Back in February, our team was in Dubai for the 11th Middle East Banking AI and Analytics Summit 2026, where credit, risk and technology leaders from across the GCC came together to address a clear shift. AI in banking is moving out of experimentation and into core decision-making.

The Galytix team at the 11th Middle East Banking AI and Analytics Summit 2026, Dubai.

The Galytix team at the 11th Middle East Banking AI and Analytics Summit 2026, Dubai. What stood out immediately was the clarity in the room. This is a region entering a structural growth cycle, with more than $100B in incremental lending opportunity expected by 2030. But as portfolios scale, so does sensitivity to macroeconomic and geopolitical shocks. The conversation has moved beyond adoption. Leaders are now focused on execution. How do you scale AI across portfolios? How do you embed it into underwriting and monitoring? How do you move faster without weakening risk discipline?

AI is no longer just an innovation layer. Raj Abrol, Co-Founder & CEO, Galytix It is becoming part of core credit infrastructure. Our CEO Raj Abrol took the stage to address this shift, focusing on the next phase of SME and corporate credit decisioning. The message was straightforward. Generic AI cannot solve credit. Credit is a domain problem, shaped by fragmented workflows across origination, underwriting and monitoring. Solving it requires specialised intelligence grounded in structured financial data and built for real operating environments.

Raj Abrol, Co-Founder & CEO, Galytix

Watch the full video of Raj’s keynote to see how this plays out in practice.

As conversations progressed, one pressure point became clear. In a world of faster-moving macro signals, what breaks first is monitoring. Traditional CPM approaches, built around periodic reviews and lagging indicators, are increasingly misaligned with how risk actually emerges today.

Three realities consistently emerged from both the stage and conversations on the ground:

• Generic LLMs lack the depth required for real credit risk analysis

• The credit lifecycle remains operationally fragmented across teams and systems

• Measurable impact comes from connecting decisioning across the full credit chain

Across discussions with CEOs, CROs, Heads of AI, and credit leaders, one theme stood out strongly. Alignment. AI is no longer a side initiative. There is clear buy-in across boards, risk functions and business teams. That alignment is accelerating execution and shifting the focus toward ROI-driven deployment from day one.

At our booth, we demonstrated CreditX, our production-ready Agentic AI platform already live at 30+ banks. The conversations were grounded and practical. Institutions are not looking for pilots. They are looking for systems that can deliver faster insights, improve risk visibility, and strengthen ongoing portfolio monitoring within existing workflows.

The summit reinforced a clear direction. The future of credit in the GCC will be defined by institutions that operationalise AI with discipline. Not as an overlay, but as embedded intelligence that supports decision-making at every stage of the credit lifecycle.

As volatility increases, monitoring can no longer rely on periodic reviews. Risk-specialised AI is already giving early adopters weeks, sometimes months of lead time on credit deterioration that used to arrive as quarterly surprises. The question is no longer whether this is possible. It is whether institutions are ready to act on it.

The opportunity ahead is significant. The institutions that move early, and build for speed as much as scale, will define the next generation of high-performance banking in the region.