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In a new episode of Marketplace Middle East, CNN’s Eleni Giokos is in Riyadh for the Future Investment Initiative (FII), where business leaders from around the world gather to chart a course for the Middle East’s top economies. Giokos also goes inside GITEX in Dubai, one of the world’s biggest tech showcases, where telecoms companies are looking to shift big industry into the digital age.

At FII, Giokos speaks with economist Jeffrey Sachs about AI, whether for better of worse, is at the centre of our economic universe. He says, "I’m predicting big things. The technology is extremely powerful. We’ve seen this, the Nobel prizes this year were essentially for AI, even when they were in chemistry or physics, they were for AI-empowered physics and chemistry. They were physicists working on artificial intelligence. In other words, AI is at the center of science and tech now, it’s not just the specific category, it’s infusing so much of the economy now, it’s infusing so much of innovation."

AI is the subject of more than a dozen panels at FII, showing how seriously Saudi Arabia is taking this technology.While some analysts are predicting big returns from the Middle East’s AI investments, the CEO of Arthur D. Little,Ignacio García Alves, shows Giokos more reserve, "I think this is a long journey, in fact. So the game is still out, in my opinion, on whether this will be successful or not. And the technology also is evolving very quickly. So you might be investing in something and then it’s the next wave that comes."

Rimi Assi, a senior partner at McKinsey in Abu Dhabi, hopes that AI can help women close the gap in certain fields of work. She explains, "my hope and dream is that women will leverage AI and these technologies to advance much better, embrace change and do that with care, with emotion, and bring to the companies and their corporates what the world needs the most." Assi has made gender diversity one of the central pillars of her work.

At GITEX, Huawei promotes its theme of ‘industrial digitalisation’.Faisal Ameer Malik, Huawei’s CTO, explains this, "post-Covid every organization or every industry has realized one good thing is that ICT technology is not an option. It’s not a side tool. It’s a prime thing they have to utilize."Huawei wants big industries, like manufacturing and energy, to incorporate data into their businesses.

Embracing digital transformation is a mammoth task, but Ameer Malik says Huawei is willing to invest on it, "Huawei is one of the top companies who invest the most in R&D, and we are something like more than 23 billion dollars in last year on R&D, and maybe more than 50 percent of our workforce is engaged in research and development. And the core purpose of this R&D is to bring innovative latest products and solutions for our customers."

Telecom companies are not just powering the products we use but the very cities where we live. Orange is focused on building the next generation of ‘smart cities’. The President of IMEA and Inner Asia at Orange,Sahem Azzam, says, "In a simple world, a smart city is actually taking a service that you want to consume and deliver it to you in a very friendly user experience."

Azzam continues, "The system itself can make the right decisions on their behalf by collecting all the data that they have gathered through the right and smart infrastructure they have deployed, and actually take the right decisions to meet their customer requirements."Orange is designing ways for data to automatically drive parts of a city’s infrastructure. They say artificial intelligence can help manage everything from its traffic flows to water supplies, and that cities can be not just smarter, but more sustainable.

Kaan Terzioğlu, the CEO of telecoms giant VEON, ends the episode by explaining the kind of role he sees telco companies playing in the future, "it is a responsibility for us, not only invest in telecoms, but provide them the best financial services, the best health care services, the best education services, and the best entertainment that they deserve. In my philosophy, emerging markets used to be always an exception. They need to be exceptional, and we are there to create that exceptional service for them."