Banking in the United Arab Emirates is approaching an inflection point, with artificial intelligence beginning to reshape everything from customer service and compliance to cybersecurity and internal operations. Developments showcased at last week's Dubai FinTech Summit 2026 indicate that the country's largest lenders have moved beyond experimenting with AI and are preparing to embed it at the core of how they operate. Because banking operates under strict regulatory and data-security constraints, the pace at which the country's lenders are operationalizing the technology offers a reference point for how AI adoption can unfold across compliance-driven sectors.

Emirates NBD commits half of its technology budget to AI

Emirates NBD, Dubai's largest lender by assets, disclosed that it has more than 150 AI initiatives underway, 65 of which are already in production. The majority government-owned bank has been aggressively scaling its digital transformation, directing approximately 50% of its technology budget toward AI.

In June, an analysis of publicly available data covering 25 banks across the Middle East & Africa (MEA) placed Emirates NBD at the top of the region's AI rankings. The index was compiled by Evident, a London-based market intelligence firm, which found that the bank "explicitly" links AI to enterprise productivity, operational modernisation and the UAE's national AI agenda. Other GCC lenders on the list included First Abu Dhabi Bank at No. 3, Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi at No. 9, and Dubai's Mashreq at No. 10 — a concentration of Gulf lenders near the top that underscores how AI capability is becoming a competitive marker across the region's banking industry.

Last month, Emirates NBD became the first bank in the MENA region to deploy OpenAI's GPT models on local, in-country infrastructure, an arrangement that allows it to run advanced large language models at scale while meeting strict UAE data residency, privacy, and regulatory compliance requirements. Data residency rules require organizations to keep data within a country's borders — a constraint that shapes how regulated institutions can deploy cloud-based AI. The bank plans to integrate OpenAI's models across its operations to enhance customer experiences, strengthen risk management and financial crime prevention through advanced analytics, automate processes, and boost employee productivity.

"Banking will transform more in the next five years than it transformed in the last 30 years," said Miguel Rio-Tinto, Emirates NBD's Group Chief Digital and Information Officer. "Generative AI and advanced frontier models are so powerful that they are opening up new possibilities for automation in banking, enabling capabilities that were previously out of reach across customer service, internal processes and employee support. I believe AI will be the key determinant in shaping the competitive landscape of the future."

Cybersecurity emerges as the front line

Rio-Tinto expects cybersecurity to undergo the most significant transformation. As advanced AI models become increasingly capable of identifying software vulnerabilities, the number of critical security flaws the bank must evaluate has surged from approximately 1,000 per month in early 2025 to around 15,000 last month. To address the growing challenge, Emirates NBD is adopting the same technology defensively, leveraging a frontier OpenAI model to test and identify weaknesses in its own systems. The dynamic illustrates AI's dual role in bank security: the same class of models that surfaces a rising volume of vulnerabilities is also the tool the bank turns to when probing its own defenses.

The rapid digital transformation taking place across the region has increased its exposure to cyberattacks, and the need to strengthen operational resilience across the Gulf has become increasingly pressing since the outbreak of the US-Iran war on February 28. Daily attempted cyberattacks in the UAE reportedly surged from around 200,000 to as many as 700,000 amid the escalating geopolitical tensions. In July, the UAE successfully thwarted a series of sophisticated cyberattacks targeting its financial sector that sought to compromise digital systems and technical infrastructure through phishing campaigns and malicious software. The UAE's Cyber Security Council has warned that cybercriminals are increasingly harnessing AI to devise more sophisticated attack methods.

Commercial Bank of Dubai rethinks processes with agentic AI

While cybersecurity is emerging as a critical area where AI can make a difference, UAE lenders are looking to deploy the technology across a broad range of functions. Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD) unveiled a series of strategic technology partnerships at the summit. Collaborations with Microsoft, Silent Eight, and Comarch AI Wealth will, respectively, support wider AI adoption, strengthen AI-powered compliance and risk management, and further develop the bank's digital wealth platform and investment offerings. CBD also joined forces with Zamp to leverage intelligent automation and signed strategic agreements with Harvey, Sirion, and Flank to improve its legal and governance infrastructure.

"We are moving away from traditional AI applications towards adopting agentic AI, which is creating opportunities to rethink and redesign existing business processes," said Thomas Cherian, CBD's chief technology and services officer. "This will help us accelerate service delivery and provide superior customer experiences. Agentic AI is enabling us to move towards much more intelligent banking which is safer and more secure for our customers, highlighting technology's growing role today as a strategic enabler for banks."

Unlike conventional generative AI, agentic AI can make decisions and execute tasks autonomously with minimal human intervention. Cherian estimates that AI agents could handle 55% to 60% of operational tasks, with human oversight retained to approve outcomes. CBD also aims to retain ownership of the agents it develops and the intellectual property behind them — positioning the technology as core bank infrastructure rather than an off-the-shelf capability.

Government targets put agentic AI at the center

The UAE has recently placed agentic AI at the top of its technology agenda. In April this year, the UAE government launched a major national initiative to transition 50% of all federal government operations, services, and tasks to agentic AI systems by 2028. The following month, Dubai announced a two-year action plan to accelerate the adoption of the technology across the emirate's private sector, aiming to secure a "competitive edge" in the future global economy. Together, the federal 2028 deadline and Dubai's two-year action plan give the banking sector's AI push a defined policy timeline to unfold against.

With the government's ambitious targets for agentic AI adoption and banks committing significant resources to the technology, the UAE's financial sector looks poised for a fundamental transformation. Concrete checkpoints now exist for tracking that shift: the lenders' own pilot-to-production pipelines, and the federal government's 2028 deadline for moving half of its operations to agentic AI systems.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.