Developments highlighted at last week’s Dubai FinTech Summit 2026 suggest that the country’s largest lenders are no longer simply experimenting with AI but preparing to make it a fundamental part of how they operate.

Emirates NBD, Dubai’s largest lender by assets, shared how it has more than 150 AI initiatives underway, with 65 already in production.

The bank, which is majority government-owned, has been aggressively scaling its digital transformation by committing approximately 50% of its technology budget to AI.

In June,Emirates NBD was ranked first in the Evident AI Index for Banks – Middle East & Africa which assesses how banks across these regions are deploying AI and adapting their operations to the technology’s transformative impact.

The survey carried out by Evident, a London-based market intelligence firm, comprised more than 100 companies, including insurers and payment processors. 

It 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 using local, in-country infrastructure. This allows it to run advanced LLMs at scale while meeting strict UAE data residency, privacy, and regulatory compliance laws.

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 is the area where Rio-Tinto anticipates 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 this 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 rapid digital transformation taking place across the region has increased its exposure to cyberattacks while the need to strengthen operational resilience across the Gulf has become increasingly pressing since the outbreak of the US-Iran war on February 28.

In the UAE, daily attempted cyberattacks 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 warned that cybercriminals are increasingly harnessing AI to devise more sophisticated attack methods.

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, with Commercial Bank of Dubai (CBD) unveiling 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, Commercial Bank of Dubai’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.

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.

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.