Riyadh – As Saudi Arabia continues its turbocharged journey toward digital transformation, the Kingdom’s leaders are collaborating closely with both private and public sector entities to achieve the goals of their ambitious Vision 2030 strategy and successfully execute multiple giga projects. International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that ICT spending in Saudi Arabia will top $36.6 billion in 2024, with many leading organizations already exploring and investing in generative AI (GenAI) use cases as they prepare for the emergence of an ‘AI everywhere’ world.
“In this new era of GenAI-driven disruption, technology leaders are reassessing AI’s pivotal role in the digitalization landscape,” says Jyoti Lalchandani, IDC’s regional managing director for the Middle East, Türkiye, Africa, and India. “Given AI’s transformative power to significantly enhance digital innovation, customer experience, operational efficiency, and sustainability, forward-thinking governments and digitally driven organizations are increasingly adopting an ‘AI everywhere’ mindset and making AI a tech agenda priority as they strive to maintain competitive parity with early adopters.”
As a result, today’s IT leaders increasingly find themselves fulfilling multidimensional, strategic, and collaborative roles with evolved and prominent reporting structures and mandates. These new roles carry greater responsibilities as AI becomes increasingly embedded in services, products, and experiences, intertwining with the lives of employees, customers, partners, and society at large. IDC expects annual worldwide spending on AI-centric systems to surpass $300 billion by 2026, with the technology underpinning areas such as performance, growth, engagement, satisfaction, safety, security, governance, privacy, sustainability, ethics, wellbeing, payments, and more.
The IDC Saudi Arabia CIO Summit 2024, which takes place at the Fairmont Riyadh on September 18–19 under the theme The Future of IT: Rethinking Digitalization for an AI Everywhere World, will provide an essential platform for empowering the Kingdom’s IT leaders to succeed in this new era. It will help them to better understand their roles in an increasingly AI-infused business landscape, with renowned industry experts serving up essential guidance on deploying innovative solutions, forging new business models, and scaling massively in today’s dynamic digital economy.
“As AI continues to evolve and integrate into multiple facets of our lives, organizations must be prepared to embrace data-centric platforms, migrate workloads to cloud infrastructure, optimize security and digital trust, and invest in skills,” says Hamza Naqshbandi IDC’s country lead for Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and Vice President of Custom Solutions for the META region. “The IDC Saudi Arabia CIO Summit 2024 will discuss a multitude of hot topics, trends, and challenges, enabling technology leaders to gain insights, share knowledge, and prepare for an AI-centric future.”
The summit will also play host to the inaugural CIO50 Awards for Saudi Arabia, with a dedicated ceremony honoring the Kingdom’s top 50 CIOs and senior technology executives for their role in steering innovation, fortifying resiliency, and catalyzing rapid change within their organizations. Aligned with Foundry’s esteemed global awards program, the CIO50 Awards for Saudi Arabia stand as a symbol of excellence within the enterprise landscape and as testament to the outstanding contributions made by these visionary technology executives as they shape the future of technology in Saudi Arabia. Nominations for the awards can be submitted here.