CEO and co-founder of Read AI David Shim
Doha, Qatar: Qatar is emerging as a distinct model for artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, with enterprises and government entities driving implementation from the top down rather than through grassroots experimentation, an official said on the sidelines of Web Summit Qatar 2026.
CEO and co-founder of Read AI David Shim, said that this approach is influencing how global AI companies design, deploy, and localise their products for the market.
He noted that the company’s presence at the summit is focused less on promotion and more on understanding how users in the region engage with AI-powered productivity tools in their daily work.
“The big thing for coming to this market is really understanding how customers are using our product and the data,” Shim told The Peninsula in an interview. “Every market uses AI differently, and we want to learn how meeting note takers and productivity tools fit into day-to-day workflows here.”
He pointed to Read AI’s experience in Brazil as an example of how close market engagement can drive growth. After gaining early traction there a year ago, the company has since become the country’s leading AI meeting note-taking tool.
Shim said similar learning-driven expansion is now underway in the Middle East. US-based productivity startup Read AI is witnessing accelerating adoption across the region, with Qatar emerging as one of its fastest-growing markets.
Rather than expanding through large local teams, Read AI follows organic adoption patterns, entering markets where usage is already growing.
The platform currently supports both Arabic and English, which has helped fuel adoption across the Gulf.
“We’re seeing strong uptake in the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the wider Middle East,” Shim said, highlighting that usage has increased sharply over the past year.
One of the most significant developments supporting this growth is Read AI’s move toward data localisation.
Responding to regional demand, the company recently launched localised data processing capabilities, allowing customer data to be handled within the Middle East rather than in the United States.
“We can now stand up a data centre in the UAE to process meeting notes, audio, and video,” Shim said. “That’s been a major request from customers here.”
Enterprise demand in the region has also stood out for its scale. The executive said inquiries from Middle Eastern customers often come in the form of large, top-down deployments involving hundreds or thousands of licenses, driven by organisation-wide AI initiatives.
“In this region, customers often come to us saying they want 500, 1,000, or even 10,000 licenses,” he said. “That level of demand really shaped our decision to invest in localised infrastructure.”
Alongside large enterprise deals, Read AI is also seeing rapid grassroots adoption. Shim emphasised that in Qatar specifically, the company is recording year-on-year growth of between 500 and 600 percent, driven by individual users and small businesses.
He expounded that Qatar’s enterprise and government adoption model differs from that of the US, where AI tools typically spread from individual employees upward. However, in Qatar, adoption is often mandated from the top.
“That means we have to understand requirements from day one,” the official said, citing security, privacy, and platform compatibility as critical factors.
Shim added that support for Microsoft Teams, the dominant collaboration platform in Qatar and the wider region, is particularly important, alongside enterprise-grade security features such as SAML, single sign-on, and privacy-centric data storage.
