Understanding changing data trends in the Middle East

Across the Middle East, public and private sector organizations are focusing on how they can turn their data into value, to benefit customers, citizens, and businesses. As they embrace greater data sharing, AI and collaboration, we interviewed regional members of our Data Voices community to understand the key trends and topics they are seeing on the ground, now and into 2027.

Thanks to the four experts we spoke to for their time and insights:

• Dr. Khalid Ahmed Al Mutawah, Deputy CE – Operations and Governance Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) 
• Ibrahim El Badawi, Partner and CEO, 01Gov
• Dr Ismail Hamoumi, Smart City Lead, Egis 
• Gopi Maren, Data and AI Governance Leader, UAE

Dr. Khalid Ahmed Al Mutawah, Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA):

“Across the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, the focus is shifting from digitizing individual services to digitizing end-to-end customer journeys. Data sharing has therefore become a strategic necessity rather than a technical option. Data is now viewed as strategic national infrastructure that supports evidence-based policymaking and economic development.

Key technology drivers include cloud adoption, API-based integration, AI, and geospatial platforms. In Bahrain, initiatives such as the Cloud First policy, the Open Data Portal, and the Bahrain Spatial Data Infrastructure have strengthened interoperability and enabled more effective data exchange.”

Ibrahim El Badawi, 01Gov:

“On the technology side, AI, and agentic AI in particular, is acting as an accelerator, pushing many government entities to improve their data readiness faster than they had planned. On the organizational side, AI is eating UI, opening the door to entirely new ways of delivering services to the public, and every one of them depends on data flowing across entities. At the same time, security and data sovereignty are now front of mind. The question is no longer only how much to share. It is also what to share, with whom, and where it is hosted. How far an entity can go depends on its governance maturity, which varies widely from one entity to another and from one country to another, even within the region.”

Dr Ismail Hamoumi, egis

“Since I arrived in Riyadh, I have watched the paradigm shift in front of me, through two movements. Firstly, in urban development the emphasis is moving towards optimizing and developing what already exists, and towards more human-scale projects. The same territory may now host a giga-project, a historic city under regeneration and existing networks to be optimized, each producing its own data. 

The second is the expansion of the region’s institutions, such as the SDAIA and its National Data Management Office, or the Digital Government Authority in Saudi Arabia. This is where I see new challenges emerging. After a phase of digital expansion comes a phase of integration: connecting these platforms, aggregating data, creating links between organizations and building common data pools. What strikes me in the Gulf is that institutions are being built alongside the infrastructure. Saudi Arabia’s National Data Lake now connects several hundred government systems, and Dubai made sharing government data an obligation as early as 2015. My feeling is that the region is now entering a decade of data coherence.”

Gopi Maren, Data and AI Governance Leader, UAE

“I see the Middle East moving from data ownership toward data ecosystems. At the technology level, cloud platforms, APIs, data marketplaces, data products, interoperability standards and increasingly AI are making it technically easier to exchange and consume data across organizational boundaries.

But the bigger shift is organizational. Governments and enterprises are beginning to recognize that data locked inside a system has limited value. Its value increases when it can be responsibly discovered, understood, trusted, combined and reused. The question is shifting from “Can we share this data?” to “Under what conditions can this data be safely and economically reused?”

Ibrahim El Badawi, 01Gov

“Pace, agility and a higher sense of urgency. Organizations cannot keep managing data at the rhythm of 2020 to 2022, with multi-year strategies and long governance cycles, while AI moves at an unprecedented speed, and in many areas, we don’t know what we don’t know. Leaders need to treat data as an urgent priority, build the agility to change direction as the technology moves, and work on governance and capability simultaneously rather than sequentially. Yet speed without a compass is risky, so moving fast must go hand in hand with staying anchored in clear values and keeping decisions humane, so that the race to keep up with AI never comes at the expense of the people these organizations serve.”

Dr Ismail Hamoumi, egis

“Data and AI are becoming the backbone of how the region plans and operates its territories. This is why I see five priorities: 

• Governance – who owns which data, who answers for it, and under what conditions it can circulate.
• Generating use cases based on concrete operational and citizen needs.
• Culture, as a platform only creates value if business teams know how to use it and feel encouraged to experiment.
• Building bridges between structures that were designed separately, through shared agreements, joint use cases and common data pools.
• Value, which means showing the return on use and not only the return on investment 

Digital initiatives almost always start with a handful of committed people and the critical step comes when the experiment has to become an institution. Many organizations in the region are reaching this step now. I believe 2027 will be the year they find out whether their data governance lives in their systems or only in their policy documents.”

Gopi Maren, Data and AI Governance Leader, UAE

“2027 will be about making the data foundation genuinely AI-ready. Many organizations have invested heavily in AI, but AI is exposing weaknesses that traditional reporting could tolerate: poor metadata, unclear ownership, inconsistent definitions, weak lineage and unreliable data quality.

Most importantly, organizations will need to connect their capabilities to meet this need. A glossary that does not connect to lineage, quality, ownership, AI models and business outcomes is still largely documentation. The organizations that progress fastest will treat governance not as a compliance layer around data, but as part of the architecture through which trusted data and AI are delivered.”

Dr. Khalid Ahmed Al Mutawah, Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA):

“I expect five priorities to dominate data management agendas:

• Data quality and trust as organizations seek confidence in decision-making and AI outcomes.
• Stronger data governance with greater emphasis on ownership, stewardship, classification, and lifecycle management.
• AI-ready data foundations, including master data management, metadata management, data catalogs, lineage, and quality monitoring.
• Privacy, security, and responsible AI, balancing innovation with public trust and regulatory compliance.
• Data products and self-service analytics, enabling executives and business users to access trusted insights in real time.

The conversation is moving from collecting data to creating trustworthy, governed, and AI-ready data assets.”

Gopi Maren, Data and AI Governance Leader, UAE

“The data leader is moving from custodian to orchestrator and increasingly, value creator. Perhaps the most important capability will be translation: being able to move comfortably between the boardroom, business domains, regulators, data engineers and AI teams. The next generation of data leaders will therefore need a combination of technical depth, governance judgment, commercial thinking such as AI-FinOps and influence without authority. Our job is no longer simply to protect data. It is to create the conditions where organizations can confidently use it and adapt for any AI initiatives.”

Dr. Khalid Ahmed Al Mutawah, Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA)

“The role is evolving from technical custodian to strategic business leader. Today’s data leaders are expected to drive organizational transformation, support AI adoption, improve services, and strengthen collaboration across institutions. In addition to technical expertise, future data leaders will require capabilities in AI governance, responsible AI, business strategy, change management, and what I would describe as “data diplomacy”: bringing together policymakers, regulators, cybersecurity specialists, business leaders, and technology teams to achieve shared objectives.”

Ibrahim El Badawi, 01Gov:

“In our region, most government entities tend to buy AI rather than build it, at least in the short term. This puts the data leader at the procurement table whether they asked to be there or not. Every AI contract is now also a data decision: what the vendor’s system can access, where that data is processed, how well the system performs on Arabic data, and who is accountable when it gets things wrong. Too often these terms are set by the vendor, then reviewed and mostly approved by procurement, with the data leader brought in afterwards. One of the most critical skills today is the ability to read an AI contract, test a vendor’s claims against your own data, and say no when the answers are not good enough.”

Dr Ismail Hamoumi, egis

“I am convinced the data leader can no longer be a technician alone. The Gulf is now formalizing these roles, with data management offices in every government entity. But the capabilities they require go well beyond technology. Data leaders need to understand the business lines and the organization’s strategy. They need to know how to design governance, negotiate and contract, because an available API is not a right to extract data. They need to lead change and to explain to citizens what data is collected in their streets and why. They also need a clear discipline on AI: what can be decided by rules should not be left to a model, and “I don’t know” is always better than a plausible answer. That is why I see today’s data leader no longer as a guardian of databases but as an entrepreneur and a translator between institutions and disciplines.”

Dr Ismail Hamoumi, egis

“The first change I expect is democratization. Data management will no longer be the preserve of specialist teams. With data products, shared catalogs and AI that lets anyone query data in plain language, business teams, public agents and, increasingly, citizens will use data directly. The second concerns where smart city models come from. For a long time, the Middle East imported these models. This is changing. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2026 cited SDAIA’s federated approach, which integrates data from dozens of entities while leaving it in their own systems, as a reference. By 2030, I expect the Gulf to export its own models of data governance. Data will be planned, funded and maintained as public infrastructure, just like roads and networks. In the end, the real test will not be how much data we manage, but how much better our institutions decide thanks to it.”

Ibrahim El Badawi, 01Gov:

“I believe 2030 is too far away to predict with confidence, given how fast AI is moving, so instead I would watch two things. The first is how seriously entities invest in data and AI sovereignty: where their data lives, who controls the models that use it, and how much of that capability is owned locally. The second is innovation, because sovereignty protects data but does not create value from it on its own. I expect the entities that stand out by 2030 to be those that pair strong governance with the confidence to experiment, using their data and new technologies to rethink how services are designed and delivered, rather than only securing what they already have.”

Dr. Khalid Ahmed Al Mutawah, Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA)

“By 2030, data management will become far more automated and largely invisible to end users. Organizations will operate within trusted data ecosystems where information flows securely and seamlessly between entities, monitored by AI. Governments and businesses will increasingly rely on real-time data for decision-making. Ultimately, the most successful organizations will not be those that own the most data, but those that can share data responsibly, build trust, enable AI safely, and generate measurable value from information.”

Gopi Maren, Data and AI Governance Leader, UAE

“By 2030, I believe much of what we currently call “data governance” will become increasingly embedded, contextual and autonomous. Governance will move closer to governance-by-design and policy-as-code. Humans will need to move from being constantly in the loop to being at the helm: defining boundaries, challenging automated decisions and remaining accountable for outcomes. In a nutshell, by 2030, competitive advantage will not come from having the most data. It will come from having the most trusted context around that data, knowing what it means, where it came from, whether it can be trusted, who can use it, and how confidently humans and AI can act on it.” 

Thank you again to our Data Voices for their insights and time – find out more about the community and how it can benefit your strategy and career on our global community page.