As Saudi organisations accelerate their adoption of agentic AI, moving from experimentation to production requires more than technology and skills. Ayham Alzaaim, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Middle East at ARIS, explains why aligning AI agents with real-world business processes, governance and performance objectives is critical to deploying autonomous AI at scale.
How is ARIS helping organisations in Saudi Arabia accelerate the adoption of agentic AI?
We are working with a lot of entities in KSA, including private, government and semi-government entities, to help accelerate the adoption of AI, specifically agentic AI.
The way we are doing that is by helping to bridge the gap between the actual business operations of an entity and how those business processes integrate with AI agents.
Why is that important? Because you need very close alignment, not 99% but 100% alignment, between the business process, how the business operates and how an agentic AI executes. As soon as you have any deviation, you potentially have an agent that is effectively hallucinating and not working in accordance with the business process.
What we do with our partners and customers is ensure that the business process in place has been modelled, analysed and validated. The performance of that process is also checked and verified. Once we can say, “Yes, this is the right process for the business,” we can then integrate that business process with the agent.
By doing so, you are governing, controlling and monitoring both the execution and performance of that agent.
In a nutshell, it is about bringing process intelligence into the organisation to be the driver of agentic AI.
A lot of AI projects are still stuck in the pilot phase and have struggled to move into production. What do you think the bottleneck is? Is it skills, infrastructure, culture or something else?
I think skills in KSA have increased considerably and significantly over the last few years. So, I don’t really think it’s a skills issue. We have a lot of highly skilled and capable people in the Kingdom.
I think it’s a misalignment between what the business is trying to achieve and what AI is trying to achieve. The hype around AI is about getting AI out into the ecosystem, but you need to make sure that the investment being made in AI is aligned with what the business is trying to achieve. I think that’s where the misalignment lies.
So, you do have projects in pre-production and you do have projects in the testing phase, but ensuring there is a close connection with what the business is trying to achieve and the KPIs it is trying to meet is crucial.
Think of it like this: when any organisation employs someone, you empower and enable that person. You train them, give them a set of rules and a framework within which to work, and then you measure their performance.
An agent should be exactly the same, no different. Even though it’s a digital employee, you still need to be able to empower, enable and educate it. Without those things, you don’t know what the agent is doing.
Agentic AI brings greater autonomy, but it also introduces governance risks. How do you help customers address those challenges?
I think that’s a very important point. For me, governance and risk are two separate things. If I look at why governance is important, it allows you to make sure that the operation of agents, or any AI strategy, is in line with what the business is asking for.
You must have that digital twin. Without having that digital twin, you’re going to have something happening in the digital world and something happening in the real world. If those two things are not mirror-copy identical, then you have divergence.
In some industries, that divergence can result in deaths. It can result in a bank losing money or losing credit card details. So, it’s very important that the divergence is zero.
If I go one step further, you also need to ensure there is no separation between different entities or organisations within the same company. You need to make sure that everybody is moving in parallel and working towards the same company objectives.
