Muscat – Oman is likely to reap about US$1.3bn per year in economic benefits by 2030 as investments in generative artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow globally and in the GCC region, according to a new report.

The increasingly heated generative AI (GenAI) race has sparked excitement and investments in a technology that has the potential to change the world profoundly. PwC’s Strategy& Middle East expects to see widespread adoption of this technology across the corporate world over the next six to 12 months, along with rapid progress in the field.

Although accurate predictions are difficult at this early stage, Strategy& Middle East’s conservative top-down estimate predicts that by 2030, the GCC region could realise approximately US$9.9 of economic growth for every US$1 invested in GenAI. ‘At that rate, the overall economic impact of GenAI could reach US$23.5bn per year by 2030 in the GCC region,’ Strategy& Middle East said in its report.

GenAI-fuelled improvements in efficiency and effectiveness will likely have the greatest effect in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with annual economic impact of US$12.2bn and US$5.3bn, respectively. Other countries in the region will also benefit, with Qatar gaining US$2.6bn, Kuwait US$1.6bn and Bahrain US$0.6bn annually.

According to the report, the largest affected industry is likely to be media and entertainment, with US$8.5bn of likely economic impact across the GCC region, followed by banking and financial services at US$3.5bn, healthcare at US$3.8bn, and IT and telecommunications at US$2.9bn.

‘Given this expected impact and the accelerating pace of new GenAI advances, executives in the Middle East should seize the opportunity without delay. Companies that merely watch risk falling behind, while their forward-thinking counterparts that adopt GenAI stand on the verge of gaining a significant competitive edge,’ the report said.

Strategy& Middle East noted that GenAI is not just another tech buzzword – it is a revolution set to redefine the business landscape.

It said, ‘Grasping GenAI’s capabilities can catapult organisations ahead, giving early adopters a formidable competitive advantage. Adopting GenAI and building the required underlying capabilities is not a quick or cheap fix. It calls for sustained and long-term investments to drive an enterprise-wide transformation. The race is on, and the prize – a share of a multibillion-dollar market impact in the Middle East – is too significant to be ignored.’

GenAI is more than an advanced chatbot. These large language models (LLMs) trained on extensive textual and, of late, multimodal data, perform a multitude of linguistic tasks, including generation, editing, summarising, translation and classification. More broadly, GenAI is poised to trigger a seismic shift in business, impacting functions from sales and marketing to customer service and compliance.

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