#UAE #agenticAI - UAE telecoms operator Etisalat UAE and enterprise AI company DataRobot have signed a new multi-year agreement to build, operate and govern an agentic AI workforce across Etisalat UAE’s business units. The DataRobot Agent Workforce Platform will be hosted in Etisalat’s own data centre, keeping sensitive data and AI workloads on its self-managed infrastructure. Financial terms of the multi-year deal weren’t disclosed.
SO WHAT? - In common with other large enterprises in the UAE, Etisalat is transitioning from AI models that predict to agents that act, and it wants to keep control of where they run. Hosting the platform hosted in its own data centre gives it a say over what data agents can reach and where they process that data. The partnership has a four-year track record, in deploying AI for use cases from churn prevention to credit risk. The new agreement extends a working relationship rather than starting a new one, which may give Etisalat added confidence to deploy faster.
KEY POINTS:
Etisalat UAE and DataRobot announced a multi-year agreement on 14 October 2026. It extends their partnership and focuses on building, operating and governing an agentic AI workforce across Etisalat UAE’s business units.
Etisalat UAE will use DataRobot Agent Workforce Platform capabilities within its sovereign AI ecosystem to develop, deploy and govern selected agentic AI workloads. The platform will be hosted within Etisalat UAE’s own data centre.
According to DataRobot, the environment will brings predictive, generative and agentic AI together under one governance framework. Etisalat UAE keeps control over where its AI runs, what data it can access and how it is governed.
The two companies have worked together since 2022 developing early predictive use cases covering customer value management. These include churn prevention, upsell and cross-sell targeting, and credit risk optimisation.
Etisalat UAE says the partnership strengthened governance of its growing machine learning portfolio and helped teams deliver models faster. It also supported the company’s Citizen Data Scientist Program, which brings data science to business users.
The telecom operator is embedding AI expertise directly in its business units, enabling teams closer to customer, commercial and operational problems to develop new use cases from idea to production.
The new programme’s success relies on the support of departmental AI champions and a governed enterprise sandbox for prototyping. Etisalat UAE says it is helping scale agentic AI across customer experience, regulatory compliance, sales effectiveness and operational efficiency.
Etisalat UAE plans to extend the governance, security and operational disciplines built for machine learning into the agentic AI environment, so agents can be built and scaled safely.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Source: DataRobot, Etisalat IAE
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