As enterprises across the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey (MENAT) race to operationalise artificial intelligence (AI), a familiar tension continues to surface: how to scale AI automation while maintaining strict control over data, governance and regulatory compliance. A new strategic partnership between e& enterprise and US-based Emergence aims to resolve that dilemma by introducing data-sovereign, agentic AI systems designed specifically for regulated industries.
Together, the two companies plan to accelerate the adoption of next-generation AI across the MENAT region, enabling organisations to deploy intelligent agents that can reason, act and automate complex workflows, while maintaining full control over sensitive data and proprietary processes.
AI investment across the region is accelerating rapidly, driven by national digital strategies, rising enterprise demand for automation and growing confidence in advanced analytics. According to P&S Intelligence, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) AI market alone is expected to more than double from $12.3bn in 2025 to $26bn by 2032. Crucially, enterprises are now moving beyond pilots. Nearly one in five organisations in the GCC has already deployed agentic AI at scale, with the majority planning adoption in the near term.
For e& enterprise, the partnership reinforces its role as a key enabler of large-scale digital transformation across the region. Operating at the intersection of cloud, data, cyber security and AI, e& enterprise has positioned itself as a trusted partner for governments and regulated industries seeking to modernise operations without compromising sovereignty or compliance. By becoming a distribution and implementation partner for the Emergence AI platform, e& enterprise expands its portfolio with a new class of autonomous AI capabilities tailored to regional realities.
Amit Gupta, vice-president and head of data, AI and Fintech at e& enterprise (L), and Satya Nitta, CEO and co-founder of Emergence (R)
“This partnership marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of enterprise AI across the MENAT region,” said Amit Gupta, vice-president and head of data, AI and fintech at e& enterprise. “Enterprises are moving quickly to operationalise AI, and they need solutions that deliver real impact, not just experimentation. As AI becomes increasingly agentic, data governance has become one of the most critical enablers of safe, scalable automation.”
Unlike many generative AI offerings that rely on centralised cloud models, the Emergence platform is designed for deployment flexibility. Organisations can run it in cloud-agnostic environments, fully on-premise, or even in air-gapped setups, which is an essential requirement for sectors such as banking, healthcare, energy and government. This ensures enterprises retain complete sovereignty over their data, models and workflows, aligning with regional regulatory and national data residency requirements.
At the core of Emergence’s approach is its Semantic Intelligence platform, which enables autonomous agents to understand enterprise data in context, not just process it. The platform operates through a three-tier framework. First, the Foundation layer automates complex data tasks such as discovery, mapping and unification. The Intelligence layer then defines business concepts, relationships and rules to create deep semantic understanding. Finally, the Transformation layer utilises Emergence’s ACA engine (Agents Creating Agents) to build bespoke autonomous agents that can execute multi-step processes end-to-end.
Every organisation we work with shares the same challenge. They want to scale AI, but their data and processes are fragmented and still require constant human oversight. Agentic automation changes this Satya Nitta, Emergence
“Every organisation we work with shares the same challenge,” said Satya Nitta, co-founder and CEO of Emergence. “They want to scale AI, but their data and processes are fragmented and still require constant human oversight. Agentic automation changes this by allowing enterprises to finally understand their data and make use of it far more quickly, saving months of human effort, to drive actionable insights.”
The result is AI that moves beyond dashboards and copilots into true operational automation. Use cases already span industries, from semiconductor yield optimisation and pharmaceutical research to financial reporting and enterprise compliance workflows. By embedding governance, observability and control directly into each agent, the platform addresses one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption in regulated environments: trust.
For enterprises across MENAT, the partnership also tackles what many IT leaders describe as the “last-mile problem” – the gap between generic AI tools and the complex, business-specific realities of production environments. With e& enterprise providing regional expertise, industry knowledge and white-glove implementation services, organisations can deploy agentic systems that integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure and operational models.
As AI transitions from experimentation to execution, the collaboration between e& enterprise and Emergence signals a broader shift in the regional market – from asking whether AI can be adopted safely, to defining how it can be embedded responsibly at scale. In doing so, it positions agentic, data-sovereign AI not as a future concept, but as a practical foundation for the next phase of digital transformation in the MENAT region.
