Dubai AI Festival 2026: Unpacking the State of AI – Watch Now

Live from Dubai AI Festival 2026: Unpacking the State of AI Report

Recorded live from the bustling floor of the Dubai AI Festival 2026, this exclusive podcast episode features Erika Welch, our Co-Founder and Chief Content Officer, diving into the critical trends shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

The discussion serves as a premier showcase for our newly released special publication: The State of AI Report 2026. Serving as the official publication of the Dubai AI Festival, this comprehensive report provides actionable intelligence on global enterprise AI adoption, the rapid evolution of agentic workflows, and the massive shift toward AI-driven digital infrastructure.

This landmark research and the surrounding event are powered by a formidable coalition of industry leaders, including DFINITY, the Dubai AI Festival, Dubai AI Campus, and the DIFC Innovation Hub. Together, these partners are actively cementing Dubai’s position as a premier global hub for AI innovation, capital deployment, and enterprise digital transformation.

Watch the full live podcast episode to hear Erika unpack the data, demystify the hype, and outline exactly what the next 12 months hold for the global AI ecosystem.

Related Report

The State of AI Report 2026 – The Official Publication of Dubai AI Festival 2026

If 2023 was the year of AI awakening and 2024 was the year of acceleration, 2026 is the year of institutional reckoning. The central question facing global business is no longer whether models can generate answers, but whether enterprise architecture, energy grids, and capital allocations can support them at scale. While over 60% of enterprises have deployed or expanded AI tools across core functions and 1 in 6 people globally now interact with generative AI, only a small minority of organizations report more than a 5% impact on EBIT. The bottleneck is no longer raw intelligence, but execution, data integration, and physical capacity. The State of AI 2026 delivers an authoritative, data-backed assessment of this transition. From the $630 billion annual hyperscaler CapEx boom and data center power grids absorbing 8% of all new global electricity capacity by 2030, to the shift from copilots to autonomous agentic systems, this special report outlines where value is accruing—and which institutions are building the substrate for the next decade of intelligence.

Cover of Entrepreneur Middle East, featuring a futuristic AI theme and a figure walking toward a modern skyline.