IBM has joined the 17th Middle East Banking Innovation Summit (MEBIS 2026) in Dubai as title sponsor, spotlighting a shift now defining the industry. Banks across the Middle East and North Africa are moving from AI experiments toward full deployment in a move to modernize the data, governance, and legacy systems that let AI run safely at scale.

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Somewhere inside a Gulf bank's operations center, an artificial intelligence model is flagging suspicious transactions with an accuracy that would have seemed improbable three years ago. The same institution is still tied to a core banking platform old enough to predate the smartphone. That gap, between what AI can already do and what a bank can run across its business, has become the defining challenge of the regional financial sector, and it will sit at the center of this year's summit.

IBM has joined the 17th edition of the Middle East Banking Innovation Summit, known as MEBIS 2026, as title sponsor. The event runs on 16 and 17 September at Jumeirah Emirates Towers in Dubai, drawing more than 400 banking leaders and delegates, over 60 speakers, and more than 30 technology providers for two days of talks on the future of banking. IBM is bringing its enterprise AI, hybrid cloud, data, and automation work to an audience of senior banking and technology executives from across the Middle East and North Africa.

From Proof of Concept to Production

Across the Gulf, the numbers describe a market that has adopted AI widely but scaled it narrowly. Roughly 60 percent of financial institutions in the region report using AI in some form, yet only about a quarter have moved those tools into full production, according to industry analyses published this year. Fraud detection is the clearest success showing AI systems have cut false positive rates at some Gulf institutions by as much as 90 percent, easing a workload that rule based systems could never process cleanly. Customer facing tools have followed, with Emirates NBD's virtual assistant, Eva, among the most cited regional examples.

The distance between a working pilot and a production system is where most of the difficulty now lives. A fraud model trained on one data source delivers real value in isolation but connecting it to the rest of a bank's operations requires infrastructure that many institutions have not yet built. That integration problem, rather than the sophistication of any single model, is what separates banks that talk about AI from banks that run on it.

A global IBM study of 2,000 chief executives found that banking and financial markets leaders expect AI to make nearly half of operational decisions without human intervention by 2030, up from about a quarter today. Decisions of that kind made at machine speed require a solid structure which many banks have not yet been able to integrate due to old and new systems running simultaneously without a proper connect.

The Foundations Problem

This is the argument IBM intends to press in Dubai, and it reframes the conversation away from novelty and toward actually getting into the deep end. Modernizing mission critical systems, governing data properly, and building secure, resilient infrastructure is what will determine whether agentic AI can be trusted with real money and real customers.

“The banking conversation has moved beyond whether to adopt AI to how it can be deployed responsibly and at scale,” said Shukri Eid, General Manager, IBM Gulf, Levant and Pakistan. “That requires trusted data, strong governance and secure, resilient infrastructure so innovation delivers measurable value for customers and the business. As Title Sponsor of MEBIS 2026, IBM looks forward to working with banking leaders across the region to turn that ambition into action.”

Sovereignty adds another layer as Gulf governments have pushed hard to keep sensitive financial data within national borders and under local control, and regulators are tightening rules on AI use as fast as banks deploy it. The same IBM research found that a large majority of executives now treat AI sovereignty as essential to strategy, a concern that resonates well beyond the Gulf. Banks in the United States and Europe are wrestling with versions of the same questions around data control, model governance, and accountability when automated systems make consequential calls.

The summit's speaker roster reflects how uneven the regional picture remains. Executives are joining from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, and Jordan, markets that are developing at different speeds while facing a shared set of strategic questions. More than 20 sessions will cover digital banking, cloud infrastructure, payments innovation, cybersecurity, and the data foundations that AI depends on. Cybersecurity carries particular weight as financial crime grows more automated and harder to detect.

Over the years, MEBIS has tracked the region's banking industry through its digital transformation from early online banking toward today's focus on intelligent, AI driven systems. More than 500 pre-registrations were confirmed ahead of the September event, a sign of how seriously the regional banking community is taking the transition.

For IBM, a US technology company with deep roots in financial services, the sponsorship is a chance to position itself at the point where ambition meets execution. For banks joining, the question now lies in how fast the foundation can be built for AI integrations to actually work seamlessly.

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