Eslam Kandil, MEA Telco Account Director at Intel, sat down with CNME Editor Mark Forker for a frank discussion on the company’s new collaboration and partnership with e& enterprise, designed to empower enterprises across the Middle East to deploy GenAI faster, cheaper and within regional rules.
How do you see your organization contributing to the region’s bold and ambitious national digital economy agendas, and where do you believe private–public collaboration will be most critical in achieving these ambitions?
National AI strategies across the Middle East and Africa are bold and forward-looking, yet they face the same practical challenges seen worldwide—cost, compliance, and time to value. At Intel, we focus on making AI deployment more efficient and accessible by optimizing smaller, task-specific models that can deliver high performance and low total cost of ownership on Intel® Xeon® processors.
The latest generations of Xeon feature Intel® AMX (Advanced Matrix Extensions)—a built-in accelerator that significantly boosts AI inference performance directly on the CPU. This allows enterprises to run AI workloads without requiring specialized hardware, simplifying deployment and scaling across environments like AWS Marketplace, where these capabilities are readily available.
Through our partnership with e& enterprise, we combine Intel’s technology leadership with local delivery and governance expertise. Together, we help organizations in sectors such as healthcare and finance move from pilot to production within weeks, while meeting national requirements for data residency, compliance, and security.
Public–private collaboration remains essential in realizing these national digital economy agendas. Intel provides the technology foundation and ecosystem enablement, while regional partners ensure that innovation is delivered responsibly, securely, and at scale.
As emerging technologies such as Gen AI and Agentic AI continue to reshape industries, how do you strike the right balance between rapid adoption for competitive advantage and ensuring resilience, security, and regulatory alignment?
That balance is exactly what our SLM-in-a-Box solution is designed to achieve. Many organizations are eager to adopt AI rapidly but face rising costs, compliance hurdles, and operational complexity. By leveraging pre-deployed Small Language Models (SLMs) optimized for Intel® Xeon® processors and scalable through the cloud, we help enterprises move from experimentation to production efficiently and securely.
With Agentic AI, the future isn’t about relying on a single, massive model—it’s about orchestrating multiple, specialized models that work together to perform tasks intelligently and autonomously. In fact, running multiple SLMs in coordination often delivers greater flexibility, accuracy, and efficiency than depending on one large, monolithic model. Smaller, domain-specific models are faster, more cost-effective, and easier to align with data governance frameworks. This makes them ideally suited for applications such as summarization, classification, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and enterprise copilots that deliver immediate, measurable business impact.
With SLM-in-a-Box, innovation and resilience go hand in hand. The solution embeds robust data-handling, security, and compliance controls from the start—delivered through our partnership with e& enterprise, a sovereign-ready entity that enables local deployment on AWS’s regional infrastructure. This ensures organizations can scale Agentic AI confidently within national data-residency frameworks—achieving competitive advantage without compromising trust or regulatory alignment.
What role do you believe technology leadership should play in redefining business models and creating new value ecosystems across the Middle East?
Technology leadership today is about turning AI from hype into practical, operational outcomes—helping organizations move beyond pilots and experiments so they can realize real business value. The potential is especially significant in sectors that underpin national economies—government, financial services, healthcare, energy, and telecommunications.
Practical deployment of AI requires scalable, deployable solutions, such as SLM-in-a-Box, which allow enterprises to move from experimentation to production efficiently and securely. In banking, AI assistants can verify documents in minutes, streamlining onboarding and reducing fraud. In healthcare, clinician tools can deliver actionable insights at the point of care, cutting administrative workloads and improving outcomes. In energy and utilities, predictive AI can detect potential failures before they happen, preventing downtime and costly disruptions.
By focusing on solutions like SLM-in-a-Box, technology leaders help organizations reduce cost per task, accelerate time-to-resolution, and improve customer experience. These tangible efficiencies create a foundation for new services, new revenue streams, and new digital ecosystems—turning AI from a buzzword into a practical driver of growth across the Middle East.
Looking ahead, which transformative technologies do you believe will define the region’s global standing over the next decade, and how are you preparing your organization to lead in that shift?
There’s no doubt that AI will be the defining technology shaping how governments, businesses, and citizens operate over the next decade—and we’re already seeing its early impacts today. The Middle East, particularly the GCC countries, is uniquely positioned to become a global AI powerhouse, thanks to proactive government strategies, a young tech-literate population, rapidly expanding digital infrastructure, and speed to market. Governments are setting clear policies, national AI strategies, and regulatory frameworks that create the right environment for innovation, helping organizations adopt AI faster and with confidence.
At Intel, we are committed to powering that transformation by investing in local talent, partners, and platforms. This includes growing hands-on local solution teams, enabling organizations with practical deployment guidance, and expanding our ecosystem through partnerships with e& enterprise and other regional players. We’re also developing region-specific solutions aligned with local policy and compliance requirements.
By enabling organizations to deploy AI faster, more cost-effectively, and in line with national regulations, we help turn strategic government visions into operational reality, driving tangible business outcomes while reinforcing the region’s position as a global technology hub.
