A new consulting firm founded by a former Regional CTO is entering the UAE market with a pointed argument: the region's AI problem is not a lack of investment. It is a lack of delivery.

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UAE enterprises are spending on artificial intelligence. That part is settled. What is not settled, and what is becoming one of the more pressing strategic conversations in the region's boardrooms, is why so much of that spending stalls somewhere between the pilot phase and anything resembling a commercial return. Kudo Advisory, which launches this week in Dubai, is built specifically around that problem.

The firm, founded by Vijay Jaswal, a technology leader who previously served as Regional CTO at enterprise software companies IFS and Software AG, is positioning itself as the bridge between AI ambition and AI outcomes at a moment when the gap between the two has never been more visible or more costly.

The Problem Kudo Advisory Is Solving

The context behind the launch is straightforward, even if the solution is not. According to PwC Middle East, AI is projected to contribute up to $320 billion to the regional economy by 2030. That headline figure has been doing significant work in executive presentations and government strategy documents across the Gulf for some time. What it tends to obscure is the more uncomfortable reality sitting beneath it: a large proportion of the enterprises in the region making meaningful AI investments are not yet seeing results that justify the capital deployed.

The pattern is recognisable to anyone who has watched enterprise technology adoption cycles closely. Organisations launch AI pilots, often several simultaneously, and find that the pilots succeed on their own terms but fail to scale. Initiatives remain fragmented across business units. The question of where AI actually creates value, as opposed to where it creates activity, never gets answered clearly enough to drive disciplined prioritisation. Governance structures arrive late or not at all. And the returns that were modelled at the investment stage do not appear in the operational data.

Jaswal describes the problem with the directness of someone who has watched it repeat across multiple markets and multiple enterprise contexts: "Kudo Advisory exists to make AI move. Across the region, we are seeing strong intent and meaningful investment in AI, however many organisations are yet to see results. The issue is a lack of clarity on where value sits, how to govern it properly, and how to execute with discipline. Our focus is simple: to help leadership teams prioritise the right opportunities, put the right guardrails in place, and ensure delivery happens."

Why a Specialist Advisory Firm and Why Now

The timing of Kudo Advisory's launch reflects a maturation point in the UAE's AI journey that has been building for several years. The early phase of AI adoption in the region, roughly 2022 through 2024, was characterised by broad experimentation and high tolerance for ambiguity around returns. That tolerance is shrinking. Boards and leadership teams that approved AI budgets two or three years ago are beginning to ask harder questions about what those investments have produced, and in many cases the answers are not satisfying.

This creates a specific and growing demand for advisory capability that sits between the large generalist consulting firms, which often approach AI as a subset of broader transformation programs, and the pure technology vendors, which naturally orient solutions toward their own product stacks. Kudo Advisory's stated value proposition is independence and execution focus: helping enterprises identify where AI genuinely moves the needle for their specific business, rather than where it looks impressive in a strategy document.

What the Firm Actually Does

Kudo Advisory's service model covers the full span of the enterprise AI lifecycle, from initial strategy through to programme delivery and performance measurement. On the strategy side, the firm focuses on connecting AI opportunities to business priorities rather than treating AI as a separate innovation agenda, a distinction that matters more than it might appear. Companies that run AI programs in parallel to their core business tend to produce pilots. Companies that embed AI decisions into their core business tend to produce outcomes.

The firm also places governance at the centre of its offering rather than treating it as a compliance afterthought. This reflects where the conversation around enterprise AI has moved in the past eighteen months. The question is no longer whether to deploy AI, but how to ensure that deployment happens with appropriate oversight, measurable accountability, and structures that allow organisations to scale what works and stop what does not.

Beyond frameworks and strategy, Kudo Advisory explicitly commits to programme delivery, which is where many advisory relationships stop short. The firm's emphasis on implementation accountability and performance measurement positions it closer to an execution partner than a traditional strategic advisor, a distinction that will likely resonate with leadership teams that have already had the strategy conversation and are now looking for someone to help them actually build.

What This Signals for the UAE's AI Market

The launch of a firm with this specific focus at this specific moment in the UAE market is itself a signal worth reading. It reflects the point the regional enterprise AI conversation has reached: past inspiration, past experimentation, and now squarely in the harder territory of operational discipline, governance, and provable returns.

The $320 billion AI contribution figure that PwC projects for the region by 2030 will not materialise through investment alone. It will materialise through execution. And the organisations that close the gap between what they are spending on AI and what they are getting from it will be the ones that treat delivery as seriously as they treat strategy. That is the bet Kudo Advisory is making. Given the evidence accumulating across the region's enterprise landscape, it looks like a well-timed one.

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