The evidence is hard to ignore
A study published by IBM in late 2025, called The Race for ROI, surveyed 3,500 senior executives across ten countries, including 500 in the UAE. The headline finding for this market is striking. 77% of UAE senior leaders said their organisations had achieved significant productivity improvements from AI, well above the wider Europe, Middle East and Africa average of 66%. UAE businesses came out among the strongest performers in the whole region.
When IBM looked at which business areas were seeing the biggest AI-driven productivity gains in the UAE, advertising and marketing came in second, just behind software development and IT. Marketing is not a bystander in this shift. It is one of the places where AI is already making the most measurable difference.
From tools to teams: What Agentic AI means
The phrase you will hear more and more is Agentic AI, and it is worth understanding in plain terms because it is the heart of this shift. A normal AI tool waits for you. You ask, it answers, and nothing happens until you ask again. An AI agent is different. You give it a goal, and it can carry out a series of steps on its own to reach that goal, checking its own work along the way and only coming back to you when it needs a decision or has finished.
The simplest way to picture it is the difference between a calculator and a bookkeeper. A calculator does exactly one sum each time you press the buttons. A bookkeeper takes a task off your plate and handles it. That is the leap businesses are starting to make, from AI that answers to AI that does, and it is why people have started talking about AI teammates rather than AI tools.
The UAE is betting on the Agent shift
UAE leaders are not treating this as a distant idea. In the same IBM study, 93% of UAE leaders said they expect agentic AI to deliver measurable returns within two years. Around one in five organisations said they had already hit their ROI goals from earlier AI work, and roughly 44% expect returns within a single year. That is a lot of confidence being placed on AI moving from helper to doer, and it is why so many businesses here are actively embedding AI across how they operate rather than leaving it as a side experiment.
There is a people side to this too. Moving to AI that works alongside your team only pays off if your team actually knows how to work with it. The businesses getting the most out of this are the ones investing in building the skills to use these tools well, rather than assuming staff will simply figure it out on their own.
The honest question underneath the hype
Using AI and proving it was worth it are two very different things. IBM's own wider research has pointed out that while a large majority of leaders see productivity gains, only around a third feel they can confidently measure the actual return on their AI investment. Optimism is running well ahead of measurement, which means plenty of businesses genuinely believe AI is helping without being able to show exactly where or by how much. Getting an honest read on what is actually working is quietly one of the hardest and most valuable things a business can do right now.
The same research flags the real obstacles, and they are rarely the technology itself. The biggest barriers tend to be concerns around security and data privacy, and the awkward job of getting new AI systems to work with the older systems a business already runs. In other words, the hard part of AI integration is usually organisational, not technical. It is about people, process and trust as much as it is about the tools.
What this means for businesses here
If you run a business in the UAE, the takeaway is not that you need to rush out and buy AI agents tomorrow. It is that the ground is shifting under everyone, and the competitors around you are already treating AI as part of how work gets done rather than a novelty. Marketing especially is one of the areas where this is landing hardest and fastest.
The businesses that come out ahead will not be the ones that adopt the most tools. They will be the ones that are clear about what they want AI to actually achieve, honest about whether it is delivering, and willing to invest in their people so the technology is used well. Enthusiasm is easy and common. Turning it into something you can measure is the real work, and it is where the advantage lies.
A note from Push MENA
We find this shift genuinely interesting because marketing sits right in the middle of it. AI is changing how campaigns are built, how content is made and how customers get discovered, and the UAE is at the front of that change rather than watching from the sidelines. But we are also wary of hype for its own sake, which is why we care more about what AI is actually delivering for a business than how many tools it has switched on.
If you are trying to work out what all this means for your own marketing, and where AI could genuinely help rather than just add noise, that is exactly the kind of thing we like to get into.
Wondering where AI could actually move the needle for your marketing rather than just add noise? Get in touch with Push for a straightforward conversation about what is worth doing and what is not.
