By: Muhannad Nabulsi: Director, AI Alliances & Partnerships, Schneider Electric 

The Defining Shift of 2025: From Ambition to Execution 

Looking back at 2025 across the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa, one shift stands out: AI progress is no longer defined by  ambition. It is defined by execution. 

The conversations I had this year were fundamentally different. At GITEX, in boardrooms across the Gulf, at workshops in  Istanbul, executives weren’t asking whether AI would transform their operations. They were asking how fast they could move  from pilot to profit. 

The hype cycle has matured. Leaders are comparing deployment strategies, ROI timelines, and scalability models. They’re  designing AI around business outcomes, not algorithms. And they’re confronting harder, structural questions: Can power and  cooling scale sustainably? Can infrastructure keep pace with AI demand? Can ecosystems align fast enough to deliver real  results? 

This is where the convergence of electrification, automation, and digitalization becomes critical. AI doesn’t run on ambition. It  runs on energy infrastructure. The organizations that moved fastest in 2025 understood this. They started with a single profit lever and built backward from impact. They kept humans in the loop, pairing operators and clinicians with AI agents to build  trust and adoption. And they scaled by pattern, not by project, creating replicable frameworks across markets. 

This shift from experimentation to execution separated the AI pioneers from the AI tourists. 

My 2026 Prediction: Ecosystem Orchestration Becomes the Competitive Advantage 

In 2026, the winners won’t be the companies with the best models or the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones who assemble  the strongest ecosystems. 

No single organization can own the full AI value chain. The complexity is too high, the infrastructure demands too great, and the pace of innovation too fast. What we’ll see is a new model of competition: orchestrated ecosystems where energy  technology partners, hyperscalers, system integrators, and domain experts align around shared outcomes. 

The Middle East is positioned for this shift. The region isn’t adopting AI. It’s architecting the next era of intelligent infrastructure,  building with scale, efficiency, and sustainability in mind from day one. From sovereign AI programs to hyperscale data centers  and edge-to-cloud innovation, the building blocks are being assembled. 

At Schneider Electric, we see our role clearly: to be the energy technology partner that helps unlock the full value of these ecosystems. Converging electrification, automation, and digitalization to drive efficiency and sustainability across industries,  businesses, and infrastructure. 

The companies and countries that thrive will move from transactional partnerships to true ecosystem orchestration.  Communities will outperform campaigns. Timing will outperform speed. And scale will reward strong foundations. 

We’re entering an era where ecosystems outperform standalone brilliance.