Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026: Smart AI Starts with Data You Can Trust

For two days, ADNEC Centre Abu Dhabi was the place to be for anyone serious about artificial intelligence. The first Ai Everything Abu Dhabi took place on 6 and 7 October 2026 under the theme "New Intelligence". The question has moved on from what AI can do to how organisations can deploy it safely and at scale.

Virtech was there. Virgil Dobos and Abdul Razack represented the team, with one simple message: AI is only as good as the data you can trust.

A who's who of AI, all in one place

The line-up matched the ambition. The organisers announced more than 180 speakers, over 400 AI companies and startups, and more than 200 investors. Speakers on the programme included:

• H.E. Omar Sultan Al Olama, Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, UAE Government
• H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Secretary General of the Advanced Technology Research Council
• H.E. Dr. Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, Head of Cybersecurity for the UAE Government
• H.E. Ahmed Tamim Hisham Al Kuttab, Chairman of the Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi
• Arthur Mensch, Co-Founder and CEO of Mistral AI
• Marc Raibert, Founder of Boston Dynamics
• Dr. Najwa Aaraj, CEO of the Technology Innovation Institute
• Talal Al Kaissi, CEO of Core42, G42
• George Kurian, CEO of NetApp
• Philip Guido, EVP and Chief Commercial Officer of AMD

On the exhibition floor, AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, HPE, Intel, Alibaba Cloud, Nokia, Snowflake and Red Hat showed their work. So did regional leaders G42, TII, Hub71 and the UAE Cybersecurity Council.

What we heard

Three themes kept coming up, on stage and in the aisles:

• Sovereign AI. Governments and regulated industries want AI that runs on infrastructure and data they control, inside national borders.
• From pilots to production. Agentic AI and AI-native government services are no longer concepts. Abu Dhabi is already putting them to work.
• Infrastructure is strategy. Compute, sovereign cloud and data centres were as prominent as the models themselves.

Where Virtech fits in

All of this ambition rests on something less glamorous: the organisation's own data. That means decades of email, files and records sitting in archives and backups across the region.

Before a model ever touches that data, it must be archived, governed and recoverable. That is what Virtech has done for GCC organisations for years, with Arctera Enterprise Vault, NetBackup and Cohesity. We had good conversations with organisations planning their next AI step. For many, the first job is the same: know what data you hold, who can access it, how long it should be kept and whether you can recover it.

We have written more about this in Before You Add AI, Get Your Data House in Order.

Thank you, Abu Dhabi

A big thank you to the organisers, the speakers and everyone who stopped to talk with us. It was an inspiring two days. The UAE is not waiting for the future of AI; it is building it. We are proud to help make sure that future runs on data you can trust.

Planning an AI initiative? Make sure your data is ready first.

Email sales@virtech.ae or call +971 4 580 7555 to speak with our specialists.