In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, leaders confront a paradox: change is relentless, yet clarity and purpose are more critical than ever. With AI and changing customer behavior transforming every facet of business, the challenge is not merely to keep pace, but to lead decisively.

From fintech and AI to mobility and consumer services, business leaders across the industry navigated this complexity, leading with vision and innovating with intent—focusing efforts, and making decisions that drive the business and the region forward.

We spoke with some of the leaders to uncover the strategies they used to spark growth and fuel innovation.

The comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Amr Kamel, UAE General Manager, Microsoft

Our boldest move in 2025 is our $15.2 billion investment in the UAE. This strategic commitment, alongside our expanded partnership with G42, is contributing to the nation’s rapid progress in AI. By enabling cutting-edge technology, fostering trust through robust digital infrastructure, and nurturing world-class digital talent, this investment is supporting the UAE’s emergence as one of the world’s foremost adopters of AI. 

Ashish Koshy, CEO, Inception

In 2025, the defining step for Inception was putting our 2024 commitment to become a product-first company into full practice, translating our deep R&D heritage into domain-specific and sector-agnostic AI-native products. Powered by authentic intelligence, our solutions moved from research environments into real-world impact across nation-critical industries such as energy, finance, climate, media, procurement, and healthcare. This is the year Inception truly emerged as the core intelligence layer within the G42 ecosystem, enabling our models and agents to deploy at scale across different domains. By embedding AI directly into core operations, we enabled organizations to automate processes, make better decisions, and drive sustainable growth. 

Barry Lewis, CEO, ALEC Holdings

Our boldest decision in 2025 was to list 20 percent of our share capital on the Dubai Financial Market. Although it was the culmination of a strategy we’ve been executing for many years, the process itself was transformative. The rigorous audits, the discipline of long-term roadmapping, and the scrutiny that comes with going public ultimately reinforced the transparency, culture, and innovation on which ALEC Holdings is built. The market’s response was equally affirming, with the IPO oversubscribed more than twenty-one times across all tranches. For us, this wasn’t just a financial milestone, it marked a new chapter. Beyond the immediate financial achievement, the experience reinforced the importance of strategic discipline, careful planning, and long-term vision for sustainable growth.

Ghassan Harfouche, CEO, MCN MENAT

The boldest decision this year was to double down on our role as a true parent company — strengthening the connected model that unifies our agencies and empowers them to deliver integrated client impact at scale. Instead of leaning into a traditional one-size-fits-all model, we reaffirmed strong agency brands that prioritise collaboration, shared accountability, and borderless talent. This decision allowed us to create a framework that enableswhere teams across geographies tocan collaborate seamlessly, share knowledge effectively, and align on strategic priorities. It wasn’t just about structure; it was about embedding a culture of empowerment, creativity, and operational excellence at every level. By doubling down on collaboration and integration, we enhanced client delivery, increased innovation capacity, and positioned our organization to scale responsibly while remaining flexible, adaptable, and responsive to evolving market needs.

Ghassan Kassabji, CEO, Impact BBDO Group Dubai

The marketing industry is under increasing pressure from more data, technology, partners, and short-term demands, making execution more challenging. Innovation today relies less on new tools and more on new ways of working. Against that backdrop, one of the boldest decisions we made as a creative agency was to build a marketing PMO as an enterprise solution for large clients, orchestrating a consortium of Omnicom agencies around a single strategic roadmap. The operating model aligns strategy, brand, communications, customer experience, data, platforms, and execution under a single governance structure and a clear decision framework, designed for greater alignment at enterprise scale. The impact was immediate. Teams moved faster, decisions became clearer, and collaboration improved. For clients, this led to fewer briefings, stronger cross-agency alignment, clearer accountability, and more consistent outcomes across complex initiatives. This decision set the tone for future innovation and efficiency.

Hasan Fardan Al Fardan, CEO, Al Fardan Exchange

Al Fardan Exchange made one of its most visible and defining brand moves in 2025 with the renaming of Al Khail Metro Station to Al Fardan Exchange Metro Station. The long-term agreement with RTA instantly positioned the company at the heart of Dubai’s daily commuter flow, turning a major transit hub into a high-impact touchpoint that thousands pass through every day. With full-station branding, digital visibility, and a presence across one of the city’s busiest corridors, the metro partnership became a physical symbol of Al Fardan Exchange’s continued relevance and the decision reflected not only marketing foresight but also a dedication to long-term brand visibility, integration, and community impact.

Jack Hidary, CEO, SandboxAQ

One of our boldest decisions in 2025 was our move to spend millions of dollars in creating one of the world’s leading AI models for the co-folding of molecules and proteins. While much has been done in the folding of proteins, we took a step further with our SAIR program along with our partner Nvidia. The SAIR dataset and model enables customers to figure out if a new potential drug will fold in the right way to impact a key target in the body. This can be used for new therapeutics in cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other major diseases. We spent this money ahead of customer contracts, but it now is returning many times the investment in new customer agreements and will have a significant impact on treating major illnesses. This decision required courage and strategic foresight, and positions SandboxAQ as a pioneer in leveraging AI to accelerate breakthroughs in medical research and biotechnology.

Jobin Joejoe, Managing Director, Sony Middle East and Africa

One of the boldest decisions we made this year was to anchor our innovation strategy in insights drawn directly from customers in the Middle East. The region’s climate and content demands are distinct, and responding to these realities requires us to rethink how we design and prioritize technologies. This shift allowed us to explore solutions that address practical and high-impact needs. The introduction of the REON Pocket Pro is one example, a wearable cooling and warming device developed in response to the challenges individuals face when working outdoors in extreme temperatures. More importantly, this decision strengthened our relevance in the markets we serve. It enabled faster alignment between consumer needs and product direction, improved adoption across key segments, and reinforced our commitment to delivering technologies that support real-world creative and lifestyle requirements. This demonstrates the power of customer insight to guide innovation.

Michael Lahyani, Founder & CEO of Property Finder

2025 has been a defining year for Property Finder, shaped by major decisions rooted in our shared purpose to change living for good in the region. We welcomed Permira and Blackstone as investors alongside General Atlantic and secured long-term financing from Ares—clear signals of confidence in both our business and the region’s potential. These partnerships strengthen our ability to innovate across our connected platform, invest further in talent, and expand AI-powered tools and experiences that support homeseekers, sellers, agents, and developers. Our collaborations with Stake and Keyper this year also show how smarter ecosystems built on trust, data, and innovation can remove friction and unlock real value for both customers and consumers.

Mohammad A. Baker, Deputy Chairman and CEO, GMG

We took a huge leap forward digitally with our multi-vertical partnership with Amazon to offer additional convenience and cater to a technology-focused era of consumers. Continuing to shape retail in our communities, we brought Sports Direct to the MENA region through our ten-year partnership with Fraser’s Group. From the signing taking place in February to the first store opening in November, we’re beyond proud to deliver quality experiences for our customers at a pace that matches the rapid growth of our markets. 

Mohammed Maktari, CEO, NIO MENA

The boldest decision we made at NIO MENA in 2025 was introducing Power Swap as a foundational proof of concept for the UAE. Our goal was to understand how users respond to solutions that save time and simplify EV ownership. The early adoption we saw confirmed a real appetite for smarter, low-friction ways to live with an electric vehicle. Importantly, exploring Power Swap not only for retail users, but also with limousine fleets and other businesses that rely on rapid battery changeovers to maximize uptime and operational efficiency. This expands the role of Power Swap from a convenience feature to a strategic enabler for high-utilisation mobility services. We also saw a clear shift in what customers value. They are looking for an intuitive ecosystem, not only a polished battery electric vehicle. People want technology that fits naturally into their lifestyle, and this behavior is shaping a strong outlook for NIO in the region. This decision embodies our vision of empowering customers through innovation-led solutions.

Omar Akar, Regional VP, METCA at Pure Storage

One of the boldest business decisions we made this year was to completely rethink how we support our customers in the AI and cloud era. With the launch of our Enterprise Data Cloud, we’re actively encouraging customers to focus on data management instead of storage. It might seem counterintuitive for an infrastructure company, but we made a conscious decision to elevate our focus. It’s fundamentally different from how traditional vendors operate and is generating significant impact for customers across the METCA region. Additionally, our teams have been helping customers to not only deploy AI, but also shape their AI strategy, identify the right, high-impact use cases, and build a strong data foundation, because data is the heartbeat of every successful AI journey. In parallel, we made another bold move: expanding our ecosystem significantly to cover the full AI lifecycle. Together, these decisions reflect a clear shift from being a technology provider to becoming a trusted partner in AI strategy, execution, and value creation.

Otto Williams, SVP, Regional Head and General Manager Middle East and Africa, PayPal

Bold innovation in the Middle East and Africa has always required bold choices, and this past year we demonstrated that through the partnerships we forged. By deepening our collaboration with Ooredoo Fintech, e&, DP World, M-Pesa, and STC we strengthened PayPal’s investment in the region and expanded access to faster, trusted digital financial services. These relationships will help unlock new opportunities for consumers and SMEs including more seamless ways to transact, easier participation in global commerce, and more reliable tools to grow their businesses. Beyond infrastructure, we focused on embedding trust and reliability into every touchpoint, ensuring that the businesses and consumers we serve can fully benefit from digital payments and financial inclusion. 

Raghu Chakravarthi, Chief Technology and Product Officer, Core42

In 2025, one of the boldest decisions we made as an organization was accelerating Core42’s global expansion by executing a series of strategic partnerships that redefined the scale and ambition of our AI infrastructure roadmap. We advanced into Europe through landmark collaborations with AMD in France that strengthened our ability to drive national AI innovation through strategic investments in high-performance compute, while our partnership with Domyn in Italy enabled the deployment of one of Europe’s largest Nvidia Blackwell clusters, establishing a powerful foundation for sovereign AI workloads and supporting a pan-European rollout operated by Core42. In parallel, our entry into the US through a 70MW data center infrastructure agreement with TeraWulf demonstrated our commitment to scaling secure, high-performance AI infrastructure globally. Additionally, we expanded our inferencing capacity through our partnership with Cerebras, delivering the fastest inferencing of open models in the world. Together, these decisions reinforced Core42’s mission to advance sovereign, enterprise-grade AI ecosystems and contributed to the UAE’s ambitions to shape global AI leadership.

Richard Teng, Co-CEO, Binance

2025 has been a remarkable year for Binance and the wider digital assets industry. Across our markets, we have seen meaningful momentum—from new licenses and innovative products to greater access for our 300 million users. This year’s milestones are especially significant, highlighted by the launch of pioneering products like Binance Junior and Binance Alpha, designed to empower users at every level. We also introduced Sharia Earn and became the first exchange to open services to Syrian users. Most recently we secured our global license from the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of ADGM. These achievements provide strong regulatory clarity, deepen trust, and enable us to support our global operations from one of the world’s leading financial centers. 

Tariq Bin Hendi, CEO, botim

In 2025, Astra Tech’s boldest decision was transforming botim from a communications platform into a fintech-first, AI-native ecosystem built on a trusted VoIP foundation. This shift unified our financial services under botim money and reshaped our product strategy, culture, and operating model, turning a platform trusted by more than 157 million people globally, including 8.5 million users in the UAE, into a driver of financial empowerment. Supported by the AI ecosystem and technological capabilities of G42, we rebuilt botim’s financial architecture around a credit-led model. With direct AECB integration, we enabled underserved users to build verified credit histories and access the financial system with credibility for the first time, aligning the organization around access, intelligence, and responsible financial inclusion. By late 2025, the enhanced ecosystem had driven meaningful growth across payments, remittances, and credit adoption, demonstrating strong demand for a fintech-first, AI-native platform built on trust, access, and real user behavior, validating both our strategic approach and its impact at scale.

Tony Van den Berge, Vice President, EMEA, Cloudflare

We’ve made a strategic decision to transition all net new business to a partner-first model. While Cloudflare traditionally relies on product-led growth with a direct sales force, this shift is aimed at significantly increasing our capacity and capabilities. To build trust and provide clarity with our partners, I’ve committed to my sales force and our partners that all new business engagements will include them. For renewals, we are implementing a more phased approach, ensuring our existing customers are actively involved in that decision. As a result of this strategy, our partner-attached business has jumped to over 50% this year, and our partner-originated business is growing at more than 100%. Beyond revenue impact, this bold approach also strengthens partner relationships, accelerates alignment on solutions, and ensures that our customer outcomes benefit from closer collaboration and shared accountability across the ecosystem.