From 9 to 13 August, Monsha'at and SDAIA ran AI Week as part of Monsha'at's Business Weeks series, at SME support centres in Riyadh, Jeddah, Al Khobar and Madinah, with further events in Abha, Qassim and Jazan. Monsha'at reported more than 40 participating entities and more than 3,900 beneficiaries.
That followed a meeting in the spring between the heads of Monsha'at and SDAIA on AI adoption for SMEs, and the graduation of Monsha'at's first AI incubator cohort in June.
The gap
Interest is not the problem. Global surveys this year suggest that large companies are scaling AI agents quickly while smaller organisations are standing still. In our own conversations with owners, the reason is rarely money. It is the first use case: nobody has time to find it, set it up and check that it works.
A path that fits an owner's week
- Pick one recurring task that costs you hours and has a clear right answer. Quotes, invoice follow-ups, product descriptions, supplier emails.
- Write down what good looks like. Three real examples of the output you want, in Arabic and in English if you sell in both.
- Run it for two weeks with a person checking every output. Count what you had to fix.
- Only then automate the send. And keep approval for anything that spends money or speaks to a customer.
This is the same arc we use with enterprises, compressed for a team of ten. The tools are now cheap and, with always-on agents arriving from every major lab, very capable. The discipline is still the differentiator.