News

Gulf AI Job Vacancies Nearly Triple, But Hiring Stays Lopsided

New GulfTalent data shows demand runs highest at the top: one in 12 senior leadership roles involves AI but few of the jobs require building models.

Published

3 months ago

July 19, 2026

Nour Nasir

gulf ai job vacancies nearly triple but hiring stays lopsided

AI hiring in the Gulf is accelerating fast and remains strikingly concentrated. AI-related duties, skills, or tools appeared in 3.4% of professional vacancies advertised across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar in the first half of 2026, according to new data from recruitment platform GulfTalent. That’s roughly one in every 30 jobs, up from 1.2% in 2022 — a near-tripling in four years.

Most of that growth sits in a handful of industries. Technology leads by a wide margin, with nearly one in three vacancies requiring AI-related skills or responsibilities. Banking and auditing follow at roughly one in 15. Oil and gas and real estate sit at about one in 30, while construction, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, education, and hospitality mention AI in one in 100 vacancies or fewer.

The trajectory tracks the technology itself. ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022 pushed generative AI into businesses, and the spread of workplace platforms such as Claude, Gemini, and Copilot over the past two years has sharpened demand for professionals who can actually use them.

Seniority is the other dividing line. Around one in 30 non-supervisory roles involves AI, against roughly one in 12 senior leadership positions — employers increasingly expect executives to lead AI strategy, adoption, and business transformation.

Also Read: The Most AI-Proof Career Opportunities In The Middle East

The roles themselves reach well beyond model-building, with a third requiring the use of AI in day-to-day work, another third involving the implementation of AI solutions across organizations, and a quarter being sales roles for AI products and services. Fewer than one in 10 are dedicated to building or training models, and demand is spreading to sales executives, marketers, product managers, consultants, and other business roles.

Internationally, GulfTalent’s 3.4% figure aligns with PwC’s finding that 3.2% of UAE vacancies required AI skills in 2025, and outpaces Stanford’s AI Index figures for the US (2.5%) and UK (1.9%). Singapore leads at 4.8%. The findings draw on 118,000 direct employer vacancies advertised between January 2022 and June 2026.

News

G42’s Inception42 Wants AI To Show Its Work Before Investors Commit

Launched at SuperReturn Middle East, Alpha is pitched at sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms underwriting bigger deals on tighter timelines.

Published

3 days ago

October 13, 2026

Nour Nasir

g42's inception 42 wants ai to show its work before investors commit

Inception42, G42’s agentic AI company, believes that institutional investors want AI they can check, not just AI that saves time. Its new tool, Alpha, launched at SuperReturn Middle East, is designed to draft investment memos in which every claim points back to its source.

Alpha is aimed at private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds and institutional allocators, which Inception42 says are underwriting larger, more complex positions under tighter timelines. Most AI tools, it argues, speed up individual tasks such as a memo draft or a comps table but leave the investment strategy scattered across files, inboxes and committee decks.

Teams upload Confidential Information Memoranda, diligence packs and portfolio data, which Alpha turns into insights grounded in that material. It checks how complete the diligence is, flagging gaps before they become late-stage surprises, then scores the deal against criteria the institution sets and drafts the memo.

Sourcing every claim is the core of Inception42’s Alpha pitch. Investment committees, the company says, have little time to challenge the evidence, and the audit trail is meant to give them more certainty. The company also promises institutions proof that their own strategy was applied consistently on every deal.

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

“Every investment committee wants the same thing: the full picture of a deal and the confidence to act on it,” says Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception42. “Alpha gives deal teams and committee members that picture, with every insight traceable to its source, so speed and rigor finally pull in the same direction”.

Alpha is available as SaaS, and investment data, Inception42 says, stays under the institution’s control at every step. Firms can tailor the tool with custom agents, and Alpha Skills will eventually add reusable, practitioner-designed workflows for tasks such as comparables analysis and credit assessment.

The company says Alpha is already proven in the region’s most significant financial institutions. If the tool works as described, committees get an investment memo they can interrogate rather than simply take on trust.