The Singapore-listed CX company is moving deeper into the Gulf with a UAE subsidiary, an Arabic AI partnership and a Talabat deployment spanning eight markets. 

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Toku is putting a local corporate structure behind its Middle East expansion as it moves from early regional deployments toward government and enterprise contracts across the Gulf. The Singapore-listed customer experience company incorporated Toku Technology L.L.C. in the UAE on August 24, giving it an in-country entity through which it can contract, invoice, receive payments, hire locally and participate in government and semi-government tenders across the UAE and wider GCC. The company says it is already participating in a number of regional tenders with a regional partner. 

The development comes less than a year after the company entered the Middle East in December 2025. It says its regional footprint has since grown from two markets to eight, with Talabat now live on its platform across the delivery group's eight operating markets: the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, Oman, Jordan and Iraq. 

Local infrastructure is becoming part of the sale 

For a technology provider targeting banks, telecom operators and government organizations, a local entity can make a practical difference to how contracts are structured and services are delivered. The new subsidiary gives the company a base for local commercial operations, while its platform supports commercial cloud, private data centers and hybrid deployment options. Those choices matter where customers have specific requirements around infrastructure and data residency. Rather than assuming every organization can use the same cloud arrangement, the company is positioning deployment flexibility alongside its customer experience software. It is also pursuing public-sector opportunities where procurement involves requirements beyond the technology itself. 

Language presents a separate challenge. Through a memorandum of understanding signed in June, the company is working with SESTEK to integrate conversational AI capabilities into its customer experience platform. The Turkish technology provider's documentation lists support for Modern Standard Arabic as well as Najdi, Kuwaiti and Emirati voices. Its speech recognition technology also supports multilingual interactions involving Arabic, English, French and Urdu. Voice systems have to deal with a different problem from text-based applications because customers do not necessarily speak in the formal language used in written communications. Dialect, accent and switching between languages can all affect whether an automated system understands an interaction correctly. SESTEK's focus on regional Arabic variants therefore addresses a specific operational problem for companies considering voice AI in the Gulf. 

"Toku's entry into the Middle East reflects exactly the kind of ambition this market rewards: combining serious communications infrastructure with a genuine commitment to local relevance. Language is where most voice-AI deployments succeed or fail in this region, and our two decades of work in Arabic, Turkish and multilingual speech technology are built for precisely the dialect diversity and code-switching that GCC organisations deal with every day. We see strong complementarity between SESTEK's Agentic CX Suite and Toku's customer experience capabilities, and we look forward to bringing that combination to banks, telecom operators and government bodies across the region as the partnership develops," said Ahmet Subaşı, Managing Director, MEAPAC, SESTEK. 

Talabat provides an early test 

The platform is being used across all eight markets, integrated with the delivery company's different CRM environments and supporting inbound and outbound service teams. Toku says more than 8,000 users across in-house and business process outsourcing teams are using it. 

The company also reports that customer satisfaction rose to approximately 80 percent after voice was introduced alongside chat, representing an increase of more than 20 percent across the deployment. Those figures come from Toku and have not been independently audited, but the wider deployment demonstrates the operational complexity the platform is being asked to handle across the region. 

Running one customer experience system across eight countries requires more than language support. Different regulatory requirements, infrastructure arrangements and existing enterprise systems have to work within the same operating model. That experience will now be tested against a different class of customer. Government agencies and regulated businesses can bring longer procurement cycles and more demanding requirements around security, compliance and implementation. Having a UAE entity and a regional technology partner may help address some of those requirements, but winning contracts will ultimately determine whether the early expansion develops into a substantial regional business. 

The immediate opportunity is already taking shape through the tenders the company says it is pursuing. Its progress will be measured less by the creation of another regional office than by whether the local structure, deployment flexibility and Arabic voice capabilities translate into contracts with organizations beyond its existing customer base. 

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