e& Carrier & Wholesale (CWS) has announced the successful launch of its 5G Standalone (5G SA) network, setting a new standard for global connectivity with advanced roaming capabilities and exclusive Security Edge Protection Proxy (SEPP) integration via its IPX platform.

This achievement positions e& Carrier & Wholesale as the advance provider in the region offering SEPP facilities to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) from its Point of Presence (PoP). The new 5G SA architecture, operating independently of legacy networks, delivers ultra-fast speeds up to 100 times faster than 4G, with unparalleled reliability and ultra-low latency.

By enabling seamless 5G SA roaming across borders, e& Carrier & Wholesale is empowering operators to deliver next-generation applications, from immersive AR and VR experiences to advanced IoT solutions and AI-driven services. The integration of SEPP through the IPX platform ensures secure, trusted connectivity by protecting signalling exchanges between global operators. Successful SEPP-to-SEPP testing with leading partners including TATA Communications highlights e& Carrier & Wholesale’s leadership in driving international collaboration.

Omar Bin Humidan Al Zaabi, Senior Vice President Product & Business Development, e& CWS said: “With this launch, we are reinforcing our position as the global hub for secure and advanced connectivity. Delivering 5G SA roaming with exclusive SEPP support reflects our commitment to enabling seamless, reliable, and secure international services for our global partners. This milestone sets a benchmark for the industry and strengthens the UAE’s role in shaping the future of connectivity.”

This milestone is another in a row continuing its evolution from a regional telecom operator to a global technology powerhouse, these achievements reaffirm its leadership position and dedication to powering digital economies through advanced infrastructure and customer-centric innovation.

e& money today announced the beginning of a bold new era in its journey to reshape digital finance in the UAE, following the approval of a Finance Company license from the Central Bank of the UAE. This milestone marks more than an expansion of services. It signals a shift in ambition from enabling transactions to unlocking financial opportunity.

Over the past years, e& money has transformed how people pay, send, and spend. Today, more than 2 million customers rely on the app for everyday payments, international remittance, and card spending making it one of the UAE’s most inclusive digital payment ecosystems with the highest number of active users in the country. These strong foundations have built scale, trust, and deep data intelligence, positioning e& money to take its next decisive step.

With the Finance Company license, e& money is expanding beyond payments into lending — not as a standalone product, but as an integrated part of a connected financial experience. This move opens new possibilities for individuals who have long been underserved by traditional financial models, and brings credit into the same simple, digital-first environment customers already trust.

This evolution reinforces e& money’s long-term vision of financial inclusion and its ambition to be a true financial superapp — one that supports customers across their full financial journey, from everyday transactions to moments that enable growth, stability, and progress.

At the heart of this new chapter is a data and AI-driven approach to credit. By leveraging real transaction behavior, alternative data, and advanced analytics, e& money has developed an enhanced credit scoring model designed to responsibly extend access to credit to new segments of society, including individuals who may not have previously been eligible for loans.

Khalifa Al Shamsi, CEO of e& life and e& international, said: ““In a digitally advanced economy like the UAE, access to credit is still not a given. While the UAE has achieved near universal financial inclusion, gaps remain when it comes to conventional lending. At e& money, we believe its about facilitating access this is not a risk issue — it’s an access issue. With this next chapter, we are rethinking how credit is assessed and delivered, using data and technology to open doors for people who have long been overlooked.”

Under this new phase, e& money will progressively introduce a range of fit-for-purpose lending solutions, rolled out in stages. These will include buy-now-pay-later offerings, early wage access, credit cards, and other solutions — all designed with transparency, affordability, and strong customer protection at their core.

This expansion strengthens e& money’s role within the broader digital ecosystem of e& and reinforces its position as a catalyst for inclusive growth and digital transformation in the UAE. As e& money enters this new era, its focus remains clear: to make financial services simpler, fairer, and accessible — and to turn everyday financial activity into real opportunity for everyone.

e& Carrier & Wholesale Services (C&WS), the international wholesale arm of global technology group e&, today announced the successful landing and integration of the 2Africa submarine cable system at its carrier neutral SmartHub data centre in the UAE.

Building on the completion of the core 2Africa system announced by the consortium, this milestone brings the cable’s capacity into service locally, strengthening the UAE’s international connectivity infrastructure and reinforcing its position as a global digital hub.

Spanning approximately 45,000 kilometres, 2Africa is the world’s largest submarine cable system, connecting Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and plays a vital role in meeting the region’s rapidly increasing international bandwidth requirements.

Nabil Baccouche, Group Chief Carrier & Wholesale Officer, e&, said: “The successful landing and integration of 2Africa is a strategic achievement that reinforces e&’s role as a trusted global connectivity partner. By bringing this system into service in the UAE, we are strengthening international resilience and enabling our partners and customers to scale with confidence as demand for high-capacity, low-latency connectivity continues to grow.”

The landing of this state-of-the-art subsea cable now enhances network capacity, resilience, and latency performance, supporting the growing demand for data, cloud services, and digital transformation across the UAE and beyond. By diversifying international routes, the 2Africa system ensures more reliable and seamless connectivity for carriers, content providers, enterprises, and consumers.

Global technology group e& is highlighting the dangers of excessive screen use to help families and young people, aged 8 to 19, turn screen time into healthier habits. Following its debut at GITEX 2025, the Addictech initiative will offer parents and young people practical tips and highlight e&’s parental control tools that make day-to-day choices easier. The aim is to make it simple for families to recognise the signs of unhealthy use and build balanced routines that protect both physical and mental health.

Addictech is a collection of conceptual devices that look like the future of mental and physical health technology but act as a wake-up call. It uses the familiar look and feel of tech launches to shine a light on the real impact of social media overuse and screen addiction on children and teenagers. At its core are three eye-catching, thought-provoking devices presented as if they were the latest gadgets. “SpineAlign” points to posture problems caused by long hours looking down at screens. “NeuroGrip” highlights the strain from constant swiping and tapping. “Dopamine Regulator” calls out the mood swings linked to endless scrolling. While the products are intentionally fictional, the dangers they represent are real. The message is clear: if unhealthy habits are addressed early and together, families will not need fixes like these.

Three social films exposing the hidden dangers of excessive screen use: tech hunch, weakened hands, and mental overstimulation can be found at https://www.etisalat.ae/addictech

Fares Hamad Fares, Vice President, Group Digital Marketing, Brand & Communications at e& said: “We hope that “Addictech” strikes a chord because it turns a serious topic into something people can relate to and talk about. We hope families can find useful guidance in minutes and start small changes that add up to better digital wellbeing, while staying connected. This is an ongoing effort to raise awareness, offer tools that genuinely help, and make sure tech-savvy young people have the support they need to navigate today’s screen-heavy world.”

e& UAE, the flagship telecom arm of e& in the UAE, is also giving families practical tools to build safer digital habits. Its Parental Control Service lets parents set limits, filter content, and monitor online activity across devices. This provides a safer, more balanced digital environment for children while helping parents stay actively involved in their online world. TDRA guidance on child online safety emphasises that parents should use parental control applications, teach children to protect their privacy, and have open communication with them.The figures speak for themselves. Adolescents who spend more than four hours a day on non-school screen time face much higher risks to their wellbeing, according to CDC research. Those with heavier use were over twice as likely to report symptoms of anxiety and depression, and were also more prone to poor sleep, low physical activity and weaker social and emotional support, a reminder of how excessive screen use can affect both mental health and daily life. A 2025 BMC study of university students found that anyone using their phone for more than five hours a day was more likely to experience wrist pain and reduced grip strength, especially when scrolling one-handed.

Alongside “Addictech”, children can also take more ownership of their screen habits through other tools that are designed to help teens build healthier digital routines, and Psychology Today notes that they can proactively shape their screen time through shared decision-making, open conversations and mutual respect with parents.

The etisalat.ae/addictech page brings together clear, age-appropriate advice for young people and simple steps that families can put into practice. It also connects to e& parental control features that help set sensible limits, create phone-free zones and make mindful choices that fit each household.

e& enterprise, the digital transformation arm of global technology group e& and Emergence, the US–based leading agentic frontier company, today announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the adoption of next-generation AI solutions across enterprises throughout the MENAT region (Middle East, North Africa and Türkiye). The collaboration aims to help organizations unlock operational efficiencies, faster and more accurate insights, stronger governance, and higher productivity, through the deployment of advanced autonomous AI agents. 

Emergence is widely recognized as a leading agentic AI research lab, founded by some of the world’s most accomplished AI veterans. As part of the partnership, e& enterprise becomes a key distribution and implementation partner for solutions built on the Emergence AI platform. Enterprise clients will gain unprecedented deployment flexibility — from cloud-agnostic installations to fully on-premises, air-gapped environments — supported by white-glove advisory and implementation services. Organizations across MENAT will be able to access the full power of the Emergence platform while retaining complete sovereignty over their data, models, and proprietary workflows, an essential requirement for regulated industries. 

“This partnership marks a pivotal moment in the evolution of enterprise AI across the MENAT region,” said Amit Gupta, VP & Head of Data, AI and Fintech at e& enterprise. “Enterprises are moving quickly to operationalize AI, and they need solutions that deliver real impact—not just experimentation. As AI becomes increasingly agentic, data governance has become one of the most critical enablers of safe, scalable automation. Emergence serves as the intelligence layer that brings built-in governance, observability and controls into every workflow. Our partnership introduces a new class of autonomous AI capability to the region—systems that can automate complex processes, accelerate decision-making, and enforce governance by design while ensuring full data and model sovereignty. This collaboration reflects our commitment to helping customers deploy AI safely, confidently, and at scale.”

“Every organization we work with shares the same challenge: they want to scale AI, but their data and processes are too fragmented and still require constant human oversight,” said Satya Nitta, Co-founder and CEO of Emergence. “Agentic automation changes this by allowing enterprises to finally understand their data and then make use of it far more quickly—saving months of human effort—to drive actionable insights. Our platform creates a unified, intelligent foundation where our autonomous agents can reason, act, and deliver measurable value. Partnering with e& enterprise allows us to bring this capability to organizations across the MENAT region, helping them reduce operational friction, strengthen governance, and deploy agentic systems that drive real competitive advantage."

Powered by Emergence’s Semantic Intelligence platform, agents can automate multi-step processes across systems—spanning use cases such as semiconductor yield analysis, pharmaceutical research, and financial reporting. Using a three-tier framework (Foundation, Intelligence, Transformation), the platform first automates foundational data work (discovery, mapping, unification, and entity resolution), then applies the Intelligence layer to define the concepts, relationships, and rules that deliver deep, contextual understanding. Within the Transformation layer, Emergence’s ACA engine (Agents Creating Agents) builds bespoke agents that automate complex workflows end-to-end, enabling faster decisions, lower manual effort, and rapid time-to-value.

By combining Emergence’s agentic AI platform with e& enterprise’s extensive regional presence and deep enterprise relationships, organizations across MENAT will gain access to forward-deployed AI solutions capable of solving the “last-mile problem” — the complex, business-specific integrations and operational nuances that generic AI products cannot address. 

The announcement comes at a time of rapid AI investment across the region. According to P&S Intelligence, the GCC artificial intelligence market alone is estimated at USD 12.3 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach USD 26.0 billion by 2032, driven by enterprise demand for automation, process optimization, predictive analytics, and faster, more confident decision-making. In the GCC, 19% of organizations have already moved from pilots to full-scale implementation of Agentic AI, with 74% planning adoption.

• Announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the deployment marks e&’s move beyond traditional chatbots to enterprise-grade agentic AI.
• Powered by IBM watsonx Orchestrate, agentic AI is embedded into mission-critical governance and compliance systems across e&.

Global technology group e& and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a strategic collaboration to advance towards an enterprise-grade agentic AI foundation at e&, starting with policy, risk, and compliance. Unveiled at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, the initiative reflects e&’s move beyond traditional natural language processing (NLP)-based chatbots toward governed, action-oriented AI embedded in core enterprise systems.

e& and IBM have introduced an agentic AI solution built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate – a product offering more than 500 tools and customizable, domain-specific agents from IBM and its partners – to help employees and auditors quickly access and interpret legal, regulatory, and compliance information. Integrated with IBM OpenPages and the broader watsonx portfolio, the solution delivers clear, traceable responses aligned with enterprise governance requirements.

A joint proof of concept delivered by IBM, GBM (Gulf Business Machines) and e& within eight weeks demonstrated how agentic AI can operate at enterprise scale under real-world conditions.

IBM’s Client Engineering team led the design and integration of the agentic AI solution, with GBM supporting delivery through project coordination and deep familiarity with e&’s OpenPages and watsonx Assistant environment. The work showcased AI capabilities that move beyond traditional question-and-answer tools, enabling reasoning and action while remaining aligned with e&’s governance, risk, and compliance framework.

“Our ambition is to move beyond isolated AI use cases toward enterprise-scale agentic AI that is trusted, governed, and deeply integrated into how the organization operates,” said Hatem Dowidar, Group CEO, e&. “By collaborating with IBM, we are embedding intelligence directly into our risk and compliance processes, enabling faster decisions, consistent policy interpretation, and a foundation for broader agentic AI adoption across the enterprise.”

IBM watsonx Orchestrate enables agentic AI that goes beyond chat-based interactions, allowing AI agents to reason, orchestrate tasks, and integrate with enterprise systems under governance controls. For e&, it provides a foundation for trusted, explainable AI that can scale across compliance and other enterprise domains. It helps to streamline compliance tasks, reduce response times, and enables 24/7 self-service access across the organization.

The initiative also aligns natively with watsonx.governance, already in use at e&, providing a strong foundation for AI governance, explainability, and compliance by design. By embedding agentic AI directly into the OpenPages governance, risk, and compliance platform, this represents one of the early enterprise-grade agentic AI implementations in the region, demonstrating how AI can support trusted, human-led decision-making under regulatory and operational requirements.

The deployment also demonstrates the flexibility of IBM’s AI and model gateway approach, enabling large language models to run across hybrid environments, including customer-managed infrastructure, while remaining governed under enterprise controls.

“As organizations move from experimenting with AI to embedding it into the fabric of how they operate, governance and accountability become just as important as intelligence,” said Ana Paula Assis, SVP and Chair for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific, IBM. “Through our collaboration with e&, this proof of concept intends to demonstrate how agentic AI can be designed and validated for enterprise-scale use, deeply integrated into core systems, governed by design, and trusted to support human-led decisions and outcomes.”

This collaboration marks an important milestone in e&’s enterprise AI journey, establishing a scalable and governed foundation for agentic AI adoption across the organization. By embedding action-oriented AI directly into core governance and compliance workflows, e& is reinforcing its commitment to responsible innovation and setting a new benchmark for trusted, enterprise-grade agentic AI in the region.

e& enterprise, the digital transformation arm of global technology group e&, today announced a strategic collaboration with Sergas, a UAE-based gas system solutions provider, aimed at transforming the way energy operations are run and protected.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signals a shared push toward smarter systems, stronger cybersecurity, and a better customer experience, all driven by innovation.

At the core of this collaboration is a suite of integrated digital capabilities designed to elevate Sergas’ operational efficiency, security, and customer engagement.

Next-Generation Security Operations Centre (SOC)

Delivered by HELP AG, an e& enterprise company, the SOC will bolster Sergas’ cybersecurity posture with advanced threat detection and rapid incident response. This ensures uninterrupted service delivery, increased operational reliability, and stronger protection for customer data.

EngageX A2P Communications Platform

By consolidating SMS, email, and WhatsApp into a single intelligent messaging hub, Sergas can automate service notifications, send targeted alerts, and personalise communications at scale. Customers will benefit from timely updates on billing, maintenance schedules, service requests, and safety advisories, all delivered through their preferred channels.

AI-Driven Contact Center Platform

The platform brings smarter self-service tools, omnichannel support, and enhanced workforce management. Sergas customers will gain quicker issue resolution, shorter wait times, 24/7 support, and more consistent service quality, whether they reach out through phone, chat, or digital channels.

Majd Coussa, Acting Chief Revenue Officer, e& enterprise, said: “This collaboration equips Sergas with a powerful set of digital capabilities that strengthen every part of their operation—from secure digital payments and enhanced cybersecurity to smarter customer engagement and AI-driven service delivery. It’s about giving them the tools to innovate faster, respond smarter, and deliver greater value to their customers.”

Mohamed Damak, Chief Executive Officer, Sergas Group, said: At Sergas Group, we are witnessing a rapid transformation driven by United Arab of Emirates's supportive investment climate and advanced regulatory framework. Our partnership with e& for Smart Solutions marks a key step in accelerating digital transformation through AI-powered solutions. By optimizing operations and reducing emissions, we’re shaping a smarter, cleaner future for the energy sector.”

The collaboration highlights how energy companies are embracing technology to stay ahead in a changing industry. With cybersecurity and data intelligence at its core, the partnership enables Sergas to optimise performance, enhance reliability, reduce emissions, and elevate the customer experience through the latest technologies.

e& UAE, the flagship telecommunications arm of global technology group e&, inked a landmark agreement with Al Rayan Investments to deliver high-speed managed Wi-Fi services connecting more than 42,000 residents across two of Abu Dhabi’s largest workforce and humanitarian communities, the Construction Workers Residential City (CWRC) Labor Camp and the Moon Flower Humanitarian City.

Under the agreement, e& UAE will design, deploy, and operate a high-speed, fully managed Wi-Fi network that provides high-quality internet, reliable coverage, secure access, and centralised performance management across both communities. The service will enable thousands of workers and displaced individuals to stay connected with their families, access digital services, and participate more fully in community life.

The MoU signing was attended by senior management from both e& and Al Rayan Investments who have played a key role in the implementation of the project, mainly Sultan Al Dhaheri, General Manager of e& UAE in Abu Dhabi, Saeed Al Yabhouni, CEO of Al Rayan Investments, Nader Nasseem General Manager, CWRC Labor Camp and Abdullah Al Ali Director of Operations, Moonflower Humanitarian City.

Sultan Al Dhaheri, General Manager of e& UAE in Abu Dhabi, said: “Connectivity is a fundamental right in today’s world, and every connection we build should make life a little easier for someone. Our work with Al Rayan Investment helps extend access to communities that need it most, connecting everyone and keeping people close to what matters: their families, their work, and their community. Through this partnership, we’re making sure that technology serves people first, advancing the UAE’s vision for inclusive, connected living.”

Saeed Al Yabhouni, CEO of Al Rayan Investments, said: “Real estate is ultimately about people and communities, not properties. And beyond housing, building strong communities is about giving people the means to connect and belong. This partnership with e& UAE ensures that the communities we build are connected, giving every resident the chance to stay in touch with their families, access information easily, and feel part of a larger community.”

This initiative is part of e& UAE’s continuous investment in intelligent connectivity services and next-generation network management solutions to ensure technology uplifts every community it reaches. It stems from the shared commitment of two leading national brands to make digital access universal, empowering people regardless of circumstance to participate in the country’s connected future. In line with the “We the UAE 2031” vision, which places people at the heart of sustainable development, this partnership is set to advance national goals in digital transformation, inclusion, and wellbeing, positioning Abu Dhabi as a model for connected, compassionate urban living.