👋 Welcome back,
Businesses in Saudi Arabia are doing AI right. Nine in ten have met or exceeded their target ROI from AI investments, according to a new survey. Yet there's still strong distrust in machine decision making.
💰 Meanwhile, that transformative agent you've been building could help you retire young, thanks to Dubai.
Read about it all and more in this week’s edition of Velocity.
AI news ACROSS THE GULF
1. AI met or exceeded ROI for 90% of KSA companies: So says the latest Riverbed Global Survey on The State of Autonomous IT Operations. Interestingly, 77% report internal hesitation to let AI make decisions without human approval. Will AI-supported human decision making be the sweet spot for companies? Or will we learn to trust future models?
2. Dubai is offering a $680,000 prize to build agents: It’s part of the Create AI Agents Championship that’s designed to speed up commercial AI adoption in the emirate. Participants will be asked to identify and fix real-world problems, or commercialise promising concepts, using autonomous systems. They’ll also get access to training and mentorship programmes outside the prize money. Act soon: entries close December 2026.
3. Abu Dhabi AI models capture Arabic via voice-to-text: The Technology Innovation Institute (TII)’s three new models will bring Emirati language capabilities to developers and users. The models will understand the dialect’s specific expressions and and cultural context, strengthening Arabic usage in AI while supporting the wider interaction with AI tools.
WHAT HAPPENED WORLDWIDE
1. UK Government to curb tech firm non-compete clauses: The clauses, which are common among tech and finance firms, can provide a barrier to hiring new staff and as a result, slow down growth and innovation. Good to know: the change matters if you’re Gulf-based but work for a company headquartered in the UK.
2. Prepare for Anthropic’s updated usage policy on November 12: If you ship Claude, you’ve got less than one month to re-read its Usage Policy. The new regulations cover output related to deceptive campaigns, elections, surveillance, law enforcement, Claude-connected hardware, and more.
3. 132 of 134 models gave advice to researchers posing as terrorists: Testing from London-based researchers Tech Against Terrorism found that safety measures among models could be bypassed within three days. The team prompted their way to guidance on launching a mass casualty attack and building deadly weapons. It’s another sign that AI safeguards need to do more to govern the capabilities of models.
top AI JOBS
In-demand AI jobs live on bravou.io this week
🇸🇦 Senior Consultant, Program Management - AI Infrastructure Services, Dell 📍 KSA
🇸🇦 Senior AI Engineer Consultant, Devoteam 📍 Riyadh
🇶🇦 AI / ML Engineer, Accenture 📍 Doha
🇦🇪 Staff Data Scientist, Rakbank 📍 Dubai
🇦🇪 Agentic AI Agent, Mondia 📍 Dubai
THE debate
Has it happened to you? Months of trawling job boards, dozens of resumes sent, hours of interviews held before finally, you land that ideal role. By day 30, you realise the job isn’t what was promised.
It’s not unusual for a job description to mislead. That's especially true for AI engineering roles, which evolve near-weekly as tools advance and employers rush to keep up.
Good news: you can use the interview process to sniff out a misleading role and avoid a false start.
Our latest insight article presents 35 interview questions you can ask to uncover the reality of an AI engineering role. We also show you the subtle phrases you should spot to understand what the interviewer really means.
channels to follow
🕸️ Wamda, Entrepreneurship ecosystem: If you’re a Gulf-based job seeker or employer in tech, Wamda is a must. Events, intelligence, grants, and the Wamda Capital investment vehicle all help fuel the region’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.
📖 Import AI, Substack: From Jack Clark, an Anthropic co-founder, this Substack gives a dense view of research and regulation across the AI space. A good choice for keeping up with tech advancements and understanding their big-picture implications.
🤖 Learn Prompting, Discord: If you’re an AI newbie, here’s a great place to start. The Discord community is home to 40,000+ prompt engineers and AI enthusiasts offering insight, courses, hackathons and more to help you learn.
THE FINAL WORD
Working through a new project you want to document for future job applications?
Start this new Friday habit and thank yourself later:
- At the end of each week, pick up your phone, go to your AI model of choice and open the dictation function
- Talk about your week: what you did, what the outcome was, what quantifiable results you saw, what didn’t work and how you fixed it, who you helped — anything with a number attached.
- Don’t worry about structuring what you say, just talk openly.
- Keep the output in one running note so everything’s in the same place.
- Then, send the prompt below:
“Turn that into three CV bullets. Each one should name what I did, not what the team did. If a bullet has no number in it, flag it and tell me what I would need to measure to make it quantifiable.”
In a few weeks or months’ time, you’ll have a file of CV-ready evidence you can draw from to build a compelling case study of the value you provide.
💻 Visit Bravou.io for all the latest AI jobs in the Gulf
📚 Check out the Bravou Resources page for more job search guidance and insights