Etisalat UAE and DataRobot deepen strategic partnership to advance sovereign agentic AI
New multi-year agreement will expand the development and deployment of governed AI agents across business units; DataRobot Agent Workforce Platform to be hosted within Etisalat UAE’s own data centre
BOSTON, October 13, 2026 — Etisalat UAE, the flagship telecom arm of Etisalat, and DataRobot today 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.
Antonietta Mastroianni, Chief Information Officer, Etisalat UAE, said: “Etisalat UAE 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 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.”
Haissam Hassan, META GM at DataRobot, said: “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.”
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.
Morad Al Shark, Director/AI Engineering & Factory, Etisalat UAE, said: “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.”
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.
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About DataRobot
DataRobot empowers AI teams to deliver the agentic workforce of the future. Our platform enables organizations to create and scale AI agents that integrate directly with business processes—driving efficiency, transforming operations, and delivering real results. With built-in governance and safeguards, we help enterprises deploy AI securely and confidently. For more information, visit our website and connect with us on LinkedIn.
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