BE - September 2026

ISSUE 213 SEPTEMBER 2026 the BANKING EXECUTIVE 71 FinTech and AI Chornicle scale takes a full stack: compute, platforms, agents and governance working together as one system. G42 calls this the Intelligence Grid, its model for building AI-native soci- eties. “An AI-native society takes shape when intelligence becomes some- thing people can depend on: getting care, running a business, accessing a public service. The real measure of progress is how widely that possibil- ity becomes everyday reality. That is the ambition behind G42’s contribu- tion to AI Native Societies, connect- ing the infrastructure, capabilities and partnerships needed to make AI useful at the scale of a society,” said Faheem Ahamed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, G42. “At Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, ‘The World of AI’ brings us and our part- ners together around that work. From our home in Abu Dhabi, we want to help close the distance between what AI can do and what people ac- tually gain from it.” Leading Abu Dhabi entities join them in advancing the AI-native agenda and building the sovereign stack, including the Advanced Tech- nology Research Council (ATRC), TII, Ministry of Investment, UAE Cyber- security Council, UAE ICP, Abu Dhabi Ports, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Hub71, Awqaf Abu Dhabi, Public Prosecution, Alef Education, Higher Colleges of Technology, Khalifa Fund, Khalifa University Enterprise Company and Q Mobility. International AI titans including AWS, Alibaba Cloud, ASUS, Cere- bras, Cloudflare, Coursera, Dell, HPE, IFS, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Nokia, Nutanix, Oracle, Red Hat, Seagate, and Snowflake dominate an international exhibitor list spanning chips, cloud compute and enterprise software, together representing over US$10 trillion in collective market capitalisation. Trixie LohMirmand, CEO of Ai Every- thing, said: “Beyond the speculative sheen of AI, its true impact lies in transforming science, services and society. Abu Dhabi is moving deci- sively into that territory, with the leadership assembling the infrastruc- ture, institutions, research capabili- ties and global partnerships needed to turn AI ambition into national ca- pacity. The response from the inter- national AI community for Ai Everything Abu Dhabi has been em- phatic. The world’s leading enter- prises are coming to Abu Dhabi to engage a market investing, deploying and setting a benchmark in new in- telligence.” The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council, has built its Fal- con family of large language models on the principle that capability comes from how a model is built, not how large it is. Falcon-H1 Arabic, trained on high-quality Arabic data with a purpose-built architecture, now leads the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. This approach lowers the barrier to entry: organisations without the in- frastructure that very large models demand can still deploy AI. At the show, TII will present 23 demonstra- tions drawn from nine research centres, weighted towards sectors where the UAE has real depth, en- ergy, materials, marine and maritime infrastructure, aerospace and au- tonomous systems. Among them is GeoAI, a machine-learning model of the subsurface geology of the north- ern UAE, built to support national mineral exploration. THE WORLD’S LARGEST GATHERING OF AI UNICORNS More AI unicorns will take the stage in Abu Dhabi than at any other AI event this year, another marker of Abu Dhabi leading the race to build the world’s intelligent future. Mistral, Europe’s AI leader participat- ing at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi for the first time, will address the ques- tion of who controls AI as it takes on more autonomy. The French deca- corn recently closed a record € 3 bil- lion (US$ 3.49 billion) Series D funding, Europe’s largest ever single funding round, valuing it at more than € 21 billion ($24.42 billion). Mohamed Zouari, Mistral’s Manag- ing Director MEA, shared: “We be- lieve that control is becoming the defining topic in AI adoption. This is what we are building with Abu Dhabi’s most innovative organisa- tions and what we will demonstrate at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi.” ElevenLabs, the AI company behind the industry’s leading voice and audio models, will showcase two in- novations: ElevenAgents, a platform for building human-level conversa- tional experiences into products and services, and ElevenCreative, which pairs its audio models with image and video generation tools. Eleven- Labs serves enterprises and govern- ments across 80 countries. Across the Summit and sector-fo- cused conferences, more than 180 global AI experts and business lead- ers spar on the debates now testing the AI economy, from trusted deploy- ment and autonomous systems to agentic AI at scale and the contest over computing power, infrastructure and control. Certified trainings and workshops extend that conversation into hands-on learnings, spanning multi-agent workflows, rapid proto- typing, model development and emerging AI tools. Together, the programme traces AI from policy and principle to the harder task now confronting govern- ments and industry: turning new in- telligence into secure, responsible, and scalable progress, with Abu Dhabi increasingly serving as a live reference point for this shift.