The recent announcement that ‘golden visas’, or ten-year residencies, will be granted for outstanding tech-talent, along with other reforms that were announced over the past few months, are all positive steps towards growing innovation in Dubai, said Ammar Al Malik, managing director of Dubai Internet City (DIC) and the head of the in5 incubator programme.

Speaking to Arabian Business during GITEX, Al Malik said they chose to focus their participation in the tech exhibition this year on the vital role technology played in getting the country through the pandemic. He also addressed the impact coronavirus has had on digital adoption in the region.

In a wide-reaching interview, Ammar also spoke about Innovation Hub, the business park within the Dubai Internet City Freezone, being the beacon for tech and innovation development in the region.

What innovations will we be seeing come out of Dubai in 2021?

It’s very hard to speculate which particular innovations will come out but we are already seeing the ball running in that direction.

The reason I’m saying this is that the momentum has carried on despite the pandemic. Mergers are happening, companies are growing and investments are happening at rapid speed. The merger between OLX Group, owners of Dubizzle, and Dubai-based Emerging Markets Property Group happened in June, during coronavirus, for example.

This didn’t stop during this time so I expect this momentum to continue. In fact, what could happen is that investment companies or family businesses who were in a particular revenue base will invest more in technology now than they did before coronavirus because they realise there are opportunities in the technology field.

We’ve been noticing something that’s been happening for the last two years and that’s how companies are building their own innovation centres. So innovation centres are starting to come out of Dubai Internet City as well and they are no longer just offices to operate in.

I know of certain cases where people fly in R&D talent or engineers in order to develop certain products from Dubai that will go on sale in some other part of the world. This indicates that we are slowly evolving and we are happy to see it going down that road.

I think, generally, cybersecurity, e-commerce and cloud computing will continue to become important. There are other parts, like artificial intelligence and blockchain, which are also in the picture, but these are more long-term although they are coming for sure.

What is in the pipeline from Dubai Internet City specifically?

Dubai Internet City has been growing and we expect ourselves to continue to see growth in technology, mainly because technology is no longer a choice. So I do expect Dubai Internet City to continue to play its role as a regional hub for technology and innovation.

Our priority is to attract talent. We focus on talent because they are the ones who innovate.

Today, we have approximately 25,000 people in technology alone at Dubai Internet City. Once our new project, Innovation Hub, is completed, we are expecting this number to go up to roughly 40,000.

We just handed over Phase One, which is 400,000 square feet, so it is already operational and in high demand. The rest of the phases are expected to be completed in anywhere between five to seven years.

There are certain rules that recently came into the picture, one of which is the golden visa for certain technology-related careers, that are very positive and bullish for technology in general and Dubai Internet City.

Can you expand on the role of these rules and reforms in attracting talent to Dubai?

You have the Golden Visa initiative that is very, very important. You have the foreign ownership law which is also very important because it allows companies from outside to invest in Dubai. This will add value to our tech ecosystem whether they set up office in Dubai Internet City or not.

There are also the growth markets that NASDAQ was opening up to allow more start-ups to come in and allowing the companies to actually get more money in which is also very important.

Also, we have universities in the UAE that have been set-up specifically for technology. Here, you’re supporting talent and feeding in entrepreneurs to the ecosystem through universities.

When you put them all together, collectively, they are significant for the industries that are based on the knowledge economy and attracting talent.

All of these are generally good things that we see changing and will have a good effect Inshallah in 2021.

How did the coronavirus pandemic impact the adoption of technology for UAE corporations?

Digital transformation is no longer a choice; you have to have a presence online on every single channel available to your customers and be accessible anytime, anywhere.

The Covid-19 situation put huge pressure on this and, all of a sudden, what was a second or third priority for a company is no longer a choice.

But most companies proved agile and able to transform themselves.

Obviously, the more you adopt technology, the more there are technology risks. Cybersecurity comes with this because as soon as we go over to digital transformation, as soon as you provide payments online, security becomes a key issue.

For us, cybersecurity and e-commerce have been on our agenda for many years, even before coronavirus, and they are sectors that we see growing.

So in the long run, going forward, I do anticipate that companies will spend more on digital transformation. There was a report from IDC which estimated that digital transformation currently constitutes roughly 30 percent of a company’s IT budget but I think it is going to be more in the years to come.

You believe this will be the case even as vaccines are rolled out and restrictions are eased?

There are two extremes here. People talk about the ultimate extreme which is where everything is going to be remote and you don’t need to go meet people.

But I think GITEX has shown very clearly that people are hungry for personal relationships and meeting people. Remember that humanity is based upon people and we are very social creatures.

It’s going to be somewhere in the middle where you’re going to be more flexible. If the trend for e-commerce is growing at 300 percent or 400 percent, it might slow down a little but it’s definitely going to continue to develop down that road.