Etisalat UAE and DataRobot Expand Partnership to Scale Agentic AI

Etisalat UAE,  the flagship telecom arm of Etisalat, and DataRobot  announced the extension of their strategic partnership through a new multi-year agreement focused on building, operating, and governing an agentic AI workforce across Etisalat UAE’s business units.

The agreement builds on Etisalat UAE’s wider ambition to scale AI within a secure environment, while strengthening the governance and enterprise capabilities needed as AI moves from generating insights towards taking action. Under the expanded partnership, Etisalat UAE will leverage the DataRobot Agent Workforce Platform capabilities as part of its broader sovereign AI ecosystem to develop, deploy, and govern selected agentic AI workloads. The environment brings predictive, generative and agentic AI capabilities together under a common governance framework. By keeping sensitive data and AI workloads within its self-managed infrastructure, Etisalat UAE retains control over where its AI runs, the data it can access, and how it is governed, supporting its approach to AI sovereignty on-premises as agentic capabilities expand across the organisation.

“Etisalat UAE’s partnership with DataRobot has strengthened the governance of our growing Machine Learning portfolio while significantly increasing our agility, enabling our teams to develop and deliver models faster and empowering data scientists and business users through our Citizen Data Scientist Program. We are now building on this foundation to embrace agentic AI, accelerating innovation while maintaining the trust and governance required at enterprise scale.”

– Antonietta Mastroianni, Chief Information Officer, Etisalat UAE

“Etisalat UAE is showing what enterprise AI looks like when innovation, sovereignty and governance are designed together. They have already built the foundation and are now applying that same discipline to AI agents. The opportunity is no longer simply to build agents, but to put them safely into real business processes at scale.”

– Haissam Hassan, META GM, DataRobot

Since 2022, Etisalat UAE and DataRobot have worked together to scale AI from early predictive applications across customer value management, including churn prevention, upsell and cross-sell targeting, and credit risk optimisation, towards broader enterprise adoption. Alongside these use cases, the partnership has supported the development of the internal expertise and governance needed to operationalise AI at scale.

“Our secure ML platform has created a strong foundation for enterprise machine learning. As we move into agentic AI, we are extending the governance, security and operational disciplines we have established into a broader AI ecosystem designed to build and scale agents safely.”

– Morad Al Shark, Director/AI Engineering & Factory, Etisalat UAE

Building on this foundation, Etisalat UAE is also embedding AI expertise directly within its business units, enabling the teams closer to customer, commercial, and operational challenges to take use cases from idea to production. Supported by departmental AI champions and a governed enterprise sandbox for prototyping, this distributed operating model is helping the company scale agentic AI across customer experience, regulatory compliance, sales effectiveness, and operational efficiency.