Middle East and African Banks Shift Focus to AI Governance Over Adoption

Banks across the United Arab Emirates and the wider Middle East and Africa have moved beyond experimenting with artificial intelligence to prioritise robust AI governance. In the UAE, the Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications Office released a guide on generative AI, signalling regulatory intent to oversee AI models used for decisions, risk assessment, and customer outcomes. The guidance calls for a model inventory, risk classification, independent validation, continuous monitoring and clear board‑level accountability, warning that unchecked model drift or hallucinations could cause cascading failures.

The Evident Insights 2026 AI Index for Banks benchmarked 25 institutions in the region, showing that South African banks rank highly on talent depth, leadership commitment and innovation pipelines. The index highlights five key considerations for turning AI capability into lasting enterprise value: treating AI as a people strategy, defining clear strategic value, analysing and disclosing risks such as model sovereignty, establishing explicit governance responsibilities, and sequencing projects to focus first on internal efficiencies like fraud detection and AML before customer‑facing chatbots.

Both pieces stress that the competitive advantage will stem from the ability to demonstrate transparent, accountable AI decision‑making rather than the sheer number of models deployed.