years: 2026

Dubai, UAE – 12 February 2026: As geopolitical tensions, de-globalisation, and economic uncertainty reshape global capital flows, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is consolidating its position as one of the world’s most trusted and resilient financial gateways, according to a new report by Emerging Markets Intelligence & Research (EMIR), supported by Qashio.

The report, ‘Mapping the UAE’s Role as a Global Financial Gateway’, highlights how the UAE is attracting high levels of foreign direct investment and financial activity at a time when capital is retreating from many traditional markets.

Foreign direct investment into the UAE doubled to $40 billion (between 2019 and 2024), reaching record levels even as global FDI stagnated. In 2024, FDI accounted for 40% of the UAE’s gross capital formation, compared to just 4.3% across developed economies, underscoring the country’s growing role as a destination for long-term, trust-led capital.

The scale of activity is accelerating rapidly. The UAE recorded 1,362 FDI projects in 2024, representing a 350% increase since 2020, while assets under management in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) reached $700 billion, growing 58% year-on-year.

According to the report, the UAE’s ability to benefit from global realignment is closely linked to its neutrality, regulatory clarity, and institutional agility.

“The UAE is actually benefiting from the de-globalisation and the geopolitical reorientation of major power blocks. It doesn’t have adversaries, so is able to build economic ties with everyone. The speed with which the government has been able to adapt to and anticipate the new situation is remarkable,” the report notes.

Beyond capital inflows, the research also points to the UAE’s expanding role as a transaction and payments hub, supported by modern financial infrastructure, strong compliance frameworks, and growing confidence among global businesses managing cross-border activity from the region.

From Qashio’s perspective, the UAE’s rise as a financial gateway reinforces the importance of secure, transparent, and compliant financial operations for businesses operating in an increasingly complex global environment.

“As capital flows become more fragmented and regulated, trust and control are no longer optional — they are foundational,” said Armin Moradi, Founder and CEO of Qashio. “Businesses operating from the UAE need full visibility over spending, strong compliance with Central Bank guidance, and the ability to act on financial insights in real time. This report reflects why the UAE has earned global confidence — and how organisations can operate responsibly within that ecosystem.”

The findings position the UAE not only as a safe destination for capital, but as a jurisdiction capable of supporting long-term growth across finance, trade, technology, and digital assets — at a time when global businesses are reassessing where and how they deploy resources.

Dubai, UAE – 17 February 2026 – Dubai Chambers has partnered with Qashio, the UAE-based spend management and embedded finance platform, to enhance small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) access to advanced financial management and alternative finance solutions.

The partnership establishes a framework for collaboration aimed at equipping Dubai’s SME community with digital corporate cards, automated expense management systems, and streamlined access to working capital solutions. The initiative supports Dubai Chambers’ ongoing efforts to strengthen the emirate’s business ecosystem and improve private sector competitiveness.

The UAE Ministry of Economy projects that more than one million SMEs will be operating in the country by 2030. Through this collaboration, Qashio will provide Dubai Chamber of Commerce members with instantly issued corporate cards, real-time spend visibility, and automated controls that reduce manual reconciliation and improve financial governance. The platform also enables businesses to optimise cash flow through structured payment cycles and embedded financing options.

Armin Moradi, Founder and CEO of Qashio, said, “Dubai Chambers plays a central role in supporting the growth of the SME community. Through this collaboration, we aim to provide businesses with practical, technology-driven financial tools that improve visibility, strengthen control, and support sustainable scaling. By combining institutional reach with fintech innovation, we can help remove operational friction and enable SMEs to operate with greater agility.”

Under the partnership, Qashio and Dubai Chambers will also collaborate on workshops, educational initiatives, and awareness programmes focused on financial automation, responsible credit usage, and digital adoption. Tailored onboarding incentives will be introduced to encourage SMEs to adopt modern spend management infrastructure.

The partnership reflects a broader shift towards digital financial services in the region, as businesses increasingly seek alternatives to traditional banking models to improve efficiency, transparency, and access to capital.

Dubai, UAE – 18 February 2026 — eNovate, a subsidiary of eFinance Investment Group,  and Cobi, a UAE-headquartered AI-native customer intelligence platform, today announced the integration of Cobi’s AI-powered intelligence infrastructure across its digital payment ecosystem to redefine how young people across Egypt engage with digital financial services. Enabled through Mastercard’s Engage programme, the partnership combines eNovate’s digital payments product suite and Cobi’s AI-powered engagement platform to give financial institutions a new level of intelligence, personalisation, and behavioural insight across their customer base. As the MENA region emerged as a global hub for financial services innovation in 2025, fuelled by government initiatives and rapid digital payments growth, the focus is shifting toward AI-powered engagement and intelligence at scale.

The collaboration begins with the Rize app, eNovate’s flagship digital wallet, where Cobi’s intelligence layer will power real-time personalisation for Egypt’s youth segment. With 85% of people across MENA already using at least one emerging payment method, this allows banks and fintechs to better understand spending behaviours, identify friction, and deliver timely product interventions that drive activation, loyalty, and long-term customer value. The capability will extend across eNovate’s broader digital payment services, forming Egypt’s first large-scale AI-driven portfolio management infrastructure.

With the MENA region’s AI in financial services market projected to reach $4.7 billion by 2032, underscoring the scale of opportunity for intelligent, data-driven payment infrastructure across the region. At the core of the partnership is Cobi’s behavioural AI engine, which builds deep context on how users engage, identifies patterns, and recommends or triggers next-best-actions across acquisition, activation, and retention journeys for customers combining it with eNovate’s role as a central payments and digital services provider to Egypt’s banks, telcos, fintechs, merchants, and government-linked entities, the collaboration marks a major step toward intelligent, personalised financial experiences across the country.

Nashwa Kamel, CEO of eNovate, explained: “eNovate is committed to enabling banks & financial institutions with modern, data-driven capabilities. Partnering with Cobi allows us to introduce real-time intelligence into every digital wallet and payment experience we support, starting with the youth-focused Rize app. This collaboration strengthens our mission to provide Egypt with the most advanced and responsive payment infrastructure that provides insights into spend behaviour, helping banks & financial institutions to spot inefficiencies, optimize costs, and make smarter, data-driven decisions. By turning raw spend data into strategic intelligence, businesses can anticipate trends, strengthen supplier relationships, and accelerate sustainable growth.

Darren Edmund, CEO of Cobi, highlighted: “Our partnership with eNovate represents a fundamental shift in how digital payment infrastructure operates. By embedding Cobi as the intelligence layer across eNovate’s ecosystem, we are enabling banks and financial platforms to move beyond static transaction processing toward real-time, adaptive systems that understand and respond to user behaviour instantly. This allows institutions to personalise at scale, optimise portfolio performance, and build deeper, longer-lasting customer relationships. We’re glad to have had Mastercard’s Engage programme support this collaboration.”

Looking ahead, the partnership will extend toward agentic payment experiences, where AI not only analyses user behaviour but autonomously recommends or initiates actions that improve financial outcomes, ushering in a new era of intelligent and proactive financial services across Egypt. The initial deployment begins in Q1 2026, with expansion planned across additional eNovate-powered platforms and regional markets.

23 January 2026, Abu Dhabi – Yango Group, in collaboration with INSEAD and Polynome, will host an invitation-only executive workshop at Machines Can Think 2026, the UAE’s premier AI summit, focused on how AI is being implemented in practice across the UAE’s public and semi-government sectors. The workshop will take place on January 26 in Abu Dhabi at Park Hyatt Saadiyat, from 11:20 AM to 1:00 PM.

AI is becoming central to how governments and organisations operate in the UAE, driven by strong national ambition and large-scale investment. Through the UAE’s 2031 AI Strategy, the country is working toward the goals of Centennial 2071 by leading AI investment across sectors and creating high-value markets that support long-term economic growth.

Against this backdrop, the session will explore why many AI initiatives face challenges in scaling beyond pilots, even when early results are promising. It will examine how procurement decisions, data ownership, organisational structures, and governance models shape AI outcomes at scale. Panelists will discuss what it takes to embed AI into real decision-making processes, rather than using it only to automate individual tasks. The session will also highlight the long-term trade-offs governments and large institutions must navigate to ensure AI delivers lasting, accountable impact.

The discussion will also feature perspectives from government and industry practitioners, including Mohammed Adnane Retmi of Core42, Naima Al Falasi of Mubadala, Dr Merouane Debbah of Polynome and Khalifa University, Tareq Ashmawy from the Department of Government Enablement, and Sergei Loiter, CEO of AI at Yango Group.

The research takes place amid rapid AI adoption in the UAE. In 2025, AI adoption in the nation hit 97%, supporting the national goal of achieving full reliance on AI across services and data analysis by 2031. Investments directed toward AI exceeded AED 543 billion across 2024 and 2025, signalling a shift from experimentation to real-world delivery. The workshop positions Yango Group and INSEAD at the centre of a grounded, execution-led discussion on how AI scales from ambition to accountable delivery.

Dubai, UAE, February 5, 2026 – Swisslog, a global leader in automated logistics solutions, is gearing up to connect with customers and partners at LogiMAT 2026, to share its latest portfolio updates and ongoing developments shaping warehouse automation.

With this year’s LogiMAT theme, “Passion for Details,” aligning perfectly with Swisslog’s precision-driven ethos, the company is set to present its bold vision under the umbrella message: “Ready for the Next.”

“’Ready for the Next’ is more than a slogan – it’s a commitment to supporting our customers’ ever-evolving intralogistics needs.” said Giulia Colombi, CEO of Swisslog EMEA. “At LogiMAT 2026, we’ll highlight practical solutions that combine automation expertise and advanced software to help businesses stay agile, profitable, scale efficiently, and manage complexity with precision.”

What to expect from Swisslog at LogiMAT 2026

• Streamlined software: Swisslog will showcase SynQ, its warehouse management software designed to give customers greater transparency, faster decision-making, and more efficient warehouse operations. Visitors can learn how standardized solutions with built-in configuration, pre-configured templates, and standardized workflows enable rapid deployment, while providing the flexibility to scale and adapt as business needs evolve. Swisslog will also present its end-to-end SAP EWM software, supporting customers across implementation, integration, and full lifecycle management to ensure long-term operational performance and resilience.

• Strengthened pallet ASRS portfolio: Swisslog will unveil the AgileStore roaming shuttle solution for the first time, marking a major expansion of its pallet automation capabilities. With this addition, Swisslog now offers one of the broadest Pallet ASRS portfolios on the market. The debut of AgileStore highlights Swisslog’s partnership with Eurofork and introduces a 4-way shuttle with full horizontal and vertical roaming, enabling optimal workload distribution and enhanced system resilience.

• Next level cube goods-to-person (GTP): Swisslog will highlight leading-edge Cube GTP solutions, including advanced AutoStore High Throughput technologies. These innovations promise to accelerate goods-to-person operations while maximizing capacity – all within minimal footprints, making them ideal for high-density setups. Discover Swisslog’s advanced AutoStore High Throughput solution in their session – “From Grid to Great: SynQDriven AutoStore HTP” – and meet the team at Forum South, Hall 4, Booth 4C61 on 24 March at 10:30 am.

• Interaction: LogiMAT is a chance to meet, greet, and engage – and Swisslog invites visitors to an immersive ItemPiQ experience that brings piece picking to life and demonstrates the future of fast, reliable picking.

• Swisslog Intralogistics Lounge: For the first time, Swisslog will introduce its Intralogistics Lounge, a live studio environment featuring expert conversations and thought leadership sessions. Attendees will gain unique insights into practical perspectives on the intralogistics market, customer challenges, and real-world applications.

Beyond the tech demonstrations, Swisslog’s expert team will show how their industry and solution focus, paired with their robust software ecosystem, drives measurable results for businesses aiming to stay agile, efficient, and competitive in today’s fast-moving market.

February 09, 2026 – Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, today announced new product innovations that provide enterprises with easy-to-use tools, an interoperable environment, and trusted AI agents so they can move data and AI projects from idea to production faster.

These enhancements include the general availability of Cortex Code, a data-native coding agent built to automate and accelerate end-to-end enterprise development, providing users with an agent that deeply understands and operates within their enterprise data context. The general availability of Semantic View Autopilot, an AI-powered service that automates the creation and governance of semantic views, gives AI agents a shared understanding of business metrics to deliver consistent, trustworthy outcomes. With new enhancements to Snowflake Postgres (generally available soon), the world’s most popular database¹, now runs natively in the AI Data Cloud, allowing enterprises to consolidate transactional, analytical, and AI use cases onto a single, secure platform.

Furthermore, Snowflake recently announced a new multi-year, $200 million partnership with OpenAI, which cements a joint commitment to co-innovation, joint go-to-market (GTM) strategies, and makes OpenAI models natively available to Snowflake’s 12,600 global customers within Snowflake Cortex AI.

“For AI to truly deliver value, it must move beyond experimentation and become engrained within the systems teams rely on every day,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake. “With our latest product advancements, we’re reimagining how teams build and operate by embedding AI directly into the development lifecycle, making data AI-ready by design and helping enterprises deliver real business impact with AI. This marks a fundamental shift in how organizations build with data and AI, enabling users to build solutions that are reliable, governed, and ready to run at enterprise scale.”

Snowflake and OpenAI Forge $200 Million Partnership to Bring Enterprise-Ready AI to the World’s Most Trusted Data Platform

Snowflake recently announced a new collaboration with OpenAI that enables global enterprises to unlock greater value from their proprietary data with AI.

This multi-year, $200 million partnership agreement cements Snowflake and OpenAI’s commitment to co-innovation and joint GTM strategies. Snowflake and OpenAI will work closely together to co-develop and deploy customized AI solutions for joint enterprise customers that deliver tangible return on investment.

The partnership also makes OpenAI models natively available to Snowflake’s 12,600 global customers within Snowflake Cortex AI. This empowers global organizations like Canva and Whoop to bring OpenAI models directly to their enterprise data for deep research and instant insights. OpenAI models like GPT-5.2 will also be accessible within Snowflake Intelligence, the trusted enterprise intelligence agent that empowers every employee to securely access, analyze, and act on all their organization’s knowledge using natural language.

Snowflake Unveils Cortex Code, An AI Coding Agent That Understands Your Enterprise Data Context To Help Teams Build Faster

With the general availability of Cortex Code, users gain an agent that deeply understands and operates within their enterprise data context. It empowers everyone regardless of their technical-expertise, from data experts to domain experts, to build data pipelines, analytics, and AI apps faster.

As businesses race to deliver real impact with AI, teams across organizations face growing pressure to move faster without sacrificing trust, accuracy, or scale. To move data and AI initiatives forward faster and more reliably, teams require purpose-built tooling that understands their data environments, simplifies complex tasks, and enables sophisticated, trusted workflows through natural language.

Unlike generic coding assistants, Cortex Code understands users’ Snowflake data, compute, governance, and operational semantics. Cortex Code is customizable and interoperable, designed to work wherever users operate across Snowflake experiences and local developer environments. In addition, it fits naturally into existing workflows and supports the entire development lifecycle, from design and implementation to optimization and operations, without compromising trust or security. Teams can use Cortex Code within the Snowflake platform through Cortex Code in Snowsight (generally available soon) or within their preferred terminal or code editor like VS Code or Cursor with Cortex Code CLI (now generally available).

To further reduce the friction that slows enterprise AI adoption and delivery, Snowflake has introduced new capabilities for vibe coding, advancing how users build, deploy, and manage AI-powered data workflows across the stack with a new integration with v0 by Vercel (generally available soon). This enables employees, from developers to analysts, to create rich, AI-powered apps with natural language that can be deployed securely inside of Snowflake through Snowpark Container Services.

Snowflake Delivers Semantic View Autopilot to Ensure that AI Agents Operate on the Same Trusted Business Definitions

Snowflake unveiled Semantic View Autopilot (now generally available), an AI-powered service that continuously learns from real user activity to ensure business logic remains accurate and up-to-date. As a result, enterprises can minimize AI hallucinations while cutting semantic model creation from days to minutes, accelerating time-to-market and delivering a decisive competitive advantage. These innovations expand upon Snowflake’s existing enterprise-grade foundations, ensuring that AI systems such as Snowflake Intelligence are trusted, governed, and ready to operate reliably at scale, all while working directly on organizations’ most valuable data.

Enterprises are deploying AI agents into environments where business metrics are manually defined and inconsistently governed, leaving AI systems without a shared understanding of business context. This fragmented and manual approach to building the semantic layer is a major bottleneck for AI adoption, producing unreliable outputs and making it harder for organizations to trust AI.

Semantic View Autopilot addresses this challenge by automatically building, optimizing, and maintaining governed semantic views, eliminating the need for manual, error-prone semantic modeling. This builds on Snowflake’s commitment to initiatives like the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), which standardizes a shared semantic layer across ecosystem leaders. While OSI provides the connectivity to share business logic across the ecosystem, Semantic View Autopilot adds the intelligence to create and continuously maintain it, making it the connective layer for trustworthy, scalable AI across all data, wherever it lives.

Snowflake Makes Enterprise Data AI-Ready With Snowflake Postgres and Advanced Innovations for Open Data Interoperability

Snowflake announced new enhancements to Snowflake Postgres, which now runs natively in the AI Data Cloud, allowing users to easily access, ingest, and migrate data from anywhere to build what they need on a single, secure platform.

Most organizations still keep their transactional and analytical databases siloed on separate systems, a legacy approach that forces teams to rely on complex pipelines to connect those systems. This fragmentation adds steep costs, slows development, introduces risk, and delays insights.

Snowflake Postgres eliminates these pipelines by bringing transactional, analytical, and AI use cases together on a single, enterprise-ready platform. In turn, full compatibility with open source Postgres allows companies to move their existing apps onto Snowflake, without code changes. Now with Snowflake Postgres, teams can power critical AI and apps, analyze business performance and trends using the most up-to-date data from their operations, and build AI-driven features like recommendations or forecasting — all from the same data, without having to move it between systems.

Dubai, UAE — 10 February 2026 — PlanRadar, a digital platform for construction and real estate project management, has launched the Construction Site Templates Playbook, a new practical guide designed to help project teams strengthen day-to-day execution control through disciplined, repeatable site documentation.

As construction and real estate developments across the GCC increase in scale and complexity, site teams operate under continuous pressure: multiple trades working in parallel, frequent inspections, tight programmes, and strict compliance requirements. In this environment, performance issues often begin with simple breakdowns—unclear scope clarifications, delayed approvals, missed inspections, fragmented safety reporting, and incomplete records—then surface later during audits, handover, or dispute resolution when time and cost impacts are already locked in.

The Construction Site Templates Playbook addresses this challenge by positioning templates not as administrative paperwork, but as operational control points that help teams capture, verify, and act on information consistently across the project lifecycle. The playbook consolidates the most essential site templates into five execution pillars:

• Construction & Commercial Control (scope clarifications, inspections, approvals, change control)
• Health, Safety & Environment (HSE) (hazard identification, permits to work, incident reporting, compliance records)
• Quality & Inspections (structured verification, defects and non-conformance control, commissioning readiness)
• Progress & Coordination (daily reporting, look-ahead planning, constraint tracking, coordination actions)
• Materials & Logistics (material approvals, delivery inspections, traceable acceptance before installation)

The guide also introduces a practical “Execution Loop”, outlining the sequential stages of planning, executing, inspecting, correcting, and ultimately approving and closing. This approach demonstrates how the templates work together as a unified, disciplined system that enhances accountability, ensures traceability, and accelerates on-site decision-making.

“Successful delivery depends on more than planning—it depends on execution discipline,” said Ibrahim Imam, CEO and Co-Founder of PlanRadar “When clarifications, inspections, approvals, and corrective actions are captured consistently and tied to the right locations and evidence, site teams reduce ambiguity, protect quality, strengthen compliance, and improve handover readiness. This playbook is designed to make those controls practical and repeatable on every project.”

While the playbook can be applied in manual environments, it also highlights how structured digital workflows strengthen template usage by improving ownership, visibility, and audit readiness. By digitising templates, site records become time-stamped, traceable, and location-linked—reducing common challenges such as missing paperwork, delayed approvals, duplicated records, and unclear responsibility.

The Construction Site Templates Playbook is available in English and Arabic and is intended for developers, consultants, main contractors, subcontractors, and site teams involved in construction and real estate delivery across the GCC.

Across the region, interior design and architecture are entering a more deliberate, value-driven phase. Rapid urban expansion continues, but the focus has shifted from visual impact alone to how spaces perform, age, and support modern lifestyles.

Studies show that the global home décor and interior market is projected to grow from $747.75 billion in 2024 to $1.09 trillion by 2032, driven largely by demand from fast-growing urban regions such as the Middle East.

Within the GCC, government-led development, Vision 2030 programmes, and large-scale mixed-use projects are reshaping how residential, hospitality, and commercial interiors are being conceived. Based on Opāal Interiors’s research, regional market analysis, and on-ground project experience across residential, commercial, and mixed-use developments, 2026 will be defined by a new generation of interiors—refined, functional, and deeply intentional.

According to the research, six interior design trends are shaping the region in 2026.

1. Material-led design is replacing decorative excess

Opaal research found a decisive shift away from surface-level ornamentation toward interiors defined by material quality, craftsmanship, and longevity. Natural stones, engineered wood, textured metals, and bespoke joinery are increasingly favoured over trend-driven finishes.

Premium developments across the GCC are prioritising “timeless material palettes” to protect long-term asset value and reduce refurbishment cycles. Design is becoming quieter, but execution is more exacting, placing greater emphasis on detailing, proportions, and material transitions.

2. Sustainability is now embedded into interior specifications

Sustainability has moved beyond architectural shells and into interior fit-outs. Developers and asset owners are increasingly prioritising long-lasting, timeless, and durable material selections, alongside locally sourced products that help reduce carbon impact over the project lifecycle.

The UAE alone ranks among the top global markets for green-certified buildings, with over 800 LEED-certified projects. Regulatory pressure and ESG reporting requirements are accelerating this shift across the GCC. As a result, interior design decisions are now evaluated through both environmental and lifecycle performance lenses.

3. Residential interiors are becoming hospitality-inspired

As branded residences, serviced apartments, and lifestyle-led communities grow across Saudi Arabia and the UAE, residential interiors are borrowing heavily from hospitality design language.

Branded residences in the Middle East are expected to grow by more than 60% by 2030, driving demand for hotel-grade finishes, elevated material palettes, and refined spatial planning within private homes. Research also shows that end-users increasingly expect residential interiors to deliver the same sense of arrival, comfort, and material richness traditionally associated with high-end hotels.

4. Design clarity is becoming central to large-scale developments

With compressed project timelines and increasing construction complexity, developers are placing greater value on strong design leadership and structured oversight throughout project delivery. Clear design development, coordination, and quality control have become essential to minimising risk, avoiding rework, and maintaining consistency from concept through completion.

This approach is particularly critical in large-scale mixed-use and hospitality projects, where alignment between architecture, interiors, and building systems directly influences performance, cost predictability, and overall project success.

5. Commercial spaces are designed for adaptability, not permanence

Office and retail interiors across the GCC are being reimagined as flexible environments that can evolve with changing tenant needs. Modular layouts, reconfigurable partitions, and durable finishes are now prioritised over fixed design schemes.

The UAE flexible office space market size is projected to reach $1.81 billion by 2030, influencing how commercial interiors are planned and delivered. With this increase, adaptability is now a core design requirement, not a secondary consideration.

6. Design value is measured by longevity, not trend relevance

Perhaps the most defining trend of 2026 is a recalibration of how “good design” is measured. Rather than visual novelty, clients are assessing interiors based on durability, maintenance efficiency, and how well spaces age over time.

Long-term asset optimisation is becoming a priority across real estate and hospitality investments in the GCC. For interior specialists, this places renewed importance on precision, material intelligence, and execution quality, areas where experience and process matter as much as creative vision.

As the GCC’s built environment matures, interior design and architecture are becoming less about visual impact alone and more about performance, resilience, and long-term value. Opaal’s research underscores a clear direction for 2026: spaces that are thoughtfully designed, meticulously executed, and built to endure.

Dubai UAE — 04 February, 2026 — Alteryx, Inc., a leading AI-ready data and analytics company, has announced a major expansion of its partnership with Google Cloud to help make BigQuery, Google’s autonomous data to AI platform, more accessible, actionable, and AI-ready for Alteryx business teams across the enterprise. This collaboration comes as the Middle East’s AI economy is projected to reach US$320 billion by 2030, reflecting the growing scale of AI-driven decision-making across the region.

As organizations standardize cloud data platforms for analytics and AI, many face a growing gap between where data lives and how it is prepared, governed, and operationalized. This challenge is more acute in the Middle East, where McKinsey & Company estimates enterprise AI adoption at approximately 84%. Alteryx is collaborating with Google Cloud to help close that gap by bringing governed analytics workflows directly to their BigQuery users, enabling their joint customers to move from data to insight to action faster, without sacrificing trust or scale.

As part of this expanded partnership, Alteryx also announced the general availability of Live Query for BigQuery, which enables their business and IT users to build and run workflows directly in BigQuery without moving data. This in-place approach delivers AI-ready insights while maintaining governed business logic, centralized security, and full-scale performance.

Alteryx plans to expand its Google-first offerings with Alteryx One: Google Edition, a purpose-built, Google-first version of Alteryx One that will be available through the Google Cloud Marketplace. Alteryx One: Google Edition is a streamlined analytics solution, purpose-built for business professionals, and designed specifically for organizations leveraging Google Cloud technologies. It combines Alteryx’s powerful data preparation and analytics capabilities with deep, native integration into Google’s ecosystem, including direct connectivity to BigQuery, Google Sheets, and Google Drive, enabling teams to accelerate insights and seamlessly automate workflows directly on their Google Cloud data.

Live Query for BigQuery Now Generally Available

Live Query for BigQuery delivers an optimized Alteryx experience for joint customers, bringing governed analytics workflows directly to BigQuery so organizations can operate faster without moving their data. In the UAE alone, six in ten employees now use AI in their daily work, reinforcing the need for analytics tools that are accessible to information workers, not just technical specialists. Analytic workflows are built in Alteryx One and executed in Google Cloud, leveraging BigQuery’s performance, scale, and security while maintaining centralized governance.

For information workers, Live Query for BigQuery provides direct, intuitive access to BigQuery’s full-fidelity datasets through a simple, no-code interface. Business users can prepare and transform massive datasets, apply business logic, and perform critical calculations directly in BigQuery—without SQL, data downloads, extracts, or spreadsheets, allowing them to iterate faster and adapt quickly as business needs change.

For IT and data teams, Live Query for BigQuery delivers tighter governance, stronger security, and architectural simplicity. All workflows run inside Google Cloud using in-place analytics, keeping data in BigQuery while reducing shadow pipelines and unmanaged extracts. Teams benefit from centralized control, auditability, and the ability to maximize ROI from existing Google Cloud investments.

Organizations can:

• Prepare data, apply business logic, and perform calculations directly in BigQuery
• Execute and automate governed analytic workflows at full warehouse scale
• Maintain centralized governance, security, and performance within Google Cloud
• Enable faster iteration and long-term maintainability for the teams closest to the business

This in-place approach simplifies cloud architecture while enabling business teams to move from data to insight faster without sacrificing trust, security, or scale.

Built for Trusted Analytics and AI

Analytics and AI are increasingly being applied to critical business processes, including revenue reporting, risk, compliance, and operational planning. In these environments, accuracy, consistency, and transparency are essential. AI depends on high-quality data and clearly defined business logic to deliver trusted outcomes.

“Enterprises are learning that AI can’t guess its way to trusted outcomes,” said Ben Canning, Chief Product Officer at Alteryx. “Models don’t inherently understand the quality, context, or business definitions behind revenue, risk scoring, or compliance. Through this collaboration and by leveraging Google Cloud, Alteryx is able to embed governed, repeatable logic directly into BigQuery, enabling the people who know the business best to create and maintain it. Alteryx helps ensure AI outcomes stay aligned with how the business operates, even as it evolves.”

Alteryx empowers information workers to prepare and combine data across the enterprise and encode calculations, metrics and rules in repeatable, governed workflows. By running these workflows directly in BigQuery, Alteryx helps ensure analytics and AI initiatives are grounded in both trusted data and real business rules.

“Data analytics remains a critical component of every enterprise’s digital transformation strategy,” said Yasmeen Ahmad, Managing Director, Product Management, Data & AI Cloud at Google Cloud. “Utilizing Google Cloud’s BigQuery, Alteryx will power new capabilities that can improve how business teams access and analyze data, enabling real-world value and faster insights for organizations.”

Automating the Full Data-to-Insight-to-Action Workflow

Alteryx automates data preparation and delivery of AI-ready datasets directly into BigQuery, helping organizations work with trusted data at scale while maintaining consistency, auditability, and control.

The combination of Alteryx and BigQuery can provide a secure, scalable foundation for enterprise analytics and AI, turning data from multiple sources into reliable and explainable decisions and enabling organizations to adapt quickly to changing business needs.

Dubai, UAE 30 January 2026: Shaffra, an AI research and applications company building autonomous AI teams for enterprises and governments, has announced the deployment of fully autonomous AI teams at national and enterprise scale across the Gulf, marking one of the region’s most significant operational AI rollouts to date. The teams are now supporting government and enterprise organisations across Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE, delivering measurable productivity and transforming traditional workflows.

Over the past year, Shaffra has moved beyond individual AI employees to operate autonomous AI teams embedded directly into enterprise and government systems, achieving operational outcomes that were previously unattainable. Organisations using Shaffra’s autonomous AI teams have reported up to 80% reductions in operational costs, over 2 million manual work hours saved monthly, and significantly faster execution of operational processes, like HR and customer service, all while maintaining consistent quality and compliance standards.

Shaffra has established strategic partnerships with regional telecommunications leaders, including STC across Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Omantel in Oman, and Ooredoo in Qatar, as well as multiple government entities and large enterprises across the aviation, HR, and real estate sectors. The company is also expanding into Europe through strategic partnerships, reflecting growing international demand for enterprise-grade AI execution, as global AI spending is projected to reach $2 trillion by 2026.

Commenting on the company’s progress, Alharith Alatawi, CEO and Co-Founder of Shaffra, said: “Enterprises are moving past AI trials and looking for systems that can operate reliably inside real organisations. At Shaffra, we are not experimenting with AI; our AI employees have been operating inside real organisations for over a year, with defined roles, accountability, and measurable cost and productivity impact. Our focus is on strengthening Shaffra’s position as a regional leader in enterprise AI execution, supporting enterprises and government entities as they translate AI strategies into daily operations and sustained productivity gains.”

In customer service, AI teams manage up to five times more queries than human-only teams, with continuous, multilingual support. In HR, recruitment cycles that once took weeks are now reduced to hours through automated processing of applications and structured evaluations. Within government and public sector organisations, autonomous AI teams are supporting citizen services, internal reporting, and employee performance workflows, contributing to improved response times and reduced error rates. This reflects a broader shift in enterprise operations, with 70% of organisations expected to rely on AI-driven tools for recruitment, engagement, and performance management.

Shaffra’s approach enables autonomous AI teams to process enterprise knowledge, perform defined roles, and take independent action within workflows. This integrated model signals a fundamental shift in how AI can operate at scale, moving beyond pilots to sustained operational impact.