By Amira Kamel, Regional Strategy and Marketing Lead for Henkel Adhesive Technologies (HAT) IMEA.
The world is not what it once was. In Abu Dhabi last week, the UAE government unveiled AED180 billion in industrial procurement opportunities with more than 5,000 products to be localised across sectors over the coming decade. A few days earlier, the GCC Secretary-General described regional industrial integration as entering an “unprecedented recovery” phase, with a Made in the GCC Forum scheduled for October. Two announcements, days apart, pointing in the same direction.
For decades, the operating principle of multinational business was standardisation. Build the product once, ship it globally. The assumption underneath was simple: markets would converge, and scale would win. The announcements out of the Gulf this week are part of a broader signal that the era of globalisation is shifting in favour of regional resilience. The change across IMEA markets is clear. Saudi Arabia is using Vision 2030 to hardwire localisation into industrial growth. India’s Production Linked Incentive scheme is redirecting investment into strategic sectors, while the African Continental Free Trade Area is beginning to reshape the logic of scale across the continent.
The GCC sits at the centre of this shift as a hub for industrial growth, talent density, and cross-border capital. The strategic question is no longer whether to localise. It is what replaces standardisation as the operating model once you do. After two decades of running businesses across functions and geographies, my answer is integration: integration across customer sectors, across business functions, across cultures, and increasingly, across human and machine intelligence. The companies that will succeed in the next decade are the ones willing to dismantle the traditional boundaries that define corporate silos.
The same logic applies inside the company. My own career has moved across marketing, sales, strategy, and operations, and each one teaches a different discipline. Marketing teaches you to read market trends. Sales keeps you honest about customer realities. Strategy forces you to make choices. Operations demonstrates that execution is how ambition is realised. When those perspectives sit in one room, organisations become faster and more useful to their customers. They see around corners. They solve problems that cannot be addressed from any single discipline. In a region as varied as IMEA, this is an essential growth requirement.
The cultural layer matters just as much. In the Middle East, diversity is a business reality before it is a corporate value. You cannot credibly serve numerous markets from a single cultural vantage point. A team that genuinely reflects the markets it works in hears different things in customer conversations, anticipates different objections, and surfaces opportunities that a homogeneous team might miss. The argument for inclusive, locally rooted leadership stems from customers buying from people who understand the needs of our diverse markets.
The newest layer of integration is between human judgement and machine intelligence. AI will not replace the sales leader who earns trust through human connection, or the operations team that anticipates a supply chain risk before it crystallises. Pattern recognition across thousands of past customer interactions, predictive maintenance signals, and multi-market indicators are shaping the modern competitive edge. The companies treating AI literacy as a leadership competency are pulling ahead. The leader’s job description today includes a skill that did not exist five years ago, which is knowing exactly what to delegate to a model and what to keep in the room.
The GCC is the natural launchpad for this integrated operating model with active regulatory support for favourable business conditions and a talent density across nationalities that is higher here than almost anywhere in the world. We see this in the UAE’s positioning as a cross-border services and AI hub, alongside the deliberate cultivation of innovation infrastructure across Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai. An operating model built here has a credible path to the wider IMEA region and its markets. The reverse is rarely true.
For Henkel, this ability to adapt is part of its global legacy. As we mark 150 years of purposeful innovation this year, it is a reminder that enduring companies stay relevant by evolving with the markets they serve, remaining close to customers, and turning innovation into practical impact. In the GCC, that means building on the region’s momentum as a centre for industrial ambition, sustainability, innovation, and talent, while using it as a platform to support customers across the Middle East and Africa. The future of multinational business in this region will be built through the integration of expertise, cultures, functions, technologies, and deep local market understanding.
