File photo
Doha, Qatar: Qatar’s rapidly expanding artificial intelligence (AI) landscape is entering a new phase, with businesses and institutions moving beyond experimentation toward practical, problem-solving applications.
Industry leaders say the market is shifting from fast-paced initial adoption to a more strategic deployment of AI tools that address specific operational needs, particularly in multilingual, cross-border, and data-intensive environments.
Speaking to The Peninsula, David Shim, CEO and Co-Founder of Read AI, said that while large corporations may approach the company seeking thousands of licenses, meaningful insights come from direct conversations with end users. “We can have a large company come to us and say, from Qatar, ‘We want to buy 5,000 licenses,’ and we start to ask questions,” Shim said.
“But we don’t always get to the specific use case. Here, I’m able to talk with individuals and understand exactly how they’re using the product.”
The market leader cited examples of businesses operating multilingual meetings where participants speak Arabic, English, and Japanese on the same call, using Read AI to consolidate discussions and generate unified insights.
Other enterprises, he said, are leveraging the platform to connect disparate data sources to enable enterprise-wide search functions. “Many systems are US-centric, which makes integration difficult,” Shim noted. “Read has made it very simple to connect the dots.”
Shim observed that over the past three to four quarters, the market has shifted from what he described as “AI speed” to a more measured “normal tech speed.”
“AI speed is very quick as companies feel they need to adopt something immediately,” he said. “But what we have learned is that you can’t just adopt a copilot solution. A lot of people have copilots, but nobody uses them. You have to solve a very specific problem.” In Qatar and the wider region, Shim said enthusiasm for AI adoption is “unmistakable.”
Walking through conference floors, he noted the prevalence of AI branding and solutions, reflecting strong institutional backing.
“We are all in on AI,” he said, pointing to the visible investment activity led by major institutions such as the Qatar Investment Authority. They’ve been very strong and a leader in that space.”
Shim stresses that the next phase of AI evolution will move beyond chat-based systems toward autonomous “agents” capable of performing defined tasks across platforms and time zones.
He said, “Everyone thinks about AI as ChatGPT, you chat with it, and it creates content, but the future is really around agents.” Over the coming year, Shim expects companies in Qatar and beyond to identify highly specific use cases for these agents, including real-time multilingual coordination across different languages.
“At a certain point, you’re going to see a lot of agents actually attending the summit,” Shim added.
The official also stated that the next wave of AI adoption in the region will be defined not by experimentation, but by production-ready systems that solve tangible business challenges at scale.
