ResearchCollab Technologies, an AI consultancy that helps organisations adopt and govern AI systems, attended the Dubai AI Festival at Dubai World Trade Centre on 26 and 27 October.
The event brought the emirate’s AI ambitions to an international audience. For the consultancy, one area deserves more attention from businesses in the region: making better use of the information they already have.
Chatbots and customer assistants are an obvious starting point for companies exploring AI. Their results are easy to see. Getting useful answers from a company’s own records is a different challenge.
A company might have customer feedback in one system, sales figures in another and market research buried in shared folders. Regulatory paperwork and competitor reports add to the pile. For businesses working in both Arabic and English, there is also the question of dealing with material in different languages. Finding time to go through it all is not easy.
AI can search through these records and pick out details that might otherwise be missed. It can show which complaints keep coming up, highlight information that doesn’t match and point staff back to the documents behind a finding.
For Dubai businesses dealing with overseas customers and different regulatory requirements, having that information to hand could make a real difference.
Imran Chughtai, Founder and CEO of ResearchCollab Technologies, said, “There is real ambition around AI in Dubai, and rightly so. But a chatbot is only as useful as the information behind it. Most organisations don’t have a shortage of data. They have a shortage of time to read it properly.
“The opportunity is to use AI to turn that data into intelligence leaders can trust, with the sources, the audit trail and the human judgement still intact.”
Trust and oversight were also on the agenda at the festival, which covered global AI governance and AI literacy. ResearchCollab Technologies helps organisations introduce AI systems and establish the checks needed in regulated and high-stakes environments.
Automated analysis has its own problems. A summary might give the same weight to a casual blog post and an audited dataset, miss an unusual result or gloss over conflicting evidence. If the original sources cannot be found, there is little opportunity to check how a conclusion was reached.
ResearchCollab Technologies uses source tracking and human review to help catch these problems before findings make their way into board papers.
The consultancy advises businesses to start by looking at a decision they are struggling to make. What information would help? Does the business already have it, buried in reports, customer records or other documents? That is a practical place to test whether AI can make a difference, before investing in a larger project.
About:
ResearchCollab Technologies helps organisations govern AI responsibly and build the autonomous systems that deliver on it. Based in Dubai and London, the consultancy offers a range of services including agentic operations audits, custom agent architecture, AI ethics board setup and digital readiness assessments.
