Saudi AI Start-Up Shaffra Says Its Digital Employees Saved Clients 800,000 Work Hours

In an interview with Arab News, Al-Atawi said the company's AI recruiters conduct about 15,000 to 20,000 interviews and its AI call-centre agents handle 7,000 to 8,000 calls a day. Shaffra works with Saudi companies and government entities in recruitment, customer service, HR and project management, though he said enterprise-wide adoption is still at an early stage.

The figures are the company's own and were not independently verified, but they give a sense of how Saudi organisations are starting to put AI agents into daily operations. The kingdom has designated 2026 its Year of Artificial Intelligence, and the General Authority for Statistics says AI adoption among Saudi businesses reached 33.1% in 2025, up from 27.6% in 2024, led by information and communications at 61.1% and finance and insurance at 52.9%.

Al-Atawi pointed to one client that used to spend about $150,000 a year assessing 300 employees. After switching to Shaffra's system, the cost fell to about $30,000 a year while the number of employees assessed rose to 7,000. He named customer service, revenue operations, HR, finance and accounting, and business operations as the functions with the most scope for autonomous AI teams.

The main barriers, he said, are inside the organisation. "The biggest obstacles we encounter are organisational rather than technical," he said, adding that companies often have not decided whether technology or operations teams own the deployment. He said AI employees need controlled access to sensitive data, audit trails and continuous monitoring, with consequential decisions left to human approval. In April the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority issued a framework for agentic AI tools in software development that stresses human oversight.

Shaffra, whose investors include Ooredoo Corporate, stc and Omantel, said after launching what it calls a subconscious AI architecture in Riyadh in June that it would release more than 20 additional AI employee roles during 2026, covering sales, finance, HR, operations and customer service.