Article by - Ramki Jayaraman, Managing Partner - Synarchy Consulting

It wasn’t just layoffs or funding cuts. In 2025, AI changed the cost of building tech, and everything else — hiring, investment, risk — followed.

As the UAE’s retail market expands, small retailers face rising costs, intense competition, and limited structural support. The Small Retailer Network was built to address that gap, quietly and deliberately.

The acquisition will expand ServiceNow’s security workflow offerings and advance AI-native, proactive cybersecurity and vulnerability response across all connected devices.

The new Kee Project will support up to 50 local entrepreneurs in building technology solutions for Kuwait’s crowded food delivery market, as platforms face rising costs, tighter margins, and fierce competition.

Bahrain’s National Cyber Security Center will deploy SandboxAQ’s AQtive Guard across more than 60 ministry environments to strengthen cryptographic visibility and readiness for emerging quantum-era risks.

Today’s deals tell a consistent story: AI is moving from demos to deployment, biotech is buying geography, and private equity is still writing big cheques for infrastructure-like fintech.

India’s rise to the world’s fourth-largest economy, TikTok’s sovereign restructuring in the US, and the Middle East’s race to own AI infrastructure point to a deeper shift: growth now follows control, not speed.

The year slows down, but judgement speeds up. Why the last week of December triggers anxiety for individuals, shapes customer behaviour, and quietly alters how companies make decisions.

Gartner’s latest “Companies to Beat” analysis reveals how the AI market is shifting from experimentation to structure, with platforms consolidating at the core while competition intensifies at the application layer.

This week’s tech and capital moves point to a single theme: infrastructure beats experimentation. AI needs energy, chips need redundancy, and fintech needs scale—and the GCC sits at the intersection.

A new ServiceNow report shows that the UAE’s digital transformation will create jobs, not eliminate them, with AI acting as a force multiplier rather than a replacement for human work.

Dava.Rise isn’t pitching more startup introductions. It’s pitching enterprise-grade execution - turning Series A/B products into deployable systems that clear security, compliance, and procurement.

Infoblox research finds parked domains have flipped from nuisance to threat: more than 90% now redirect to scams, scareware or malware, often automatically, with victims profiled in real time.

G42’s AI infrastructure arm is establishing a European base in Ireland as governments and enterprises seek compliant, high-performance compute to scale production AI.

Advisory firm Mintiply Capital says it is leading a AED 1.2 billion investment opportunity linked to the strategic exit of a fast-growing GCC food group spanning supermarkets, cafés, catering and delivery.

In Salesforce’s 2025 State of Service data, AI absorbs repetitive cases while reps move up the value chain - but the constraint is usually unified data and governance, not model capability.

Rehan Jalil isn’t selling magic. He’s selling control: knowing what data you have, what agents touched it, and how to roll back damage when autonomous workflows inevitably go wrong.

When capital floods a platform layer, buyers pay later through bundling and switching costs. Databricks’ $4 billion round is a warning and a roadmap for enterprise AI adoption.

After five years of development and three years of formulation, Hanane Bouchouicha-Sykora is scaling Zaphira Nature through a ritual-led, salon-backed strategy built for GCC climate realities and a market still biased towards imports.