Inception42 announced the launch of Seraj, a new enterprise AI model purpose-built to advance Arabic-language AI capabilities for government and enterprise applications. Developed jointly with Microsoft and now available through Compass, Core42’s sovereign AI platform, Seraj combines frontier AI performance with advanced Arabic language understanding and cultural nuance.
Named after the Arabic word for “light” or “illumination,” Seraj is designed to help enterprises unlock more accurate, context-aware, and scalable Arabic AI applications without compromising performance in English or other languages. Built on GPT-4.1, Seraj addresses a longstanding challenge in enterprise AI adoption across the region: while frontier models have demonstrated strong capabilities in English, many continue to show meaningful gaps in Arabic linguistic precision, dialect comprehension, cultural context, and safety handling. These limitations have constrained deployment across sectors where Arabic fluency, trust, and contextual understanding are essential.
To address this, unlike Arabic-first models built entirely from the ground up, Seraj takes a different architectural approach. Targeted mid-training techniques were applied using curated, high-quality Arabic datasets spanning linguistics, cultural knowledge, safety scenarios, and domain-specific enterprise content resulting in significant enhancement in Arabic performance while preserving the underlying reasoning and multilingual strengths.
Seraj supports a broad range of enterprise use cases, including document understanding, summarisation, translation, question answering, workflow automation, bilingual Arabic-English applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and knowledge-intensive tasks across sectors such as government, education, legal services, Islamic studies, media, and financial services.
Ashish Koshy, CEO of Inception42 said: “Seraj is a gamechanger. Organisations across the region have been forced to choose between global AI capability and meaningful Arabic performance. Seraj changes that equation. From government services and legal analysis to customer engagement and knowledge management, the model is designed to help organisations deploy Arabic AI at scale with confidence.”
Rima Semaan, Director of AI and Enterprise Solutions at Microsoft UAE commented: “Microsoft’s collaboration with Inception42 on Seraj reflects a shared commitment to expanding the real-world impact of AI across the region. AI will create the greatest impact when it can understand and engage people in the languages they use every day. Seraj represents an important step forward in making advanced AI more relevant, accessible, and effective for Arabic-speaking organisations. By combining advanced frontier model capabilities with regionally relevant linguistic and cultural intelligence, Seraj supports the UAE’s broader vision of accelerating responsible AI adoption across governments, enterprises, and critical industries.”
The launch of Seraj reflects growing regional demand for AI systems that can operate effectively in Arabic across complex enterprise environments, particularly in applications where precision, trust, and contextual understanding are critical.
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