As more critical business services move onto digital platforms, Saudi companies are having to rethink what resilience means as AI adoption accelerates across the Kingdom. 

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Saudi Arabia has spent years building the digital infrastructure behind its economic transformation, and the scale of that shift is now reflected in the wider economy. The digital economy accounted for 16% of the Kingdom’s GDP in 2024, according to the General Authority for Statistics. For companies operating banks, logistics networks, industrial systems and digital services, that growing dependence on technology also changes the cost of an outage. A disruption that might once have been treated mainly as an IT incident can now affect customers and business operations much more quickly.  

The issue is becoming more relevant as Saudi organizations move further into AI and cloud adoption. Feras A. Al-Alshaikh, Regional Director for Saudi Arabia, North Gulf and Levant at Red Hat, argues that operational resilience needs to be considered before a disruption occurs, rather than treated mainly as a recovery exercise. Saudi regulators have already put parts of that thinking into practice. The Saudi Central Bank's Business Continuity Management Framework requires financial institutions covered by the framework to maintain continuity arrangements and ensure the availability of critical operations and services. The framework also places business continuity within the wider management system, alongside areas such as enterprise risk and cybersecurity. 

AI is changing the resilience equation 

Saudi Arabia has designated 2026 as the Year of Artificial Intelligence, with the Saudi Data and AI Authority describing the initiative as part of the Kingdom's effort to expand AI adoption across sectors and support a data-driven economy. For businesses, putting AI into production means dealing with much more than the model itself. Data, applications, computing resources and security controls all have to work together, making the infrastructure underneath an AI service just as relevant to its reliability as the technology running on top of it.  

That shift is already visible inside Aramco, where the company's Upstream Digital Center has built a GenAI Foundation using Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat says the platform now supports more than 35,000 users, has reduced deployment times to a maximum of one hour and has handled a 700% increase in daily requests without downtime. Once AI services become part of day-to-day work, the platform supporting them is no longer simply an innovation project. It becomes part of the infrastructure the business has to keep running.  

Financial services provide another view of the same pressure. Riyad Bank has worked with Red Hat on an open hybrid cloud environment as part of its digital transformation, including the use of OpenShift to support digital banking services. For a regulated institution, the decision is not simply about adding cloud capacity. It also involves questions around availability, security, sensitive workloads and how much flexibility the bank has when its technology environment needs to change. Red Hat's Riyad Bank case study 

Those questions increasingly overlap with digital sovereignty in Saudi Arabia. Infrastructure choices are becoming harder to separate from questions about data control, local requirements and the ability to keep critical workloads adaptable. For enterprises operating across hybrid environments, that can mean weighing the convenience of cloud services against the need to retain control over where important data and workloads are handled. 

For technology leaders, this makes resilience a broader question than whether a company has a backup site. Modernization can introduce more dependencies at the same time that it creates new capabilities, particularly when applications are spread across on-premises systems, private infrastructure and public cloud environments. Automation can reduce the number of manual steps involved in deployment and recovery, but the more basic requirement is knowing which systems the business cannot afford to lose and having enough control over the underlying infrastructure to respond when something does fail. 

Saudi Arabia's digital economy is already large enough for reliability to matter at an economic level, while the Year of AI is likely to put more business processes onto digital infrastructure. The challenge for companies is no longer simply adopting AI or moving another workload into the cloud. It is making sure the systems behind those investments can continue supporting the business when demand rises, infrastructure fails or a security incident interrupts normal operations. For Saudi CIOs and business leaders, resilience is increasingly becoming part of the technology decision, rather than something left for the recovery plan. 

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