Capturing AI’s Momentum: Pathways to Growth and Productivity | Middle East & Africa Summit 2025

Market Leadership and Winners

• Saad (IBM) asserts no single entity currently "wins" the AI race; success will be defined by the entity delivering the most tangible productivity and efficiency benefits to enterprises.
• IBM claims a $9.5 billion AI book of business with enterprises, positioning itself as a leader in enterprise AI impact despite consumer AI popularity.
• Antonello (Etihad) argues humanity as a whole is the beneficiary, noting historical parallels where early market leaders (e.g., Nokia, PC manufacturers) were replaced by new dominant players.
• Saad explicitly states the United States is "definitively winning" the current AI race.
• Audience polling indicates a majority belief that the US is winning the AI race compared to China.
• Alex (Metropolis) frames the current geopolitical landscape as a "Cold War" between the US and China, stating the US "needs to win."

Internal AI Adoption and Efficiency Gains

• IBM implemented an internal "Client Zero" strategy, using AI to retrofit legacy systems, resulting in $4.5 billion in savings.
• IBM's "Ask HR" system resolves 90% of IT issues and generates employment documents (e.g., pay statements) in seconds, replacing multi-day manual workflows.
• Etihad Airways automates revenue management, updating fares for millions of origin-destination pairs 3–4 times daily, a task impossible for humans to manage manually.
• Etihad uses Large Language Models (LLMs) as decision-support tools for customer service agents, rather than fully autonomous bots, to interpret refund requests and compensation eligibility.
• Metropolis utilizes computer vision to onboard 1–2 users per second, accumulating 21 million US members for seamless identity and frictionless commerce experiences.

Data Infrastructure and Utilization

• An MIT study cited indicates only 1% of enterprise data is currently leveraged by AI, suggesting the remaining 99% represents a massive future value opportunity.
• The primary barrier to AI adoption is not technology or infrastructure, but the complexity of aligning business processes and unifying trillions of data points across legacy structures.
• Success requires "data lakehouses" to structure unstructured data, enabling workflows to be completed in minutes rather than days.

Technological Frontiers and Chip Innovation

• IBM announced a 156-qubit quantum chip, the first of its kind, leveraging quantum physics (infinite states between 0 and 1) rather than classical binary computing.
• Commercial viability for quantum computing (error-free machines) is projected for 3–4 years away, with applications in protein mapping, genetic mapping, and rust prevention.
• IBM advocates for specialized, smaller LLMs over massive general models to reduce GPU requirements, power consumption, and operational costs.
• The US CHIPS Act provided approximately $50 billion in research funding for AI and chip development in the US.

Labor Market Implications and Workforce Evolution

• Pessimistic View (Alex): Skepticism exists regarding mass job losses for skilled professionals (lawyers, accountants, traders), with concerns that retraining alone may be insufficient given the scale of disruption.
• Optimistic View (Antonello): Job displacement is viewed as a natural evolutionary cycle; the focus is on "reskilling" rather than replacement, with the critical skill shifting from "providing answers" to "asking the right questions."
• Historical Context: Etihad's leadership notes that while roles change (e.g., assistants moving from typing to strategic support), the volume of work increases, requiring higher-level skills.
• Talent Scarcity: AI is being used to pre-screen 100,000+ CVs and video interviews annually for Etihad's hiring of 2,500 employees per year, though fraud prevention (deepfakes) remains a risk.

Consumer Experience and Automation

• The future vision (Metropolis) is "precognitive" AI that eliminates entire workflows rather than just automating steps, meaning the need for human agents may vanish entirely as AI predicts needs in real-time.
• Airport biometrics and facial recognition (Dubai, Orlando) have streamlined passenger processing, removing the need for passport checks at boarding gates, though reliability varies by region (e.g., Brazil).
• AI's highest commercial value in airlines lies at the "top of the funnel" (converting the 93% of website visitors who do not book) rather than in check-in operations.

Governance, Regulation, and Risks

• IBM's WatsonX platform centers on governance to prevent bias, hallucination, and data corruption, serving as "guardrails" for enterprise AI.
• Etihad operates in a regulatory environment where facial recognition is accepted as a "fair exchange of value" for safety and convenience, unlike some other jurisdictions.
• Key risks identified include the pace of adoption (slowing down leads to being left behind), energy consumption for data centers, and the geopolitical "trade war" over advanced chips and critical minerals.