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GITEX GLOBAL 2024 To Showcase Leading AI Tech Talent
The Dubai expo will bring thought leaders, founders, and investors together in a landmark event celebrating the UAE’s growing success as a global AI hub.
Over 3,500 of the tech sector’s most well-known brands will converge at the World Trade Centre in Dubai between 14 and 18 October for GITEX GLOBAL 2024, the world’s largest technology and startup event.
This year, the tech expo will see thought leaders, industry heavyweights and even government representatives gather to showcase and discuss breakthrough AI technologies while forging potential collaborations that could lead to future advancements in one of the world’s fastest-growing sectors.
GITEX GLOBAL 2024 will highlight the potential challenges surrounding AI, including ethics, government policies, and regulations. Experts will also uncover key opportunities for applying the technology in the tech, health, and finance sectors and explain how it might shape the future of work and employment.
The UAE has become increasingly prominent as a global AI hub due to a long-term government agenda aiming to harness the new technologies’ full potential. The UAE’s National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence offers a clear and determined vision to make the country an AI world leader by 2031, with significant funds already allocated to public services, tourism, energy, and education.
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AI solutions are increasingly seen as vital tools for enhanced productivity and economic growth amongst world leaders and industry experts. In a recent GITEX Tech Waves podcast, Thomas Pramotedham, CEO of Abu Dhabi-based AI enterprise Presight, explained: “Today you’ll see companies applying AI and AI evolving — in five, ten years, it will get smarter, and when it gets smarter, you’ll get more efficiency and shorter routes to answers for difficult and complex questions. In return, that will be to the betterment of society and the world we live in”.
GITEX headliners for 2024 include a host of tech giants such as Adobe, Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Builder AI, Dell, G42, Google, HPE, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Open AI. In addition, the conference will feature a star-studded lineup of keynote speakers, including Isabell Gradert, VP of Central Research and Technology at Airbus (Germany), Michael Spranger, President of Sony AI (Japan), and Stephen Ibaraki, and many more.
For more information about GITEX GLOBAL 2024, head to the official website.
News
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.
Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.
The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.
Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc
— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026
“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.
Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.
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The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.
Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
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