Emirates NBD Puts Half Its Tech Budget Into AI as Threats Surge

Emirates NBD is channelling approximately 50% of its technology budget into artificial intelligence, with 65 of more than 150 AI initiatives already in production. Dubai's largest lender by assets shared the figures at last week's Dubai FinTech Summit 2026, where the country's biggest banks signalled a shift from experimentation to structural adoption.

In June, the bank ranked first in the Evident AI Index for Banks – Middle East & Africa, a survey of more than 100 companies including insurers and payment processors conducted by Evident, a London-based market intelligence firm. The index noted that Emirates NBD "explicitly" links AI to enterprise productivity, operational modernisation and the UAE's national AI agenda.

Last month, Emirates NBD became the first bank in the MENA region to deploy OpenAI's GPT models on local, in-country infrastructure, allowing it to run large language models (LLMs, AI systems trained on vast text datasets) at scale while meeting UAE data residency, privacy and regulatory compliance laws. The bank plans to apply the models to customer experience, risk management, financial crime prevention, process automation and employee productivity.

What do the banks' leaders expect?

"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. He added: "I believe AI will be the key determinant in shaping the competitive landscape of the future."

Cybersecurity is where Rio-Tinto anticipates the most significant change. As advanced AI models grow more 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. The bank is adopting the same technology defensively, using a frontier OpenAI model to test and identify weaknesses in its own systems.

How severe is the regional threat picture?

Very. Daily attempted cyberattacks in the UAE reportedly surged from around 200,000 to as many as 700,000 amid escalating geopolitical tensions following the outbreak of the US-Iran war on February 28, according to a Help AG State of the Market report. In July, the UAE thwarted a series of sophisticated cyberattacks targeting its financial sector, which sought to compromise digital systems through phishing campaigns and malicious software. The UAE's Cyber Security Council warned that cybercriminals are increasingly harnessing AI to devise more sophisticated attack methods.

What is Commercial Bank of Dubai doing?

Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD) unveiled a series of strategic technology partnerships at the summit:

• Microsoft – to support wider AI adoption
• Silent Eight – to strengthen AI-powered compliance and risk management
• Comarch AI Wealth – to develop the bank's digital wealth platform and investment offerings
• Zamp – to leverage intelligent automation
• Harvey, Sirion and Flank – to improve 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. Agentic AI, unlike conventional generative AI, can make decisions and execute tasks autonomously with minimal human intervention. "This will help us accelerate service delivery and provide superior customer experiences," Cherian said.

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 underlying intellectual property.

Where does government policy point?

The state is moving at least as fast as the banks. In April, the UAE government launched a 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 adoption across the emirate's private sector, aiming to secure a "competitive edge" in the future global economy.

The direction of travel is unambiguous. With aggressive national targets and lenders committing substantial resources, the UAE's financial sector appears poised for a transformation measured in years rather than decades. The arithmetic is stark: half a tech budget, fifteen times the vulnerabilities, and a 2028 deadline. Verdict: the banks believe their own forecast.