AI Use Among DIFC Firms Reaches 70%, Dubai Regulator Says

Steward gave the figures to the Emirates News Agency (WAM) on the sidelines of the Dubai FinTech Summit 2026. He said the authority's latest surveys show 64 percent of firms using generative AI in their operations. WAM's report did not say over what period adoption rose from 30 percent to 70 percent.

Steward said he expects the centre's financial sector to keep growing strongly over the next year. He pointed to a DFSA report on advanced and agentic AI and cyber resilience in the financial sector, published to support safe use of the technology and to address cyber threats. He also said the regulator is running a dedicated survey on how investment funds use tokenisation of financial assets.

Banks Shift Budgets Toward AI

Neeraj Makin, group head of strategy, analytics and venture capital at Emirates NBD, told WAM that the bank spent about 50 percent of its technology budget on AI initiatives last year and plans to do the same next year. He said the bank is working on more than 50 AI use cases, including fraud prevention and customer service.

Makin described a trial in which AI handled 2,000 debt collection accounts while staff handled another 2,000. According to his account, the AI side was 15 percent more productive. WAM did not publish further details of how the trial was set up or measured.

Mohammed Al Hakim, vice chairman of Multibank Group and chief executive of MB.io, told the agency that the group moved its business from the United States to the UAE in 2021 and had recorded trading volume of about half a trillion dollars in a single month. He said bringing AI into trading and interbank solutions had made operations more efficient.

A Finance Week Built Around AI

The Dubai FinTech Summit runs on 2 and 3 November as the flagship event of the first Dubai Future Finance Week. The DIFC-led week runs until 6 November and, according to WAM, its programme focuses on AI-driven banking, shifting capital flows, new financial corridors and payment systems. At the launch, DIFC also announced a tenfold expansion of DIFC Academy to 370,000 square feet. It said the academy will be able to take more than 50,000 learners a year from 2030.

Why It Matters

The DFSA's figures give one of the clearest measures yet of how quickly AI has spread through the Gulf's largest financial free zone. Because the numbers come from the regulator itself, they also point to the oversight questions now on its agenda, including cyber resilience and AI agents acting with more autonomy. Emirates NBD's budget split shows that, for the region's largest banks, AI has become a core spending line and not a side experiment. For international firms weighing a move to Dubai, the figures suggest the centre is promoting fast AI adoption alongside regulatory guidance.