30 Jan e& enterprise and Emergence bring data-sovereign agentic AI to MENAT

e& enterprise, the digital transformation arm of global technology group e&, has entered into a strategic partnership with US-based agentic AI specialist Emergence to accelerate enterprise adoption of autonomous AI systems across the Middle East, North Africa and Türkiye (MENAT). The collaboration is designed to help organisations automate complex, high-value workflows while maintaining full sovereignty over their data, models and proprietary processes.

Under the agreement, e& enterprise will act as a key go-to-market and implementation partner for solutions built on the Emergence platform, which is focused on ‘agentic’ AI – agents capable of planning and executing multi-step tasks end-to-end. Enterprise customers in MENAT will be able to deploy Emergence’s AI agents across a range of use cases, including semiconductor yield optimisation, energy forecasting, financial reporting and pharmaceutical R&D, with options spanning cloud-agnostic, on-premises and fully air-gapped environments.

The partnership comes as AI investment and deployment rapidly scale across the region. The GCC artificial intelligence market within the Middle East is estimated at US$12.3 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach US$26.0 billion by 2032, driven by demand for automation, process optimisation and faster decision-making. At the same time, enterprises are seeking to move from isolated proofs of concept to production systems that can operate safely in complex regulatory and operational environments.

Emergence’s Semantic Intelligence platform is built around a three-tier ‘Foundation, Intelligence, Transformation’ framework. At the foundation level, it automates core data work such as discovery, mapping, unification and entity resolution. The intelligence layer defines the concepts, relationships and rules that give enterprises a contextual understanding of their data. On top of this, the transformation layer – powered by Emergence’s ACA (Agents Creating Agents) engine – builds bespoke AI agents that can navigate internal systems, execute workflows, validate outputs and enforce governance controls.

For MENAT organisations grappling with fragmented data, legacy systems, talent shortages and governance bottlenecks, the combination of Emergence’s platform and e& enterprise’s regional footprint is intended to address the ‘last-mile problem’ of AI: integrating intelligent agents into real business processes at scale. Regulated sectors such as finance, energy, healthcare and government stand to benefit from the ability to keep sensitive data and models within their own environments while still leveraging advanced automation.

For the Middle East’s security and risk community, the partnership signals a shift toward operational AI agents embedded in core processes – from critical infrastructure operations to fraud monitoring and compliance – with data sovereignty and governance built in from the outset.