Four years ago, in 2018, when Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Silicon Valley, the vision to push technology as the key driver became clearer. 

During his visit, he met several tech leaders. This includes Google co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, alongside Meta’s chief Mark Zuckerburg, Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson, Magic Leap’s chief Rony Abovitz and others, where he discussed multiple areas of collaborations and partnerships in setting up training centres for the youth in Saudi, and enhancing cooperation in cybersecurity, among other ideas.

Since then, the Crown Prince’s vested interest in the tech sector—particularly AI, analytics, and emerging technologies—has been growing significantly. His efforts to reduce Saudi’s dependency on the oil industry have also been viewed as one of the many progressive steps in transforming the country’s economy. The same has also been reflected in the kingdom’s Vision 2030 plan. 

The culmination of these efforts in the technology space, alongside positive and business-friendly reforms, was observed at the recent Global AI Summit 2022, held in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. But, most important of all, the event showcased the power of preserving ancient customs, traditions, and values alongside advancing technology innovations for the benefit of humanity—not just from an economic sustainability standpoint but also in creating an entirely new parallel around social good, ethics, inclusivity, diversity, best practices and more. 

During the closing remarks, H.E. Esam AlWagait, director of the National Information Centre in Saudi Arabia, said they did not just deliver a summit; together with you, they launched a real global movement to advance AI for the good of humanity.

Check out the highlights of the Global AI Summit 2022 below: 

Global AI Summit 2022 Key Highlights 

This summit was perhaps among the world’s biggest AI conferences. Hosted by the SDAIA (Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority), the event hosted 200+ speakers and industry experts from over 90 countries sharing their thought-provoking ideas in over 100+ sessions for three consecutive days. It also witnessed about 15,000 delegates in-person and over 21,000 attendees online attending the conference. 

The speakers included industry thought leaders and academics like Amin Nasser, CEO of Aramco, Junaid Bajwa, chief medical scientist of Microsoft Research, Jürgen Schmidhuber, director of AI initiative at KAUST, IBM Quantum’s Scott Crowder, DataRobot’s chief Debanjan Saha, NVIDIA’s Anima Anandkumar, Quantm AI’s Seth Dobrin, and others. 

Launched in April 2019, SDAIA is an industry governing body in Saudi Arabia that oversees all the advancements in data, AI, and information technology, alongside accelerating strategic collaboration and partnerships between various stakeholders, locally and internationally. The industry body works very closely with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

One of the interesting partnerships at Global AI Summit 2022 was SDAIA and Google Cloud, where they launched a new programme called ‘Elevate’, which aims to empower women in occupying roles in AI and machine learning. The programme offers free training to 25,000 women over the course of five years to increase the proportion of women working in the AI and analytics field. While the media has been criticising the government for its restrictive policies toward women and other groups, this move by the government seems like a positive direction towards shifting the narrative. 

Overall, more than 40+ partnerships and MoUs were signed by global and local partners at the Global AI Summit, marking the kingdom’s steady progress towards its Vision 2030 goal. 

Some of the major initiatives include the partnership with International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to sponsor the department of the first globally recognised AI readiness framework to usher international collaboration and exchange of national AI best practices, alongside supporting international AI for sustainable development efforts. 

They also announced the agreement signed with the World Bank for Saudi Arabia to join the digital development partnership (DDP) to enhance and develop data capabilities, accelerate digital tools, and enable the country to achieve sustainable growth and economic development. 

The country launched Saudi AI Ethics, one of the first national implementations of UNESCO’s AI ethics recommendations, which touches upon ethical and trustworthy AI. 

In addition, the SDAIA Group launched global competitions—AI Neom Challenge and Smarathon, solving cities’ most critical challenges. Besides this, they announced the launch of the world’s best Arabic speech recognition model, developed by Saudi AI experts. “This will ensure that AI works for every speaking person, not only here in Saudi Arabia, but people worldwide,” said H.E. Esam Alwagait. 

Future looks bright 

Alwagait said that initially, they had plans to host the summit every two years, but given the demand and success of the event, they are now planning to make it an annual event. “We promise you a bigger and better Global AI Summit next year,” he added. 

Saudi Arabia is now catching up with the rest of the world and is accelerating its technology adoption at a much faster pace as part of its Vision 2030 and National Transformation Program 2020. As per a PwC report, the Middle East is projected to accrue 2% of the total global benefits of artificial intelligence in 2030—equivalent to $320 billion—with Saudi Arabia having the largest gains during that period, with AI contributing over $135.2 billion to its economy.