Image used for representation only.
Doha, Qatar: Qatar is emerging as one of leading countries in the world in technology adaptation and innovation. The country has made progress transforming its energy-based economy into a well-diversified, knowledge-based society by building and integrating its ICT infrastructure.
“Qatar has been one of the early adopters of AI in the region as the country understood its economic impact and they have invested big time in AI since many years,” said Chady Haddad, Data & AI Lead at Microsoft in Middle East, during an event organised by Startup Grind Doha chapter, recently.
In 2019, the AI strategy was released in Qatar to accelerate adoption. The FIFA World Cup 2022 was an example where the country showcased and implemented AI to manage the crowds and to digitise the whole fan experience.
He further said, “If you think about healthcare and precision medicine and the genomics it does not exist outside of Qatar in the region. Also, the smart cities and what’s going on from Msherieb to Lusail and even Tasmu, there are a lot of success stories. So, Qatar has been leading this journey and we as Microsoft are partnering with government since long time.”
Hadad shared how Microsoft supports Qatar in this journey, Haddad said “We are focused on three main pillars – people, technology and process. When it comes to technology, we have our three data centers in Qatar and we offer some of these data centers with end to end data, unified data analytics platform and all the AI capabilities from cognitive services to machine learning. The latest partnership with Open AI helped us into acquiring ChatGPT which is also part of our offering.”
The second pillar is the people and skills, he noted “we need people and technology alone cannot do anything. So, we are focusing on different skilling and training programmes starting from the leaders and employees, to specific programmes for the partners and startups and also for education and the students because they are the future of Qatar and the world.”
“We as Microsoft work through our partners and startups and we believe it requires strong partners and startup ecosystem for us to be successful and add value to our customers. Therefore, our focus is on the startups, partners and to ensure how we support startups to move from having an idea into an Independent software vendor (ISV),” he added.
Also, addressing the event Dr. Chawki Tawbi, CTO, Data & AI Lead at Google Cloud Qatar highlighted technologies and innovations Google is introducing with AI in Qatar and Middle East region. “In last few months we have seen acceleration in AI breakthroughs, it is all the generative AI because it is easy to use,” he said.
He noted that all the studies before showed that AI is going to contribute to the region by 2030 with $55bn to the GDP and discussed the impact of AI.
“We believe Qatar is set to lead innovation in the region, and we are excited to be a part of it. We admit there are some challenges and we as Microsoft are taking the challenge very seriously,” Dr Tawbi said.
