claude apps on the web or iOS. Anthropic's documentation puts Claude Sonnet 4.5's Arabic performance at 97.2% of its English performance, and Arabic voice support is not stated by the vendor. support.claude.com ↗ apps.apple.com ↗ platform.claude.com ↗Data hosting Anthropic states that data is stored in the US, and traffic may be routed through the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. Regional residency in Europe, the US, Canada and Asia-Pacific is offered only through AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI and Microsoft Foundry, and no Middle East region is listed. privacy.claude.com ↗ claude.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Saudi company Velents, which serves Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan and Oman, joined the Claude Partner Network in June 2026. No Anthropic office in the Gulf or Egypt is stated. techafricanews.com ↗Latest move Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, which the company says costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5. 2026-09-22 anthropic.com ↗Region fit · 2 of 4
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 Jais Chat (G42/Inception, MBZUAI)AI assistants | Not stated | Yes | Not statedNot stated | Not published | Translating English AI output into Arabic, and manual Arabic drafting | Inception42 published the Jais 3 open-weight models, ranging from 0.9B to 375B parameters, on Hugging Face. | |
Arabic-English chat app built on the UAE's Jais models, for Arabic drafting and questions. jaischat.ai ↗ Price No business plan or pricing is published for Jais Chat. The Jais 3 model weights are available under the Apache-2.0 licence. jaischat.ai ↗ huggingface.co ↗Arabic The Jais 3 models are designed for Arabic and English assistant and agentic applications and are tested on dialectal Arabic. Arabic support in the Jais Chat interface is not stated by the vendor. huggingface.co ↗Data hosting Hosting location for Jais Chat not stated by the vendor. The Jais 3 model weights are open under the Apache-2.0 licence, so a company could run them in a GCC cloud itself as a build option. jaischat.ai ↗ huggingface.co ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Jais 3 is published by Inception42, a G42 company based in Abu Dhabi, and the Jais Chat site carries the title Jais 3 - MBZUAI. The models are credited to the IFM, Inception42 and Cerebras teams. huggingface.co ↗ huggingface.co ↗ jaischat.ai ↗Latest move Inception42 published the Jais 3 open-weight models, ranging from 0.9B to 375B parameters, on Hugging Face. 2026-09-29 huggingface.co ↗Region fit · 2 of 4
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 CleverTapMarketing and customer engagement | Not stated | Not stated | PartlyEU, India, Singapore, US, Indonesia, UAE | From $85 a month for 5,000 MAU | Basic push tools, segmentation spreadsheets and separate email or SMS senders | CleverTap launched Live 1:1 Personalisation, which it describes as an expansion of CleverAI that makes real-time decisions for each customer. | |
Segments app and web users and sends targeted push, in-app, email, SMS and WhatsApp messages, with a focus on mobile apps, to increase retention and revenue. clevertap.com ↗ Price The Core plan costs $85 a month for up to 5,000 monthly active users, excluding taxes and add-ons. The Pro and Ultimate plans are quoted on request. clevertap.com ↗Arabic Arabic interface and Arabic content support are not stated by the vendor. The Scribe AI copy tool has a language setting, but the documentation lists no supported languages and does not mention Arabic. clevertap.com ↗ clevertap.com ↗Data hosting CleverTap lists a Middle East (UAE) region on AWS alongside the EU (default), India, Singapore, the US and Indonesia. Its documentation says the entry plan defaults to the EU region, and whether the Core plan can be hosted in the UAE is not stated. clevertap.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt CleverTap lists an office at Dubai Internet City and publishes a case study with Edenred UAE. clevertap.com ↗ clevertap.com ↗Latest move CleverTap launched Live 1:1 Personalisation, which it describes as an expansion of CleverAI that makes real-time decisions for each customer. 2026-10-08 dqindia.com ↗Region fit · 1.5 of 4
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 HubSpot Sales HubCRM | No | Partly | NoUS, EU, Canada, Australia | From $7 per seat a month | Spreadsheets and separate email-tracking and scheduling tools | In its Fall 2026 Spotlight, HubSpot added the Breeze Prospecting Agent, which tracks more than 40 buying signals and drafts outreach, plus Mobile Notetaker and Deal Progression, which update the CRM after meetings. | |
Combines a CRM with email tracking, sequences, meeting booking and deal pipelines. Breeze AI agents find prospects and log meeting notes. hubspot.com ↗ Price The Starter plan is listed from $7 per seat a month, and the same page also shows $20 per seat a month without stating which figure applies to which billing period. Professional is $90 to $100 per seat a month plus a $1,500 one-time onboarding fee. hubspot.com ↗Arabic The HubSpot interface is not available in Arabic. Arabic (Egypt, Modern Standard) is listed as a content creation language, so emails, landing pages and chatflows can be written in Arabic. hubspot.com ↗Data hosting HubSpot lists data centres in the US (East and West), the EU, Canada and Australia. The company says it has no immediate plans for additional data centres. hubspot.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Digital Nexa, a Dubai-based partner, describes itself as HubSpot's only Diamond-tier partner in the GCC in a 2021 post. A HubSpot office or data centre in the Gulf is not stated by the vendor. digitalnexa.com ↗Latest move In its Fall 2026 Spotlight, HubSpot added the Breeze Prospecting Agent, which tracks more than 40 buying signals and drafts outreach, plus Mobile Notetaker and Deal Progression, which update the CRM after meetings. 2026-09-16 hubspot.com ↗Region fit · 1.5 of 4
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 respond.ioWhatsApp, calls and voice AI | Yes | Partly | Not statedAWS, region not stated | $79 a month, 5 users | Staff phones, scattered chat apps and manual lead routing | No recent move. | |
Puts WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram, Messenger, email and WhatsApp or VoIP calls in one team inbox, where AI agents qualify leads and book meetings, chats are routed to reps and data syncs to the CRM. respond.io ↗ Price The Starter plan costs $79 a month billed annually or $99 billed monthly, with 5 users included and extra users at $12 a month each. Plans are tiered by monthly active contacts. respond.io ↗Arabic Users can switch the interface to Arabic from the language menu in their profile. The company describes its AI agents as multilingual but does not list Arabic. respond.io ↗ respond.io ↗Data hosting The service runs on Amazon Web Services, and the region is not stated by the vendor. The trust centre lists no data residency options. respond.io ↗ trust.respond.io ↗In the Gulf and Egypt The company is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur and lists no office, data centre or partner in the Gulf or Egypt. A homepage testimonial from Innov821 DMCC does not state the customer's location. respond.io ↗Latest move No recent move.Region fit · 1.5 of 4
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 Retell AIWhatsApp, calls and voice AI | Not stated | Yes | Self-hostAWS, region not stated; on-prem option | From $0.07 a minute | Manual cold calling, after-hours answering services and call-to-CRM glue | Retell launched Retell Memory, which keeps a brief on each contact so agents can pick up earlier conversations. | |
Provides voice AI agents that make and take phone calls at scale for outbound campaigns, lead qualification, appointment booking and CRM write-back to Salesforce and HubSpot. retellai.com ↗ Price Pay-as-you-go pricing runs from $0.07 to $0.31 per call minute, and phone numbers cost $2 a month. Accounts start at $0 with $10 of free credit, and Enterprise pricing is on request. retellai.com ↗Arabic Saudi Arabic (ar-SA) is listed for text-to-speech and speech recognition through several providers. Quality for other Gulf or Egyptian dialects is not documented, and whether the interface is in Arabic is not stated by the vendor. docs.retellai.com ↗Data hosting The cloud service runs on AWS in a region not stated by the vendor, and the company says it does not operate services in the European Union. Customers can deploy Retell on their own infrastructure for data residency. docs.retellai.com ↗ retellai.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt The homepage and pricing page name no office, data centre or customer in the Gulf or Egypt. retellai.com ↗ retellai.com ↗Latest move Retell launched Retell Memory, which keeps a brief on each contact so agents can pick up earlier conversations. 2026-10-08 retellai.com ↗Region fit · 1.5 of 4
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 Apollo.ioData and enrichment | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS | $49 per seat a month | Manual list building, a separate data vendor and a sequencing tool | At ApolloNEXT, Apollo launched Builder Studio, an Intelligence Layer and Messaging OS, and said it has more than 600,000 customer companies. | |
Finds B2B contacts and companies, reveals email addresses and phone numbers, and runs outreach sequences from one platform. apollo.io ↗ Price The Basic plan costs $49 per user a month billed annually, or about $59 billed monthly, according to a third-party pricing guide. Apollo's pricing page lists Free, Basic, Professional and Custom plans. landbase.com ↗ apollo.io ↗Arabic Apollo does not state Arabic support. Its help centre article on the AI writing assistant is reported to say the assistant supports only English. knowledge.apollo.io ↗Data hosting Apollo states that the personal data it processes is hosted in the United States. No GCC hosting option is stated. apollo.io ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Solvarex, an Apollo certified partner based in Riyadh, serves the GCC and has a team in Egypt. apollo.io ↗Latest move At ApolloNEXT, Apollo launched Builder Studio, an Intelligence Layer and Messaging OS, and said it has more than 600,000 customer companies. 2026-09-30 apollo.io ↗Region fit · 1 of 4
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 AvomaCall and meeting intelligence | Not stated | Yes | NoUS; EU on request | $19 per seat a month | Manual call notes, CRM data entry and spreadsheet pipeline reviews | Avoma's October product release added a Pre-Meeting Brief, scheduled Ask Avoma prompts and in-person recording on mobile. | |
Records, transcribes and summarises customer calls, then adds coaching scorecards, deal forecasting and CRM updates. avoma.com ↗ Price The Startup plan is $19 per recorder seat a month billed annually, or $29 billed monthly, and viewer seats are free. Conversation Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence are paid add-ons at $29 per seat a month each, billed annually. avoma.com ↗Arabic Arabic is in Avoma's list of supported languages and dialects, and Arabic is transcribed in native script. Interface language support is not stated by the vendor. help.avoma.com ↗ avoma.com ↗Data hosting Avoma hosts its software in AWS facilities in the US. EU data residency is available on request, and no GCC hosting is stated. avoma.com ↗ avoma.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated. avoma.com ↗Latest move Avoma's October product release added a Pre-Meeting Brief, scheduled Ask Avoma prompts and in-person recording on mobile. 2026-10-15 avoma.com ↗Region fit · 1 of 4
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 ElevenLabs AgentsWhatsApp, calls and voice AI | Not stated | Yes | NoUS; EU, India, Singapore on Enterprise | $0.08 an agent minute | IVR phone menus and scripted first-line SDR or call-centre work | A $300 million employee tender valued ElevenLabs at $22 billion, double its February Series D valuation. | |
Builds voice and chat AI agents that answer and make calls, qualify leads and book meetings across phone, web, WhatsApp, SMS and email, with Salesforce, HubSpot and Zendesk integrations. elevenlabs.io ↗ Price Plans are credit subscriptions with agent minutes included: Scale costs $299 a month for 3 workspace seats and Business $990 a month for 10 seats. The Agents Speech Engine is listed at $0.08 a minute, and Enterprise pricing is on request. elevenlabs.io ↗ elevenlabs.io ↗Arabic The text-to-speech models list Arabic, including Saudi and UAE variants, and the realtime agent models support more than 90 languages. Whether the app interface is in Arabic is not stated by the vendor. elevenlabs.io ↗Data hosting Data is hosted in the US by default, with EU, India and Singapore options available only on the Enterprise plan. No Middle East region is offered. elevenlabs.io ↗In the Gulf and Egypt The company's blog and customer stories pages name no office or customer in the Gulf or Egypt. elevenlabs.io ↗ elevenlabs.io ↗Latest move A $300 million employee tender valued ElevenLabs at $22 billion, double its February Series D valuation. 2026-09-30 elevenlabs.io ↗Region fit · 1 of 4
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 Fireflies.aiCall and meeting intelligence | Not stated | Yes | NoUS; EU storage on Enterprise | $10 per seat a month | Manual meeting notes, follow-up emails and CRM note entry | No recent move. | |
An AI notetaker that joins calls, transcribes and summarises them, and pushes notes and action items into the CRM. fireflies.ai ↗ Price The Pro plan is $10 per seat a month billed annually, or $18 billed monthly. The Business plan, which adds team analytics and conversation intelligence, is $19 per seat a month billed annually. fireflies.ai ↗Arabic Arabic is in the list of supported languages, and Fireflies says it supports transcription and summaries in more than 100 languages. Interface language support is not stated by the vendor. guide.fireflies.ai ↗Data hosting Data is stored and processed in the United States on AWS and GCP. Enterprise Private Storage can keep data in the EU, but processing stays in the US, and no GCC region is named. guide.fireflies.ai ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated. fireflies.ai ↗Latest move No recent move.Region fit · 1 of 4
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 GongCall and meeting intelligence | No | Yes | NoUS and EU | On request | Manual call notes, CRM logging, spreadsheet forecasts and deal-review meetings | At its Celebrate '26 event, Gong launched Gong Activate, Gong Enrich, Agent Builder and Deep Mode. | |
Records and analyses sales calls, emails and deals so leaders can coach reps, forecast and spot at-risk deals with AI agents. gong.io ↗ Price Gong publishes no plan prices and sells by custom proposal. Licences are priced per user, plus a platform fee based on the number of users. gong.io ↗Arabic Arabic calls are transcribed and analysed, including Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE variants. The interface is offered in English, French and Canadian French only. Some features, including email labels, red-flag alerts, recommended to-dos and example-based smart trackers, work only on English calls. help.gong.io ↗Data hosting Gong stores customer data in data centres in either the US or the EU, with the US as the default. No GCC hosting is stated by the vendor. help.gong.io ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated. Gong's security FAQ lists offices in the US, Israel and Ireland only. help.gong.io ↗Latest move At its Celebrate '26 event, Gong launched Gong Activate, Gong Enrich, Agent Builder and Deep Mode. 2026-09-30 gong.io ↗Region fit · 1 of 4
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 Grok BusinessAI assistants | Yes | Not stated | Not statedNot stated | $30 per seat a month | Manual research and drafting, and individual chatbot subscriptions | xAI launched Grok 4.7, aimed at coding and knowledge work. | |
Team version of Grok chat with permission-aware Google Drive search, team administration and shared billing. x.ai ↗ Price Grok Business costs $30 per user a month on self-serve sign-up, and no annual rate is published. Enterprise pricing is on request. x.ai ↗Arabic The Grok app lists Arabic among its languages. xAI says its speech-to-text covers 38+ languages without naming them, and Arabic answer quality is not stated by the vendor. apps.apple.com ↗ docs.x.ai ↗Data hosting Hosting location for Grok Business not stated by the vendor. The xAI API offers global routing or a US regional endpoint, with no Middle East region. x.ai ↗ docs.x.ai ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, data centre, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated.Region fit · 1 of 4
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HubSpot Marketing HubMarketing and customer engagement | No | Yes | NoUS, Canada, Australia, EU (Germany) | From $7 per seat a month | Separate email, form and landing-page tools and spreadsheet lead tracking | HubSpot's Fall 2026 Spotlight release added Breeze Assistant, a self-updating Smart CRM, Marketing Studio and Revenue Hub. | |
Runs email, forms, landing pages, ads and lead nurturing on the same CRM the sales team uses, so marketing-sourced leads and revenue can be tracked end to end. hubspot.com ↗ Price Marketing Hub Starter starts at $7 per seat a month as special pricing for new customers, shown next to $20 per seat a month; whether this is a monthly or annual billing rate is not stated by the vendor. Professional starts at $800 a month with 3 seats and Enterprise at $3,600 a month with 5 seats, with required onboarding fees of $3,000 and $7,000. hubspot.com ↗Arabic Arabic is not an interface language. Arabic (Egypt and Modern Standard) is listed as a content creation language and for call and meeting transcription, and right-to-left layout is not mentioned. hubspot.com ↗Data hosting HubSpot hosts data in the United States (East and West regions), Canada, Australia and the European Union (Germany). hubspot.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. HubSpot lists local sales phone numbers for the UAE and Saudi Arabia. hubspot.com ↗Latest move HubSpot's Fall 2026 Spotlight release added Breeze Assistant, a self-updating Smart CRM, Marketing Studio and Revenue Hub. 2026-09-16 hubspot.com ↗Region fit · 1 of 4
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 MoEngageMarketing and customer engagement | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS, EU, India, Singapore, Indonesia | On request | Manual list exports and separate email, SMS and push tools | IDC named MoEngage a Leader in its 2026 MarketScape for AI-enabled B2C customer data platforms. | |
Sends personalised push, email, SMS, WhatsApp and in-app messages based on each customer's behaviour, aimed at repeat purchases and retention. moengage.com ↗ Price The Growth and Enterprise plans are quoted on request. Pricing is based on Monthly Tracked Users (MTU), not seats. moengage.com ↗Arabic Arabic interface and Arabic content support are not stated by the vendor. The Merlin AI copywriter accepts a requested output language, but its documentation names no languages and does not mention Arabic. moengage.com ↗ moengage.com ↗Data hosting MoEngage lists data centres in the US, the EU, India, Singapore (closed to new sign-ups) and Indonesia, with no GCC region named. The location of one further data centre, DC-101, is not stated. moengage.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt MoEngage lists an office in Dubai at Media One Tower, Al Falak Street, and publishes a case study with The ENTERTAINER, a GCC customer. It also hosted a CXO roundtable in Riyadh with Khaleej Times on 7 July 2026. moengage.com ↗ moengage.com ↗ khaleejtimes.com ↗Latest move IDC named MoEngage a Leader in its 2026 MarketScape for AI-enabled B2C customer data platforms. 2026-07-21 cxotoday.com ↗Region fit · 1 of 4
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 Perplexity Enterprise ProAI assistants | Yes | Not stated | Not statedNot stated | $400 per seat a year | Manual desk research and account preparation | Perplexity partnered with UK-based Valarian to run Perplexity Computer on customers' own or air-gapped infrastructure. | |
Cited web and internal-file search for account and market research, plus the Perplexity Computer agent, which builds documents and decks. perplexity.ai ↗ Price Enterprise Pro costs $40 per seat a month, or $400 per seat a year, which is about $33.33 a month. Enterprise Max costs $325 per seat a month. perplexity.ai ↗Arabic The Perplexity app lists Arabic among its languages. Arabic answer quality and Arabic voice support are not stated by the vendor. apps.apple.com ↗Data hosting Hosting location not stated by the vendor. Perplexity's data retention and privacy article for enterprise organisations does not give one. perplexity.ai ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, data centre, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated.Latest move Perplexity partnered with UK-based Valarian to run Perplexity Computer on customers' own or air-gapped infrastructure. 2026-10-20 perplexity.ai ↗Region fit · 1 of 4
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 ProfoundWorkflow automation and AI search visibility | Not stated | Yes | NoUS | On request | Manual checks of AI chatbot answers and SEO rank reports that miss AI answers | Profound raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation, co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. | |
Shows how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI engines mention and recommend a brand compared with competitors, and its agents produce content intended to improve that. tryprofound.com ↗ Price A free 7-day trial covers 50 prompts in one language and one region, after which the Enterprise plan is priced on request with unlimited seats. A separate Agency Growth plan is offered to agencies. tryprofound.com ↗Arabic The company says its interface is available in over 30 languages, without naming Arabic, and that right-to-left support will be added in a future update. Its published research ran Arabic prompts for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. tryprofound.com ↗ tryprofound.com ↗Data hosting Profound states that its services are hosted in the United States. Data from the EEA and UK is transferred to the US under standard contractual clauses. tryprofound.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, reseller or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. The platform can track AI answers for the Saudi and UAE markets in Arabic. tryprofound.com ↗ tryprofound.com ↗Latest move Profound raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation, co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. 2026-09-15 tryprofound.com ↗Region fit · 1 of 4
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 AmplemarketData and enrichment | Not stated | Partly | Not statedUS | $600 a month for 2 users | Separate data provider, sequencer and dialer tools | An Amplemarket product update added a Grok (xAI) connector, a Parallel Dialer that calls several prospects at once, contact edits that sync to the CRM, and a Gong integration. | |
Combines a B2B contact database, an AI copilot called Duo that researches accounts, and outreach sequences with email and a built-in dialer. amplemarket.com ↗ Price The Startup plan costs $600 a month on an annual term and includes 2 users, which works out to $300 per user; extra users can be added at a price that is not stated. The Growth and Elite plans are priced on request. amplemarket.com ↗Arabic A 2023 product update added right-to-left editing to the email editor, naming Arabic, and said AI classifies replies in 104 languages. No source states that the AI copilot writes emails in Arabic. amplemarket.com ↗Data hosting Amplemarket hosts its application on Google Cloud and says it may store personal data in the United States. The hosting region is not named, and no GCC option is stated. amplemarket.com ↗ amplemarket.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. amplemarket.com ↗Latest move An Amplemarket product update added a Grok (xAI) connector, a Parallel Dialer that calls several prospects at once, contact edits that sync to the CRM, and a Gong integration. 2026-09-18 amplemarket.com ↗Region fit · 0.5 of 4
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 FathomCall and meeting intelligence | Not stated | Partly | NoUS | $15 per user a month | Manual meeting notes and CRM note entry | Superhuman, formerly Grammarly, announced that it had acquired Fathom. | |
An AI notetaker with a free starting plan that records calls, writes summaries and action items, and syncs them to the CRM. fathom.ai ↗ Price The Team plan is $15 per user a month billed annually, or $19 billed monthly, with a minimum of 2 users. A free plan is available for individuals. fathom.ai ↗Arabic Arabic is one of 38 supported transcript languages. Summary translation is listed only for Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian and Dutch, so support for Arabic summaries is not stated by the vendor. Fathom's October 2026 release notes state that Arabic users are eligible for Fathom 3.0. Interface language support is not stated by the vendor. help.fathom.video ↗ help.fathom.video ↗Data hosting Fathom states that all of its data is stored in the United States. help.fathom.video ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated. fathom.ai ↗Latest move Superhuman, formerly Grammarly, announced that it had acquired Fathom. 2026-09-14 blog.superhuman.com ↗Region fit · 0.5 of 4
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 Manus TeamAI assistants | Partly | Not stated | Not statedNot stated | $200 per seat a year | Manual research-to-deck work, simple automation scripts and outsourced slide production | Manus launched Manus 2.0 with a new agent harness, a cloud computer and event-triggered automations. | |
Autonomous agent that runs multi-step tasks such as research, slide decks, websites, and automations triggered by email or Slack. manus.im ↗ Price Manus Team costs $20 per seat a month, or $200 per seat a year, which is about $16.67 a month. Usage is credit-based, with 4,000 pooled credits per seat each month. manus.im ↗Arabic The Manus website offers an Arabic version. Arabic inside the app and Arabic output quality are not stated by the vendor. manus.im ↗Data hosting Hosting location not stated by the vendor on its Team page or Trust Center. Manus says it formally resumed independent operations on 1 September 2026, after a December 2025 post announcing that Manus had joined Meta. manus.im ↗ trust.manus.im ↗ manus.im ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, data centre, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated.Latest move Manus launched Manus 2.0 with a new agent harness, a cloud computer and event-triggered automations. 2026-09-28 manus.im ↗Region fit · 0.5 of 4
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 n8nWorkflow automation and AI search visibility | No | Not stated | Self-hostEU (Frankfurt), or self-hosted anywhere | EUR 20 a month, unlimited users | Manual copy-paste between sales tools, custom integration scripts and older integration platforms | n8n introduced a brand refresh at its In The Loop conference, repositioning the company around agentic AI. | |
Connects CRM, email, forms and AI models in automated workflows such as lead routing, enrichment and follow-ups, and can run on the customer's own servers. n8n.io ↗ Price The Starter plan is EUR 20 a month billed annually and includes 2,500 workflow executions and unlimited users. The Pro plan is EUR 50 a month, and prices are shown in euros only. n8n.io ↗Arabic The n8n interface is available only in English, and its documentation says untranslated text falls back to English. Arabic content support is not stated by the vendor. github.com ↗ docs.n8n.io ↗Data hosting n8n's hosted plans store data in the EU, on servers in Frankfurt, Germany. With self-hosting, data stays wherever the customer runs n8n, which can be a data centre in the GCC; n8n itself does not host in the GCC. n8n.io ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. n8n.io ↗ experts.n8n.io ↗Latest move n8n introduced a brand refresh at its In The Loop conference, repositioning the company around agentic AI. 2026-10-14 blog.n8n.io ↗Region fit · 0.5 of 4
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 OutreachOutreach and sequences | No | Partly | NoUS and EU | On request | Manual inbox follow-up, CRM task lists and forecast spreadsheets | Outreach announced that it was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration for the second year in a row. | |
Runs multi-step email, call and task sequences for reps, and adds AI agents, call recording, deal management and forecasting on the same platform. outreach.ai ↗ Price The entry plan, Amplify Essentials, includes 10,000 AI credits and is quoted on request. The vendor states per-user pricing with no platform fees but publishes no prices. outreach.ai ↗Arabic The interface is offered in English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese, not Arabic. Arabic text can be entered but may not display right to left, and Arabic is not among the 28 call transcription languages. support.outreach.io ↗ support.outreach.io ↗Data hosting Customers can choose to host data in North America or the EU, with the EU option on AWS in Dublin. No Middle East region is named. support.outreach.io ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. Its contact page lists offices in Seattle, Atlanta, Prague and Hyderabad. outreach.ai ↗Latest move Outreach announced that it was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration for the second year in a row. 2026-10-15 outreach.ai ↗Region fit · 0.5 of 4
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 PipedriveCRM | Not stated | Partly | NoUS, EU, UK, Canada, Australia | $14 per seat a month | Spreadsheets and whiteboard deal tracking | Pipedrive made Nova, an AI meeting tool that briefs reps, records and transcribes calls and drafts CRM updates, generally available on all plans at no extra cost. | |
Gives small teams a visual sales pipeline to track deals. Nova records meetings and drafts CRM updates. pipedrive.com ↗ Price A third-party pricing tracker lists the Lite plan at $14 per seat a month, billed annually. Growth is $39, Premium $59 and Ultimate $79 per seat a month on the same annual terms. pricingsaas.com ↗Arabic An Arabic interface is not stated by the vendor. The email, signature and note composers accept right-to-left input such as Arabic, but Pipedrive says this does not change the alignment of pipelines. pipedrive.com ↗Data hosting Pipedrive hosts data on AWS in the US, the EU (Frankfurt and Dublin), the UK, Canada and Australia, and assigns non-EU European and EMEA customers to the UK region. No Middle East region is listed. pipedrive.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt An office, data centre, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is not stated by the vendor. pipedrive.com ↗Latest move Pipedrive made Nova, an AI meeting tool that briefs reps, records and transcribes calls and drafts CRM updates, generally available on all plans at no extra cost. 2026-09-16 pipedrive.com ↗Region fit · 0.5 of 4
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 tl;dvCall and meeting intelligence | No | Partly | Not statedEU; US, Japan and others on request | $18 per seat a month | Manual meeting notes, recap emails and CRM note entry | No recent move. | |
Records Zoom, Meet and Teams calls with or without a bot, transcribes and summarises them, and syncs notes to the CRM. tldv.io ↗ Price The Pro plan is $18 per seat a month billed annually, or $29 billed monthly, and the official pricing page lists the same figures in euros. The Business plan is $29 per seat a month billed annually. tldv.io ↗ tldv.io ↗Arabic Transcripts are available in Arabic for Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE variants. tl;dv says notes and reports are supported in more than 30 languages but does not state whether Arabic is one of them. The interface is offered in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and German, not Arabic. intercom.help ↗ intercom.help ↗Data hosting tl;dv hosts data in Europe by default, and its security page states that all its data centres are located in Europe. The company says the US, Japan and other locations are available on request, but it names no GCC location. tldv.io ↗ tldv.io ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated. tldv.io ↗Latest move No recent move.Region fit · 0.5 of 4
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 WATIWhatsApp, calls and voice AI | No | Partly | Not statedGlobal and EU; dedicated option | $119 a month, 3 users | Personal WhatsApp phones, manual broadcast lists and lead spreadsheets | Wati published a setup guide for its Astra Voice AI agent on WhatsApp calling. | |
Gives sales and support teams a shared WhatsApp Business inbox with broadcasts, no-code chatbots, Astra AI agents and WhatsApp calling, so leads are captured and followed up on WhatsApp. wati.io ↗ Price The Growth plan costs $119 a month billed annually or $130 billed monthly, with 3 users included. WhatsApp conversation fees are charged on top and vary by country. wati.io ↗Arabic The interface is offered in English, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, not Arabic. Wati says its Copilot can translate messages into any language and its Voice AI covers more than 12 languages, but Arabic is not named. support.wati.io ↗ wati.io ↗Data hosting Workspaces run on Global or EU endpoints, with backups on Google Cloud multi-region. A dedicated hosting option at $1,000 a month lets the customer choose the hosting location, but no GCC region is named. docs.wati.io ↗ support.wati.io ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is listed, and the company says its team works remotely. Testimonials on its Arabic about page do not state the customers' countries. wati.io ↗Latest move Wati published a setup guide for its Astra Voice AI agent on WhatsApp calling. 2026-08-05 support.wati.io ↗Region fit · 0.5 of 4
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 ClayData and enrichment | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS | From $167 a month, unlimited users | Manual research and several single-source data subscriptions | Clay raised a $115M Series D led by Wellington at a $7.1B valuation and says it has more than 17,000 customers. | |
Provides a spreadsheet-like workspace that queries many data providers in sequence and uses AI research agents to build, enrich and act on lead lists. clay.com ↗ Price The Launch plan costs $167 a month billed annually or $185 billed monthly per workspace, with unlimited users, and cost depends on Actions and Data Credits rather than seats. A Free plan also exists. clay.com ↗Arabic Not stated by the vendor. Clay's subprocessor list shows its AI runs on OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini and Mistral models, but Clay does not state Arabic support. clay.com ↗ docs.google.com ↗Data hosting Clay's subprocessor list names Amazon Web Services, ClickHouse and Turbopuffer, all in the United States. The data processing agreement names no hosting region, and no GCC option is stated. clay.com ↗ docs.google.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. Clay's community page lists GTMENA, a training provider that certifies go-to-market engineers in the Middle East and North Africa. clay.com ↗Latest move Clay raised a $115M Series D led by Wellington at a $7.1B valuation and says it has more than 17,000 customers. 2026-09-09 clay.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 CognismData and enrichment | Not stated | Not stated | NoEU (Ireland) | On request | Manual prospect research and calls to unverified numbers | Cognism's Q3 2026 update made CRM Enrichment generally available for Salesforce and HubSpot and added a Cognism MCP and a new API. | |
Supplies B2B contact data with verified mobile numbers, along with CRM enrichment and compliance tools such as Do Not Call screening. cognism.com ↗ Price Cognism gives personalised quotes rather than public prices. The Standard plan includes 5 seats, each with a credit allocation. cognism.com ↗Arabic Not stated by the vendor. The website's language selector lists only English, German and French, and the product interface languages are not stated. cognism.com ↗Data hosting Cognism's sub-processor list names AWS and MongoDB in the EU-West-1 region in Ireland for platform hosting. No GCC hosting option is stated. cognism.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Cognism positions itself for EMEA, but its official pages do not mention an office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt. cognism.com ↗Latest move Cognism's Q3 2026 update made CRM Enrichment generally available for Salesforce and HubSpot and added a Cognism MCP and a new API. 2026-10-13 cognism.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 HeyReachOutreach and sequences | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS | $64 per sender a month | Hand-sent LinkedIn invites and messages | HeyReach launched AI voice notes in the sender's cloned voice, in beta on all plans. | |
Automates LinkedIn connection requests and messages across many sender accounts, with one shared inbox and CRM sync. heyreach.io ↗ Price The Growth plan costs $64 per sender (LinkedIn account) a month billed yearly, or $79 billed monthly. The Agency plan costs $800 a month billed yearly for a bundle of 25 senders. heyreach.io ↗Arabic AI voice notes are offered, but no supported languages are listed. Arabic support is not stated by the vendor. heyreach.io ↗Data hosting The vendor's primary processing facilities are in the United States, and users cannot select the region where their data is stored. heyreach.io ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. heyreach.io ↗Latest move HeyReach launched AI voice notes in the sender's cloned voice, in beta on all plans. 2026-09-02 heyreach.io ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 InstantlyOutreach and sequences | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS | $37.60 a month per workspace | Hand-sent cold email and manual inbox warm-up | Instantly launched new AI agents for partnerships, investment, recruiting, user research and voice outreach. | |
Sends cold email at scale from many warmed-up inboxes, finds B2B leads, and uses AI agents to sort replies and keep campaigns running. instantly.ai ↗ Price The Growth plan costs $47 a month, or $37.60 a month with yearly billing selected, and includes unlimited email accounts and 5,000 emails a month. No per-seat pricing is stated. instantly.ai ↗Arabic The website offers only English. AI reply labelling handles more than 50 languages, but Arabic is not named. instantly.ai ↗ help.instantly.ai ↗Data hosting The privacy policy says data used in the service is generally stored in the United States. instantly.ai ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. The company is registered in Wyoming, USA. instantly.ai ↗ instantly.ai ↗Latest move Instantly launched new AI agents for partnerships, investment, recruiting, user research and voice outreach. 2026-09-22 feedback.instantly.ai ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 KlaviyoMarketing and customer engagement | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS; EU (Germany) opt-in for new accounts | Free to 250 profiles, then usage-based | Basic email newsletter tools and manual e-commerce campaign lists | Klaviyo launched headless access at K:BOS, letting users run Klaviyo from AI tools through more than 260 MCP tools and 490 APIs. | |
B2C CRM for online brands that sends email, SMS and mobile messages triggered by store and customer data, with AI agents for content and customer service. klaviyo.com ↗ Price The free plan covers up to 250 active profiles and 500 email sends a month. Paid plans are priced by active profiles and message volume, with prices shown in a plan builder on the pricing page. klaviyo.com ↗Arabic Arabic interface and Arabic content support are not stated by the vendor. The help centre is offered in 12 locales, none of them Arabic. klaviyo.com ↗Data hosting Existing accounts are hosted in the United States, and new accounts can opt in to an EU data centre in Germany at sign-up. No GCC region is listed. klaviyo.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, data centre, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. Its regional headquarters are in Dublin for EMEA and Singapore for Asia. klaviyo.com ↗Latest move Klaviyo launched headless access at K:BOS, letting users run Klaviyo from AI tools through more than 260 MCP tools and 490 APIs. 2026-09-09 klaviyo.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 lemlistOutreach and sequences | Not stated | Not stated | NoFrance (EU) | $55 a month, unlimited users | Hand-sent cold emails and separate lead databases | lemlist launched custom enrichment waterfalls, which let teams set the order of email and phone data providers. | |
Finds leads in its own contact database, enriches them, and runs personalised sequences across email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and phone, with AI-written messages and a shared inbox. lemlist.com ↗ Price The Email plan costs $55 a month billed yearly, or $69 billed monthly, and includes unlimited users and email senders. The Multichannel plan is priced per user at $87 a month billed yearly, or $109 billed monthly. lemlist.com ↗Arabic The website is offered in English, French, German and Spanish, and the app's interface languages are not stated by the vendor. The nine languages listed for AI voice messages on LinkedIn do not include Arabic. lemlist.com ↗ help.lemlist.com ↗Data hosting Data is stored on servers located only in France and hosted by OVH. help.lemlist.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt The vendor lists its operating regions as Europe, the USA and Canada. No office, partner or customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated. lemlist.com ↗Latest move lemlist launched custom enrichment waterfalls, which let teams set the order of email and phone data providers. 2026-10-02 lemlist.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 LushaData and enrichment | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS | $37.45 per seat a month | Manual LinkedIn and Google searches for contact details | Lusha API version 2.20.0 added Recommendations endpoints that rank contacts and companies against target profiles, following the ICP Fit Score API released on 13 October 2026. | |
Reveals verified email addresses and direct phone numbers for prospects through a browser extension, enrichment and an API, and pushes them into the CRM. lusha.com ↗ Price The Starter plan costs $37.45 a month billed annually or $49.90 billed monthly, with 400 credits a month, and a third-party pricing guide describes the price as per user. A Free plan with 40 credits a month also exists, and teams of more than five users are asked to contact sales. lusha.com ↗ databar.ai ↗Arabic Not stated by the vendor. Lusha's pricing page and product blog are published in English only and do not mention Arabic. lusha.com ↗ lusha.com ↗Data hosting Lusha's privacy policy states that its data is stored on Amazon Web Services in the United States. The policy also lists data transfers to the UK, Australia and Israel, and no GCC hosting option is stated. lusha.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. lusha.com ↗Latest move Lusha API version 2.20.0 added Recommendations endpoints that rank contacts and companies against target profiles, following the ICP Fit Score API released on 13 October 2026. 2026-10-20 docs.lusha.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 MakeWorkflow automation and AI search visibility | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS and EU | From $9 a month for 10,000 credits | Manual data transfer between sales tools, spreadsheet-based processes and custom scripts | At Waves '26, Make launched Process Intelligence on a waitlist, upgraded its Maia AI builder and added governance controls for AI agents. | |
Builds visual no-code scenarios and AI agents that automate lead handling, CRM updates and reporting across thousands of apps. make.com ↗ Price The Core plan is $9 a month billed annually for 10,000 credits, priced per organisation rather than per user. Team features need the Teams plan. make.com ↗Arabic Make's help centre describes no interface language setting and does not list Arabic. Arabic content support is not stated by the vendor. help.make.com ↗ help.make.com ↗Data hosting Make offers data centres in the US and the EU, as data zones US1, US2, EU1 and EU2. The zone is fixed when an organisation is created, and some AI requests are processed in the US or UK even on EU zones. help.make.com ↗ help.make.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt Make's partner directory lists partners in Europe, the US, Israel, Brazil and Australia, and none in the Gulf or Egypt. No office or named customer in the region is stated by the vendor. make.com ↗ make.com ↗Latest move At Waves '26, Make launched Process Intelligence on a waitlist, upgraded its Maia AI builder and added governance controls for AI agents. 2026-10-20 make.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 Otter.aiCall and meeting intelligence | Not stated | No | NoUS | $8.33 per user a month | Manual note-taking and recap emails | Otter closed $320M in growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, which the company says is for enterprise growth and international expansion. | |
Records and transcribes meetings, writes summaries and action items, and offers live coaching during sales calls. otter.ai ↗ Price The Pro plan is $8.33 per user a month billed annually, or $16.99 billed monthly, for up to 5 users. The Business plan is $19.99 per user a month billed annually, for teams of up to 25, and the pricing page also carries temporary discounts. otter.ai ↗Arabic Otter transcribes English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese, and Arabic is not on the list. Interface language support is not stated by the vendor. otter.ai ↗Data hosting Customer data is stored on AWS in the United States. No choice of data location is stated by the vendor. otter.ai ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated. otter.ai ↗Latest move Otter closed $320M in growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, which the company says is for enterprise growth and international expansion. 2026-10-20 otter.ai ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 Peec AIWorkflow automation and AI search visibility | Not stated | Not stated | NoEU (Frankfurt) | EUR 89 a month | Manual checks of AI chatbot answers and SEO-only rank tracking | Peec launched Peec Agent and redesigned actions that connect to tools such as HubSpot and Linear. | |
Tracks a brand's visibility, position and sentiment in AI search answers compared with competitors, with recommended actions and an AI agent. peec.ai ↗ Price Peec's comparison page lists the Starter plan at EUR 89 a month and the Pro plan at EUR 199 a month, billed monthly and sized by the number of AI answers tracked. The Enterprise plan is priced on request and billed annually. peec.ai ↗ peec.ai ↗Arabic Peec lets each project set the location, language and domain to track. A list of supported languages, an interface language setting and Arabic support are not stated by the vendor. docs.peec.ai ↗ peec.ai ↗Data hosting Peec hosts its services in the EU on Google Cloud, mainly in Frankfurt, Germany. Some subprocessors, mainly AI providers, process data in the US and UK. peec.ai ↗In the Gulf and Egypt The company is based in Berlin. No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. peec.ai ↗ peec.ai ↗Latest move Peec launched Peec Agent and redesigned actions that connect to tools such as HubSpot and Linear. 2026-10-21 peec.ai ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 SalesloftOutreach and sequences | No | Not stated | NoUS and EU | On request | Manual inbox follow-up, CRM task lists and forecast spreadsheets | Salesloft unveiled a single global brand after the Clari merger, with Salesloft as the company and platform name and Forecast keeping the Clari name. | |
Runs rep cadences across email, phone and LinkedIn, and since the merger with Clari also covers conversation intelligence and forecasting. salesloft.com ↗ Price No plans or prices are published. The pricing page directs buyers to talk to sales for a custom quote. salesloft.com ↗Arabic A 2023 announcement says the platform was made available in French, German and Spanish. Arabic interface, writing or transcription support is not stated by the vendor. martechcube.com ↗Data hosting Data is hosted in Amazon and Google data centres in the US and the EU, and EU data is stored in Frankfurt, Germany. salesloft.com ↗ salesloft.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. salesloft.com ↗Latest move Salesloft unveiled a single global brand after the Clari merger, with Salesloft as the company and platform name and Forecast keeping the Clari name. 2026-09-02 salesloft.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 SmartleadOutreach and sequences | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS | $32 a month, unlimited email accounts | Manual cold email and warm-up across many inboxes | No recent move. | |
Runs high-volume cold email from unlimited inboxes with automatic warm-up, a shared inbox, lead sourcing and AI agents. smartlead.ai ↗ Price The Base plan costs $39 a month, or $32 a month billed annually. All plans include unlimited email accounts, and no per-seat pricing is stated. smartlead.ai ↗Arabic Language support is not stated by the vendor, and Arabic is not mentioned. smartlead.ai ↗Data hosting The vendor's sub-processor list names Amazon Web Services in the USA for hosting, processing and storage. helpcenter.smartlead.ai ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. smartlead.ai ↗Latest move No recent move.Region fit · 0 of 4
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 Writesonic GEOWorkflow automation and AI search visibility | Not stated | Not stated | Not statedNot stated; US sub-processors | From $79 a month, 1 user | Manual checks of AI chatbot answers, SEO rank trackers and part of content writing work | Writesonic added tracking for Meta's Muse Spark AI assistant. | |
Tracks how a brand appears in AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and other engines, then generates content and citation fixes and links AI traffic to pipeline. writesonic.com ↗ Price The Starter plan is $79 a month billed annually for one user, 50 prompts and one market. The Basic plan is $199 a month for two users, and extra users cost $50 a user a month on the Basic and Growth plans. writesonic.com ↗Arabic Writesonic says its Enterprise plan supports more than 50 languages but does not name Arabic. Each tracked market covers one country and one language. writesonic.com ↗ docs.writesonic.com ↗Data hosting Writesonic runs mainly on Microsoft Azure, with AWS for some workloads, and lists all its sub-processors in the United States. Enterprise contracts can set the hosting region, but no regions are named. writesonic.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. writesonic.com ↗ writesonic.com ↗Latest move Writesonic added tracking for Meta's Muse Spark AI assistant. 2026-10-14 writesonic.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 ZapierWorkflow automation and AI search visibility | No | Not stated | NoUS | From $19.99 a month, 1 user | Manual data entry between apps, hand-routed leads and simple custom scripts | At ZapConnect 2026, Zapier launched Next Gen Zaps in early access and added enterprise controls for AI agents, including app restrictions and audit logs. | |
Builds no-code automations, AI steps and agents that move leads and deal data between thousands of apps, including CRM, forms, email and Slack. zapier.com ↗ Price The Professional plan starts at $19.99 a month billed annually for one user and 750 tasks. The Team plan starts at $69 a month billed annually for 25 users and 2,000 tasks. zapier.com ↗Arabic Zapier states that its product is available only in English. Its help centre says chatbot answers in other languages may be less precise than in English, and its translation step covers over 100 languages without naming Arabic. help.zapier.com ↗ help.zapier.com ↗ help.zapier.com ↗Data hosting Zapier stores customer data in AWS US-East-1 in the United States. Region-specific data residency is not available unless agreed separately with Zapier. docs.zapier.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. zapier.com ↗ zapier.com ↗Latest move At ZapConnect 2026, Zapier launched Next Gen Zaps in early access and added enterprise controls for AI agents, including app restrictions and audit logs. 2026-09-23 zapier.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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 ZoomInfoData and enrichment | Not stated | Not stated | NoUS | On request | Manual account research, bought lead lists and older data providers | ZoomInfo acquired DoubleO.ai, an agent orchestration platform built to let agents run a go-to-market motion end to end, in a deal reported on 5 October 2026 without a stated deal date. | |
Provides a large B2B company and contact database with intent signals, CRM enrichment, and AI agents that run go-to-market workflows. zoominfo.com ↗ Price ZoomInfo sells custom packages based on the customer's B2B data use cases and does not list prices. Its API, MCP and CLI access is priced on usage rather than seats. zoominfo.com ↗Arabic Not stated by the vendor. ZoomInfo's October 2026 release notes do not mention languages, localisation or Arabic. zoominfo.com ↗Data hosting ZoomInfo's subprocessor list names Amazon Web Services in the United States for cloud hosting and also lists Google in the United States. No GCC hosting option is stated. zoominfo.com ↗In the Gulf and Egypt No office, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt is stated by the vendor. The October 2026 enrichment release note lists the largest mobile number gains in India, the UK, Brazil, the Netherlands, Australia and Italy, with no mention of the Gulf. zoominfo.com ↗Latest move ZoomInfo acquired DoubleO.ai, an agent orchestration platform built to let agents run a go-to-market motion end to end, in a deal reported on 5 October 2026 without a stated deal date. 2026-10-05 mrweb.com ↗Region fit · 0 of 4
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No tools match these filters.
Global moves that change the tools you buy, and regional moves that change who you sell to.
No moves match these filters.
The index exists so revenue leaders in the Gulf and Egypt can choose tools and read the market without guessing.
We track the AI assistants, CRMs, data, outreach, messaging, meeting and marketing tools that revenue teams in the region use and evaluate. Facts come from each vendor's own pricing, security and documentation pages wherever they can be read, and otherwise from named news or industry sources. A second researcher re-checks each one before it is published.
Four checks, one point each: the interface is in Arabic, the tool works in Arabic, customer data can be kept in a GCC country, and the vendor has an office, data centre, partner or named customer in the Gulf or Egypt. Partial support counts half, and so does data that stays in the GCC only when you host the tool yourself. Region fit is about readiness for this market, not product quality.
A topic makes the list when at least two dated sources from the last 90 days show revenue leaders discussing it. Momentum says whether it is new, rising, steady or cooling, and why. We do not publish engagement counts we cannot measure.
Product and revenue leaders who speak in public about building, pricing and selling, worldwide and across the Middle East and North Africa. Each person is checked against their own LinkedIn profile and current role, and every statement links to the post, article, talk or interview it came from, with its date.
Funding, acquisitions, launches, expansions and rules that matter to revenue teams, each linked to the company's announcement or a named outlet. This edition covers 1 September to 26 October 2026.
Tell us and we will check it for the next edition.
