The UAE’s online and phone banking services were disrupted on March 2, 2026, when several banks were hit by a regionwide IT services breakdown. A day later, AWS, Amazon's cloud division, confirmed that two of its facilities in the UAE “were directly struck”, while in Bahrain a drone strike near one of its sites damaged its infrastructure. That’s the neat little modern arrangement: finance, data, and public life wired into systems that can fail fast, fail wide, and leave customers waiting while executives talk about resilience.
The State-Backed AI Push
The UAE remains one of the world’s most ambitious AI markets, with government strategy, regulatory leadership, startups, partnerships and investments from Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI helping build what ServiceNow described as ripe conditions for businesses to make the most of the technology. Saif Mashat, vice president for the Middle East and Africa at ServiceNow, said: “The UAE remains one of the world’s most ambitious AI markets and the government’s long-term strategy and regulatory leadership have given organisations a genuine head start.” He added: “The ones pulling ahead are moving from AI pilots to AI orchestration, connecting legacy systems, data, governance and AI agents in one control tower.”
That “control tower” language says plenty. It’s the dream of centralized command dressed up as innovation. ServiceNow said its latest findings were set out in its Enterprise AI Maturity Index, compiled by ThoughtLab and based on surveys of about 4,500 executives and 2,000 employees around the world. The analysis showed the UAE made a 13-point improvement on its AI maturity score. It also said that currently more than half, 57 per cent, of UAE organisations have implemented agentic AI, but only 7 per cent have used it to build autonomous workflows. A highlighted version of the analysis said: “The research shows many organisations are still trying to layer AI on to fragmented technology environments, disconnected data and siloed workflows.”
Mashat said the UAE government “has already created many of the conditions for AI leadership”, and that it was now largely up to companies to go beyond merely investing in the technology. “The challenge for enterprises now is to bring that same discipline and consistency into their own organisations,” he said. The report said UAE organisations expect AI to account for almost one fifth of total information technology budgets by 2027.
The report said that for more than a decade the UAE has pushed to be an AI leader as it diversifies its economy away from hydrocarbons. It said the country’s affinity for research into the technology has resulted in the establishment of startups, partnerships and investments from industry leaders including Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI. It also said the UAE has teamed up with the US to develop an AI campus in Abu Dhabi that will include 5GW of capacity for AI data centres.
Banks, Budgets, and the Cost of Dependence
Banks in the UAE are also under pressure to keep pace with the shift to AI and digital banking. Pedro Cardoso, group chief digital officer at Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, said: “In banking, trust is the ultimate currency.” He added: “As individual customers and businesses' expectations continue to evolve, the industry’s responsibility is to ensure that innovation, resilience and customer experience advance together.”
The Dubai International Financial Centre said in its 2026 Future of Finance report that competition from new banks built on AI-driven, cloud-first and asset-light models has set new standards for speed, personalisation of services and cost efficiency. A DIFC report released in June said: “Without decisive transformation”, industry profit pools could fall by $170bn by 2030, pushing many institutions below their cost of capital.
UAE lenders are responding by accelerating investment in technology. Abu Dhabi-based Sharia-compliant lender Al Hilal Bank has transformed its traditional operating model to a “digital-first” proposition “in response to a fundamental shift in customer behaviour and preferences”, chief executive Jamal Al Awadhi said. He said more than 95 per cent of the lender’s active customers bank digitally, and that as digital engagement grows, “so do customer expectations”, requiring “continued investment in infrastructure, cyber security and cloud capabilities”. He said the goal is to strengthen the bank’s “resilience, flexibility and scalability” so it can “rapidly shift critical banking services across multiple environments when required”.
Mid-tier banks are also spending heavily. National Bank of Fujairah is committing Dh100 million a year to become a “digital-first bank with a human touch”, chief executive Adnan Anwar told The National in March. The UAE's largest lenders, including First Abu Dhabi Bank, Mashreq, ADCB, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank and Dubai Islamic Bank, have not disclosed how much digitalisation accounts for their annual expenditure, but they have repeatedly emphasised their continued transformation.
Their efforts are paying off. Emirates NBD and First Abu Dhabi Bank topped an index tracking the use of responsible artificial intelligence, receiving recognition for their role in narrowing the adoption gap between the Middle East and Africa and global peers. The lenders were ranked first and third, respectively, by the Evident AI Index for Banks – Middle East & Africa, which tracks how lenders in the region leverage AI and navigate its transformational effects throughout their operations.
When the Systems Go Down
But the more dependent banks become on technology, the greater the stakes when systems go down. Cloud and digital infrastructure on which most banks rely to run core banking platforms, process digital payments, store customer data and power mobile banking apps can become points of vulnerability during conflict as well as targets for attack. On March 2, online and phone banking services of several banks in the UAE were disrupted due to a regionwide IT services breakdown. It was not clear whether the issues were related to strikes at Amazon Web Services data centres in the UAE that took place on the same day. A day later, AWS, Amazon's cloud division, confirmed that two of its facilities in the UAE “were directly struck”, while in Bahrain a drone strike near one of its sites damaged its infrastructure.
Following the disruption, the UAE Central Bank allowed Emirati lenders “temporary relief” to host some data outside the country to avoid the fallout of Iranian attacks, the UAE Banks Federation chairman, Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, said in May. Under regulations, the UAE Central Bank requires all financial institutions to keep customer and transaction data within the Emirates. Inci Kaya, senior research manager at International Data Corporation (IDC), said: “Banks are accountable not just for their own systems, but also for the vendors and platforms they rely on … especially when we consider the rising expectations around resilience-by-design, governed execution of AI systems, and strategies aimed at third-party concentration risk.”
Technology failures have also hit lenders for more conventional reasons. Last month, ADCB, the third-largest lender in the UAE by assets, suffered intermittent outages to its services. On July 6, ADCB said its mobile app was back to normal operation for most customers after a week of technical disruption. The lender’s core systems, branches, ATMs, card networks and payment operations absorbed heavy transaction volumes despite the intermittent downtime. Its corporate banking channels remained fully operational throughout that period, the lender said at the time.
The scale of its digital customer base shows what can be at stake during an outage. Some 1.9 million customers, representing about 93 per cent of the bank's customer base, were registered across ADCB’s mobile and internet banking platforms at the end of 2025. Over 1.5 million users have already migrated to ADCB’s new AI-powered app, according to the bank's data. Sean Langton, chief information officer at ADCB, said: “As digital banking continues to evolve, resilience is becoming as important as innovation.” He said ADCB plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next two to three years to bolster stability, and that “These investments are strengthening our core infrastructure, expanding cloud and AI capabilities.”
Banks and payment networks globally also face outages. Mastercard has suffered two disruptions this year, including an outage last weekend linked to a system upgrade, while a technical glitch in Russia's interbank networks in April temporarily disrupted services at several major lenders. Sujit Krishnan Unni, group chief technology officer at Network International, said: “No system is failure-proof, so we don't build as though ours are.” He said the company is engineering resilience into “every layer of our technology, from infrastructure and applications to change management and monitoring”, and that “Automation is also playing a growing role, helping us identify and fix issues before they affect customers.”
Industry executives said the answer is not for banks to retreat from AI or digitalisation, but to make resilience keep pace with innovation. Unni said: “A system that isn't resilient can't deliver value consistently, and a system that doesn't adapt to customer expectations isn't delivering the right value in the first place.” IDC's Kaya said financial institutions that prioritise investments in AI-enabled customer engagement and personalisation engines are seeking to improve service quality, deepen customer relationships and increase loyalty. She said security and risk management outrank customer experience among their priorities, but that it would not be fair to characterise the industry's adoption of technology as “reckless deployment”. She said the global shift in technology strategies is moving away from efficiency alone towards continuity, redundancy and risk absorption. “Banks must be ready to demonstrate their ability to restore critical services within defined impact tolerances,” she said. “They are aware that they are subject to fines and remediation orders, and that they can incur reputational damages if they fail.”