News

6 Automation Tools Transforming Middle Eastern Businesses

From finance to HR, automation is helping companies in the region cut costs, reduce risk, and focus on smarter, higher-value work.

Published

1 year ago

July 28, 2025

Nour Nasir

6 automation tools transforming middle eastern businesses

As growth accelerates across the Middle East, businesses are under pressure to run leaner, faster, and smarter. In the UAE alone, 64% of companies plan to increase their automation budgets in 2025, targeting finance, HR, and customer support in particular. With that momentum building, here are six automation tools already reshaping how regional companies operate.

Spend Management

Spend management platforms are replacing manual expense workflows with real-time control. Tools like Qashio automate approvals, issue custom corporate cards, and integrate directly with ERP systems — giving companies visibility into spend patterns and reducing fraud and delays. Travel businesses using Qashio for Travel, for example, have cut FX losses and streamlined reconciliation. Even smaller teams benefit from built-in rewards like air miles and hotel points.

HR Automation

HR automation platforms are potentially reducing thousands of errors and freeing up time. From applicant tracking to payroll, these systems replace repetitive admin with centralized dashboards for leave, benefits, tax documents, and onboarding. The result is lower compliance risk and more time for strategic HR initiatives like retention and workplace culture.

Marketing

Marketing teams are also scaling faster with automation. Tools now handle email targeting, social scheduling, lead scoring, and cross-channel analytics — creating smarter, data-driven campaigns without manual effort. Rather than chasing clicks, teams can focus on high-converting journeys, backed by real user behavior.

Customer Support

Customer support automation is another game-changer. As demand rises, chatbots, smart ticketing, and real-time translation help resolve basic queries instantly. A 2025 survey by Zendesk found 90% of C-level execs expect most customer issues to be handled without human agents in the near future. These platforms improve satisfaction while reducing overhead, keeping teams lean without compromising service.

Project Management

Project management tools are bringing structure to distributed teams. They offer live updates, task tracking, and performance insights in one place — helping managers spot delays early, keep teams accountable, and maintain transparency with stakeholders. As businesses scale, automated coordination becomes essential.

Procurement

Procurement automation is tackling one of the most overlooked inefficiencies. These systems digitize purchase requests, approvals, vendor management, and invoice tracking, often with real-time budget controls and ERP sync. The result is faster cycles, better compliance, and stronger supplier relationships.

With automation gaining traction across every core function, Middle East businesses are entering a new operational era. CEOs know what’s at stake: 60% say they’ll need to evolve significantly over the next decade to stay competitive. For many, that evolution has already begun.

News

ESET Bets On Specialized Security AI At 0.5% The Training Cost

ESET says NeoCortex can estimate an attacker’s next move, with a kill switch and human oversight built in to keep it from going rogue.

Published

5 days ago

November 4, 2026

Dana Saadeh

eset bets on specialized security ai at 0.5% the training cost

A sign-in anomaly, a suspicious process launch and an unusual connection may look harmless alone. Together, they can describe an intrusion that is hard for security to teams to piece together.

To solve that problem, ESET announced ESET NeoCortex on November 4, 2026: a specialized foundational AI model for cybersecurity. It powers ESET LiveCortex, available within the ESET PROTECT Platform, which connects fragmented security signals and turns them into actionable incidents.

Filtering is the main selling point, with LiveCortex processing billions of raw telemetry events daily, and just 0.00111% of them contributing to incidents presented to customers. The aim is less alert fatigue and more analyst time spent on threats that matter.

NeoCortex is built on world-model architecture, learning how digital environments behave and how events relate. ESET says that lets it reconstruct missing incident context, recognize similar past cases and estimate an attacker’s likely next step – what the company calls “minus-one-day defense,” a chance to intervene before the next stage unfolds. ESET points to Black October, the week leading up to October 25, 2026, when critical security issues affecting PHP, Linux, GitLab and other key systems demanded rapid, prioritized responses, as the kind of moment where that context matters.

ESET’s internal research also suggests a specialized model like NeoCortex can be trained at up to 200 times lower cost than a large general reasoning model, while delivering more accurate, defense-focused results. The company credits optimized training, a focus on cybersecurity vocabulary, lower computing requirements and privately owned hardware.

Also Read: Dubai Says Its Deepfake Detector Needs Just 7 Seconds Of Video

“AI is accelerating both cyberattacks and cyberdefenses. With ESET NeoCortex, we are applying our AI investment to develop specialized foundational cybersecurity intelligence that remains under our control and strengthens, rather than replaces, human expertise,” said Juraj Malcho, Chief Technology Officer at ESET.

As part of the design, NeoCortex forms part of a layered architecture combining specialized models, deterministic controls, correlation logic, validation, auditability and expert human oversight. Safeguards include restricted sandboxes, read-only tools, continuous monitoring, defined usage and token limits, a kill switch and human oversight of critical response decisions. The model is also developed and self-hosted on ESET’s own infrastructure, which the company says reduces exposure to shifts among third-party AI providers, including commercial and geopolitical ones.