Etisalat UAE and DataRobot Expand Partnership to Advance Sovereign Agentic AI
Etisalat UAE and DataRobot have extended their strategic partnership through a new multi-year agreement to develop, deploy and govern agentic AI capabilities across Etisalat UAE’s business units.
The expanded partnership will see Etisalat UAE use the DataRobot Agent Workforce Platform as part of its sovereign AI ecosystem. The initiative aims to help the telecommunications provider move beyond AI-driven insights towards systems capable of taking action within business processes, while maintaining control over data, security and governance.
The platform will be hosted within Etisalat UAE’s own data centre, keeping sensitive data and AI workloads within its self-managed infrastructure. It will bring predictive, generative and agentic AI capabilities under a common governance framework, allowing the company to control where AI workloads run, what data they can access and how they are managed.
Antonietta Mastroianni, Chief Information Officer at Etisalat UAE, said the existing partnership had strengthened governance across the company’s machine learning portfolio while enabling teams to develop and deliver models more quickly.
“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,” Mastroianni said.
“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 General Manager at DataRobot, said the partnership would extend the governance practices established through earlier AI deployments to the use of AI agents in business operations.
“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,” Hassan said.
The companies have worked together since 2022, initially focusing on predictive AI applications in customer value management. These included churn prevention, upselling and cross-selling, and credit risk optimisation. The partnership has also supported the development of internal expertise and governance processes to facilitate wider enterprise adoption.
Morad Al Shark, Director of AI Engineering & Factory at Etisalat UAE, said the company’s existing machine learning infrastructure would provide the basis for expanding into agentic AI.
“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,” Al Shark said.
Etisalat UAE is also embedding AI expertise within individual business units, enabling teams to develop and take use cases into production. Departmental AI champions and a governed enterprise sandbox for prototyping are supporting this approach, with planned applications spanning customer experience, regulatory compliance, sales effectiveness and operational efficiency.
The agreement reflects Etisalat UAE’s approach to expanding AI adoption while retaining control over its infrastructure and the governance of increasingly autonomous AI systems.
