Conversational AI in the UAE

This morning Carrington Malin of Middle East AI News published a fascinating overview of how Conversational AI is being used and being viewed in the United Arab Emirates.

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I know a lot of Conversational AI vendors are very keen to understand the potential of the market in the Gulf and whilst I would suggest that Chatbots are still very much 'a new idea' for many companies there, now – absolutely right now – is the time to be getting into the market.

WhatsApp is used heavily – to the extent that I often quip that the region essentially runs on WhatsApp – but this is generally human-to-human. It's monumentally convenient for the end-user and I'd go so far as to suggest it's really made things quite effective for most organisations in enabling another semi-real-time interactive channel to customers.

For example, I used WhatsApp to book appointments, request deliveries, query product availability and request information (e.g. "Can you send me the food menu for the beach restaurant?" when I'm WhatsApping the hotel on their WhatsApp number).

There's a tremendous amount of existing usage of the medium – so technically it should be relatively easy to integrate some degree of automation almost immediately.

But. Start now. If you're a vendor thinking about expanding to the Gulf, get someone out there, right now. Start having the conversations. Start demonstrating your tech. Don't wait...

Have a read of Carrington's post here and check out Middle East AI News here.