Businesses across the Middle East are moving quickly from artificial intelligence planning into active deployment, but many are now confronting a familiar challenge: turning digital ambition into measurable business results. New regional research shared by Adobe during its AI Forum in Riyadh points to a market that is no longer debating whether to invest in AI, cloud infrastructure, or customer experience platforms, but is increasingly focused on execution, integration, and return on investment.
The findings are based on a survey of 200 senior leaders from large enterprises across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Kuwait, and Qatar, all with annual revenues exceeding US$500 million. The data suggests that AI adoption has reached a critical mass. Nearly 88 percent of organisations surveyed are already experimenting with or deploying AI in some form, while 61 percent describe their cloud infrastructure as very mature. Customer experience continues to be positioned as a growth driver, with 85 percent of respondents rating their CX capabilities as good or excellent.
Despite this confidence, the research highlights a persistent gap between perception and performance. More than half of respondents, 59 percent, say they struggle to measure the return on investment from customer experience improvements. Organisational silos remain a major obstacle, cited by 42 percent of leaders as a barrier to effective personalisation across channels. Notably, only 15 percent of respondents believe AI is currently delivering the greatest impact on profitability and growth, underscoring the difficulty of scaling pilot projects into enterprise-wide value.
One of the more telling insights from the study is where responsibility for digital transformation sits. In nearly two-thirds of organisations, execution is primarily owned by CIOs or CTOs. While this can accelerate foundational progress, the research suggests it can also limit broader impact when marketing, operations, and customer-facing teams are not equally accountable. Similar constraints appear in content operations, where demand for personalised, multi-channel engagement is rising faster than internal processes can adapt. Although half of surveyed organisations now use AI extensively for content creation, only 28 percent rate their content supply chains as highly efficient.
Cloud adoption presents a comparable picture. While infrastructure maturity is relatively high, more than half of respondents say their technology stacks are only moderately effective at supporting business goals. Integration challenges, alongside ongoing concerns around security and fraud, are preventing many organisations from fully capitalising on earlier cloud investments.
Overall, the research reflects a region entering a more demanding phase of digital transformation. The focus is shifting away from experimentation and headline adoption metrics toward practical questions about governance, integration, measurement, and cross-functional collaboration. For Middle East enterprises, the next stage of AI-led growth appears less about acquiring new tools and more about aligning people, processes, and platforms to ensure that digital investments translate into sustained business impact.
