Dubai: Office workers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia certainly are not taking it slow in adopting AI tools into their work. Not when AI can easily help with their language translation needs.
That seems to be exactly what’s happening in offices, with 84% of professionals integrating AI translation services into the workflows. That’s according to a new survey by DeepL, a language AI company.
The AI-enabled tools are mostly applied to develop new language skills, saving time, and managing supplier relationships. Nearly half of those polled said these tools helped them expand their business into new markets.
But it’s not all smooth sailing. “Despite the widespread adoption, professionals express that there are certain challenges of using AI translation tools - concerns over accuracy are at the forefront, followed by verbatim translations, indicating that there is a need for enhancing contextual nuance,” says the DeepL report.
“As AI translation tools continue to reshape the way we communicate globally, the need for quality translation is essential for businesses to scale internationally,” said Jarek Kutylowski, CEO of DeepL. “This is particularly relevant in the Middle East, with Dubai and Riyadh functioning as business hubs, not only regionally, but also for doing business globally.”
How fast will UAE entities take to AI?
At the enterprise level, UAE entities are razor-focused on AI deployment plans, helped by a complete ‘buy-in from top management and a clear vision for business transformation’. “81% report that their organization is operating with a clear, shared vision of AI’s role in the wider enterprise,” said a report from ServiceNow, which recently released its AI Maturity Index.
“And 60% say an AI leader with a formal job title such as ‘Chief AI Officer’ has been appointed to oversee the strategy of the AI journey. Not surprisingly, researchers found that 77% of respondents’ organizations have increased AI budgets, year on year.”
Productivity gains
On what they expect from AI investments, nearly one in four of UAE enterprises cite productivity increases as their key measurement for verifying the RoI (return on equity).
The popular AI use cases are in data-related areas. More than half of respondents say their organization is using AI for data-cleaning, management, integration, visualization, or transformation.
About 44% are using AI for performance management, and 43% are concentrating on resource utilization such as labor and IT capacity. Another 43% are using AI for sales-focused tasks like lead-generation and marketing.
“AI is making a bigger splash since GenAI emerged,” said William O’Neill, Area VP for UAE, ServiceNow. “The real power of AI, which is demonstrated in our UAE findings, is in the careful selection of use cases.
“AI is now advanced enough to reshape work throughout the enterprise, from payroll and procurement to employee requests, customer queries, and even content creation.
“But organizations can go further. By using an enterprise AI platform approach, teams and ecosystems can work together to scale efficiently, connecting areas of the business such as customer service and technical support in ways that empower employees and delight customers.”
More AI solutions coming through
- Part of Abu Dhabi’s G42, Inception, which specializes in AI-native products, has launched the AraGen Leaderboard. This is meant to ‘redefine’ the evaluation of Arabic LLM (Large Language Model). It helps address ‘critical gaps’ in AI evaluation by offering a constructed evaluation dataset tailored to the linguistic and cultural intricacies of the Arabic language and region. Inception collaborated with Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI for the launch.
- AppliedAI confirmed that the first results of its Opus 1 Alpha Large Work Model (LWM) and Work Knowledge Graph (WKG) ‘outperformed’ all evaluated Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex workflow generation and optimisation. The Opus LWM powers AppliedAI’s automation platform Opus.com, which was developed in Abu Dhabi and now being deployed to AppliedAI’s foundational customers.
