Etisalat UAE and DataRobot announced the extension of their partnership through a new multi-year agreement. The agreement is focussed on operating, building, and governing the telecom giant’s agentic AI workforce across its multiple business units.
With this extension, Etisalat UAE will also leverage the DataRobot Agent Workforce Platform capabilities as part of its broader sovereign AI ecosystem. This in turn, will help develop, deploy, and govern selected agentic AI workloads.
The agreement builds on Etisalat UAE’s wider ambition to scale AI within a secure environment, while strengthening the governance and enterprise capabilities needed as AI moves from generating insights towards taking action.
Antonietta Mastroianni, Chief Information Officer, Etisalat UAE, said in a press statement shared by the company, “Etisalat UAE’s partnership with DataRobot has strengthened the governance of our growing Machine Learning portfolio while significantly increasing our agility, enabling our teams to develop and deliver models faster and empowering data scientists and business users through our Citizen Data Scientist Program. We are now building on this foundation to embrace agentic AI, accelerating innovation while maintaining the trust and governance required at enterprise scale.”
This brings generative and agentic AI capabilites that are predictive under a common governance framework. Etisalat UAE continues to retain control over where the AI runs, by keeping the data and AI workloads within its self-managed infrastructure. The telecom giant thus can also control data access, its governance, keeping a strong and stage AI sovereignty on-premise, even as agentic capabilities expand.
A partnership that began in 2022, Etisalat UAE and DataRobot have since been working together to scale AI from early applications towards broader enterprise adoption across customer value management, upsell and cross-sell targeting, credit risk optimisation, and even churn prevention. Along with these existing use cases, this extended partnership has supported the development of the internal expertise and governance needed to operationalise AI at scale.
Haissam Hassan, META GM at DataRobot, said in the press statement, “Etisalat UAE is showing what enterprise AI looks like when innovation, sovereignty and governance are designed together. They have already built the foundation and are now applying that same discipline to AI agents. The opportunity is no longer simply to build agents, but to put them safely into real business processes at scale.”
Etisalat UAE will also be embedding AI expertise directly within its business units, enabling the teams closer to customer, commercial, and operational challenges to take use cases from idea to production. Supported by departmental AI champions and a governed enterprise sandbox for prototyping, this distributed operating model is helping the company scale agentic AI across customer experience, regulatory compliance, sales effectiveness, and operational efficiency.
Morad Al Shark, Director/AI Engineering & Factory, Etisalat UAE, said: “Our secure ML platform has created a strong foundation for enterprise machine learning. As we move into agentic AI, we are extending the governance, security and operational disciplines we have established into a broader AI ecosystem designed to build and scale agents safely.”
