The Core42 marketing chief on why the conversation has moved beyond GPU specifications, what the UAE’s agentic workforce drive signals for the region, and why compute creates capacity while people create an economy.

Authored By: Ashley Rite Senior Vice President, Marketing & Communications, Core42 (A G42 Company)

BB:Core42 sits right at the centre of the UAE’s sovereign AI infrastructure story. From a marketing lens, how do you make something as technical as AI infrastructure resonate beyond a purely technical audience?

AR: No customer wakes up hoping to read a longer GPU specification, and I say that with great affection for the engineers. When we market infrastructure, I rarely lead with the hardware. We start with what it allows people to do. A surgeon receives predictive insight while operating, when it can still affect the decision in front of them. A government employee resolves a resident’s request without chasing information across departments. An engineer sees a problem before a production line stops, and a small business suddenly serves and markets to customers it could never have reached before.

Cloud and AI infrastructure sit behind each of these moments. Most people will never see that layer, but they will feel what it makes possible, and once they care about the moment, the technical story lands with meaning. We can then explain why intelligence has to arrive without delay and why control over data matters. The engineering becomes the proof behind something the audience already wants to believe. That, to me, is good infrastructure marketing: making an invisible layer feel consequential without pretending the engineering is simple.

BB:What’s one campaign or initiative from the past year you’d point to as evidence of where Core42, and the region’s AI infrastructure story more broadly, is actually heading?

AR: The UAE Government’s drive towards an agentic workforce is the clearest signal for me, because it is much bigger than a software rollout. The federal framework aims to move 50% of government services and operations to agentic AI within two years, alongside a programme to train 80,000 federal employees. The interesting part is what happens when agents carry routine work across systems and bring it back at the point where human judgment is needed. That changes the capacity of the individual employee, and at government scale it can change the experience of the resident.

The infrastructure underneath matters because useful agents need access to real institutional data, and that access has to be governed properly. We see both ends of that in practice. Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement is building its AI native government ambition on Core42 Sovereign Public Cloud, while MBZUAI trains frontier models on Core42 Sovereign AI Cloud. The workloads are very different, but the underlying condition is the same: the intelligence has to run where the data can be governed.

A licence on every laptop has never changed anyone’s life, as anyone who has survived a software rollout knows. A public service that suddenly takes half the time might.

BB:Where do you see the biggest gap between how AI is discussed publicly in the region and how it’s actually understood by the businesses and consumers you’re trying to reach?

AR: The public debate is usually about capability, while adoption is about behaviour. The industry asks what the latest model can do, but a business has to ask whether its people will trust it with real work. Too many companies still buy the tool, run the training and wait for the magic. Most of us know how that movie ends.

Agents make this more urgent because they do not simply answer a question and stop; they carry work across systems. Leaders have to decide where an agent’s authority ends and where human accountability begins. That is an operating decision, not a communications campaign.

Consumers are even more direct. They care most about whether the experience works and whether they can trust it. Communications cannot manufacture that trust, but it can make the change easier to understand. Trust is earned when the technology removes friction without asking everyone to become an AI enthusiast first.

BB: Having built marketing functions across different sectors, from OSN to Core42, what’s a lesson about brand building in this region that you think other marketing leaders underestimate?

AR: The pace here can fool you. A full calendar and a run of big launches can look a lot like a clear brand position from the inside, and I say that as someone who still enjoys a good launch deck. A brand becomes real when people can explain what you stand for without checking your website. That only happens when the experience keeps supporting the story after the campaign has ended.

Audiences here are optimistic about the future, but they are also difficult to impress with language alone. They have heard every version of “world leading,” usually before breakfast. The answer is a sharper idea that the organisation can keep proving.

In technology, the product vocabulary changes faster than the brand should. Eighteen months ago everyone wanted to talk about generative AI, and now the conversation is agents, sovereign AI and AI factories. If your brand reinvents itself every time the industry discovers a new noun, nobody will know what you stand for. The category has changed completely between OSN and Core42, but the fundamentals remain consistent. Decide what idea you want to own, then make the choices that keep reinforcing it after the novelty has worn off. If the idea disappears when the campaign ends, it was a campaign and never the brand.

BB: Looking at MENA’s technology and innovation sector as a whole, what’s the shift you expect to matter most over the next two to three years?

AR: Over the next few years, AI will stop being treated as a tool budget and start becoming a workforce decision. Companies will spend less time asking which model to buy and more time deciding what work should be rebuilt around agents.

MENA has spent years creating the infrastructure for this shift, but the larger opportunity sits with its people. The next advantage will come from attracting, developing and retaining talent that can turn that infrastructure into products, businesses and new ways of working. Investment in people will pay off twice: today’s workforce will be able to extend what it can do, while young people grow up already comfortable working with AI.

I see that at home with my two young daughters, who have taken to AI without any ceremony. To them, it is simply another place to go when they are curious or want to make something, and the educational system here has allowed for this mindset. Their generation will not spend years debating whether AI belongs in their lives. They will assume it does and get on with using it. That ease still needs to be matched with judgment, which is why education and workforce investment matter so much.

Compute can be bought, but a population that knows how to use it with imagination takes longer to build. Compute creates capacity, but people turn it into an economy.