Forty percent of Saudi institutions are ready for AI as OpenText shifts its focus to Riyadh through the sovereignty and governance gateway

Enterprises in Saudi Arabia are moving from the stage of testing AI tools and isolated trials to the stage of comprehensive institutional deployment, driven by security and regulatory requirements that make data control a precondition for any technological rollout. In this context, global software company OpenText disclosed that about 40 percent of enterprises within the kingdom are currently classified as qualified and ready to adopt AI, prompting the company to launch its regional headquarters in Riyadh to make the Saudi market one of its key strategic pillars internationally.

George Chamberi, vice-president and managing director of OpenText for the Middle East and Turkey, explained that the accelerating digital momentum within the kingdom has reshaped the priorities of companies and government agencies. Demand is clearly concentrated in critical sectors that handle massive volumes of sensitive information, notably government services, the financial sector, energy, healthcare, and large enterprises, where these entities seek to improve decision-making efficiency and modernize processes while preserving privacy requirements and compliance with local regulations.

The institutional question today is no longer limited to a model’s ability to perform a specific task; it has shifted toward verification, accountability, and determining who has the right to access information.Here, the concept of "sovereign AI" emerges as a new equation that goes beyond infrastructure and model computing, reaching a precise understanding of how algorithms access knowledge repositories, how decisions are interpreted and audited at every operational step; this is the path served by the Afiautor platform through tools for building intelligent agents, governing them, and securing interaction with enterprise information.

The shift toward data-driven automation has already begun in real-world use cases within the market. Alfanar deployed information-management solutions to automate invoice and document processing at scale, enhancing operational oversight, while Alinma Bank adopted a service-management system to improve handling of technical incidents and boost operational control through higher levels of automation. The company did not disclose the amount of its direct financial investment in establishing the headquarters, but it confirmed that its focus for 2026 is on expanding consulting and technical capabilities and developing local teams to support corporate expansion plans.

For chief technology and digital transformation officers in the Gulf and the region, this trajectory means that the next bet is no longer on the number of intelligent agents or the pace of integrating language models, but on the architecture of metadata management and permission matrices. Moving to automation of sensitive processes requires technology leaders to audit internal information-flow channels before connecting them to intelligent systems, to avoid data-leak risks and comply with strict sovereign regulatory frameworks that are reshaping the business environment in regional markets.