MENA hosted the most content-rich virtual conference on Artificial Intelligence, RPA and related future tech, World AI & RPA Show on Wednesday, August 25, 2021; which brought together over 400 tech decision-makers from MENA’s AI ecosystem, including government officials, leading AI specialists, and solution vendors.
Friday, September 10, 2021: A clear, unambiguous, and widely communicated AI strategy is critical to the successful transformation of any IT organization; especially in this ‘new normal. Pandemic or no pandemic – MENA had already witnessed an unprecedented adoption of AI over the past few years, and it continues to be one of the most vital and fast-growing businesses across MENA.
To discuss this in detail, Trescon hosted more than 20 thought leaders and early adopters of future-tech who presented their ideas, innovations and case studies to an audience of IT Decision Makers, alongside leading solution providers such as Darktrace, Incorta, yellow.ai, Happiest Minds, and Uniphore to discuss the MENA region’s AI prospects.
The event focused on key topics such as Defensive AI technologies uniquely positioned to fight back, overcoming challenges of legacy infrastructure, data protection policy, skilled labour, and of course the pandemic situation which made shifting to Work from Home situations, Implementation of AI and RPA making the Govt. Operations more efficient, and much more.
Some of the top speakers who attended the event included:
- Eng Isha Aljassmy, IT Director, Ministry of Energy & Infrastructure, UAE
- Latifa Saleh Alshehhi, Head of Algorithms Development and Analysis, Future of Data Department, Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Center (FCSC), Ministry of Cabinet Affairs, UAE
- Dr Khaled Alhazmi, Director of the National Center for Robotics and Internet of Things Technology, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Saudi Arabia
- Al-qahtani Fawaz, IP Commercialization Manager for ICT Portfolio, Qatar Foundation Research, Development and Innovation RDI, Qatar
- Fayez Aldosari, Cyber and Information Security Audit Head, VP at the Saudi National Bank
- Hariprasad Chede, CIS, National Bank of Fujairah, UAE
Key highlights and takeaways from World AI & RPA Show included:
Mr Salem Al Gharbi, General Manager, Energy-AI Advisory, SDAIA, Riyadh Saudi Arabia conducting his keynote spoke about the impact of AI and ML in our lives. He also shared his insights on how an individual or an organization can start their journey into AI/Ml.
Max Heinemeyer, Director of Threat Hunting, Darktrace discussed how rapidly AI-based technological advancements are evolving and how cyber-criminals are leveraging AI tools to create sophisticated cyberweapons. Max spoke about why defensive AI technologies are uniquely positioned to fight back this AI-enhanced malware. He said, “In the face of quickly changing, unforeseen conditions, the old way of handling security — setting rules for what employees are authorized to do and trying to predict what might go wrong based on history – is useless.”
In an interesting panel discussion on the topic ‘The impacts of AI and RPA on the customer experience,’ the thought leaders discussed the importance of AI in developing a superior customer-focused business. They spoke about how content personalization, using AI, drives predictive analytics and improves one’s long-term customer retention, and how the evolution of voice technology & conversational AI is stepping into the spotlight.
The panellists included Anil Kumar, Senior Director Middle East, and Africa, Uniphore; Sanjeev Madavi, Digital Transformation Office, Khimji Ramdas Llc, Oman; Imtiaz Adam, Founder, Director Strategy & Data Science, Deep Learn Strategies Limited London; Anas Shehab, CIO, Muvi Cinemas, Riyadh, KSA; Ahmed Sharaf El Din, Head of Process Re-engineering, Ebe Bank, Egypt; Ashraf Gaber, Regional Director Publications and Editorial, Techx Media.
Neil Barman, Chief Growth Officer, yellow.ai spoke about how customer experience is going to be important for brands and how companies are evolving to solve this problem with automation and AI. Mr Neil discussed some use cases for AI like enabling end mile revenue cycle management for hospitals, digitizing the financial service industry, and hyper-automation. He added, “Customer experience is a brand differentiator. Whether I go for KFC, Dominos, or Burger King is often decided by the experience I had with the brand in my last interaction.”
He further added, “yellow.ai is the world’s leading Conversational AI and CX Automation Platform, recognized by Gartner, IDC & G2 crowd as a leader and trusted by 700+ global enterprises in 50 countries. Weaving in the best of AI and human intelligence to elevate customer and user experiences for sales, marketing, commerce and internal business support, we aim to democratize AI through its no-code/low-code bot builders, omnichannel virtual assistants, and ticketing automation. We were delighted to be a part of ‘World AI & RPA Show’ with Trescon, an excellent thought-leadership-driven, business-focused platform for the industry,” stated Vartika Verma, Global VP, Marketing, yellow.ai
Ahmed Tarek, EMEA Head of Sales Engineering, Incorta spoke about how AI can help businesses make better and faster decisions. He then discussed some of the key points that help achieve success in this field and he also gave a few brand examples that have found success. He stated, “In a self-service way, organizations can attain greater analytical capabilities. Data and analytics leaders should evaluate these Cool Vendors to establish synergies among automation, augmentation, contextualization, and composability to accomplish more productive self-service analytics and data science.”
“Choosing the ideal commercial framework for AI is an important aspect of the game since it offers up a lot of doors. However, new technologies like AI must be reframed and incorporated into a company’s use case,” stated Mithun Shetty, CEO, Trescon. “Virtual gatherings provide an opportunity for such conversations to take place during these challenging times,” he added.
The show was hosted on the virtual events platform Vmeets which helped the participants to network and conduct business in an interactive and immersive virtual environment. Participants were also able to engage with speakers in Q&A sessions and network with solution providers in virtual exhibition booths, private consultation rooms, and private networking rooms.
World AI & RPA Show Mena was officially sponsored by Official Ai Cyber Security Partner – Darktrace; Gold Sponsor – Incorta, Yellow.ai, Happiest Mind; and Silver Sponsor – Uniphore.
About World AI & RPA Show – MENA
The World AI & RPA Show is a global series of events centered on thought leadership and business that takes place in key locations around the world.
This MENA edition virtually united pre-qualified CIOs, CEOs, CTOs, Heads of AI, Chief Digital Officers, Heads of Innovation, and International AI and RPA specialists from the industry as part of the global tour. For further details, please contact:
Jagriti Jaiswal,
Media, PR & Corporate Communications,
Trescon
[email protected]