Something important happened in the Gulf over the past month that most business leaders have not yet registered.
The Central Bank of the UAE granted approval to Mal, an AI-native Islamic digital bank, making the UAE what Mal describes as the first market globally to grant in-principle regulatory approval to an AI-native digital banking platform. Around the same time, Visa confirmed that its Agentic Ready programme, the global framework that certifies banks to handle payments initiated by AI, is live and expanding, with a UAE pilot already running through Aldar, where AI agents pay recurring real estate service charges on behalf of customers without any human involvement.
The message is clear. The GCC is not watching agentic commerce develop elsewhere and planning to catch up. It is building the infrastructure now. The regulatory approvals, the certification frameworks, and the capital are all moving here, faster than in most developed markets.
What is not keeping pace is the enterprise back end. The systems inside large organisations that will actually receive, process, and reconcile AI-initiated transactions. That is the blind spot, and it matters enormously.
The GCC ICT market is forecast to grow from $139 billion in 2025 to $242 billion by 2031, driven by government mandates across the UAE and Saudi Arabia that treat digital infrastructure as a national priority. With over 70 percent of retail transactions already cashless, Saudi Arabia is targeting a fully cashless economy by 2030. The Kingdom’s National Strategy for Data and Artificial Intelligence has committed $20 billion in AI investment toward that same deadline. The ambition is not in doubt. But ambition at the front end does not automatically fix the problems at the back end.
The IMF noted in April 2026 that agentic AI systems can interpret objectives, plan multistep actions, and interact with digital services with limited human intervention, shifting payments from human instructions to agent-driven decisions. For GCC enterprises, that shift reaches into every layer of their operations. Order management systems were built assuming a named human being sits behind every purchase. Reconciliation tools were designed to match transactions to individual approval events. Finance platforms model creditworthiness and disputes around the behaviour of a person.
Remove the human from the transaction, which is exactly what agentic commerce does, and those systems struggle.
An AI agent does not respond to a payment confirmation email. It does not have a purchase order number in the way a procurement team does. It moves at machine speed and generates transaction data that looks nothing like normal human purchasing, often high frequency, sometimes very low value, sometimes running as multiple agent instances for the same company at the same time. The existing back end was not built for any of that.
The GCC e-commerce market was valued at $584.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach over $2 trillion by 2034. That growth was projected on the basis of human-led digital commerce. Agentic transactions will not simply add volume. They will change the character of every transaction flowing through the region’s commercial infrastructure. The organisations running that infrastructure need to start treating it differently.
McKinsey projects that agentic commerce will orchestrate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global retail spend by 2030. A significant share of that will flow through GCC commercial systems. The conglomerates, banks, telecoms groups, and real estate developers handling those transactions are running order-to-cash operations engineered for an earlier era. Rebuilding them is not a software upgrade. It is an architectural decision, one that requires redesigning how orders are authenticated, how payments are matched and reconciled, and how identity and authorisation are managed when an AI agent, not a person, is the one spending.
The GCC has proven it can move from regulatory intention to live infrastructure faster than almost any other region in the world. The UAE licensed an AI-native bank. Saudi Arabia committed $20 billion to AI. Visa is running live autonomous payment pilots in Abu Dhabi. The runway is real.
But runways are only useful if what lands on them is ready to operate. The enterprises that will define what agentic commerce looks like at regional scale are the ones rebuilding their back end now, before the transaction volumes arrive, not after.
The Gulf has ambition. It has regulations. It has the capital. The one thing it still needs is enterprise infrastructure that can actually handle what is coming.
That work starts in the back office, not the boardroom.
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