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6m smart devices in UAE and Saudi Arabia connected to Alexa in 2023

Ana Mary Joseph
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6m smart devices in UAE and Saudi Arabia connected to Alexa in 2023
  • Customers are seeing the benefits of using smart AI assistants to manage their homes, evident by the increase of engagement.
  • Customers have initiated nearly 130m smart home actions and over 100m requests to listen to music, Quran and podcasts, totaling more than 70m hours of listening.

Customers are turning to Alexa and it [Alexa] has become the most popular smart home devices categories in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, an industry expert said.

“The UAE and Saudi Arabia are embracing cutting-edge technologies with palpable excitement. We’re humbled by the adoption pace of Alexa and our smart home devices, welcoming ambient intelligence into daily lives across the region. Ambient intelligence weaves together AI, devices, and services for an experience greater than the sum of its parts,” Dr. Raf Fatani, Regional General Manager, Alexa, Amazon MENA, said.

Alexa’s customers in the UAE and KSA are making use of integrated smart home hub in Echo devices, with support for a variety of standards like Zigbee, Sidewalk, Thread, Bluetooth, and Matter, enabling easy control of compatible lights, locks, and sensors.  

Home automation grows

According to Amazon stats, a total of six million smart devices are integrated into the everyday lives of Alexa customers  in Saudi Arabia and the UAE in 2023 and have initiated nearly 130 million smart home actions and over 100 million requests to listen to music, Quran and podcasts, totaling more than 70 million hours of listening.

Throughout  2023, Alexa turned the lights on and off over 24 million times in homes across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Customers in these two countries turned to Alexa nearly 9 million times to control their air conditioners only by using their voice, the second-most frequently used device category.

Customers from the Middle East usually have multiple compatible devices connected to Alexa, demonstrating the growing adoption of voice-enabled home automation.

There was a more than 50 year-on-year increase in smart home customers in 2023 vs 2022, with a 90 per cent year-on-year increase in number of smart home devices connected to Alexa.

No wonder Alexa heard “I love you” over two million times in 2023, and received 60,000 marriage proposals!

Fatani said that they are excited to be at the forefront of AI advancement in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with an unwavering passion for customer obsession here.

“We’ve invested in local talent and resources to tailor our products for these markets, ensuring Alexa and our devices cater to unique customer needs.”

New feature added

Amazon has recently added a new feature for customers in UAE and KSA to enable the multi-view option. This allows customers to see live feeds from up to four cameras, including Ring, on their multimodal devices. Customers can also ask Alexa to show their recently active cameras or all those belonging to a specific group, with a command such as “Show my Living Room cameras”. 

Mohammad Meraj Hoda, VP of business development – MEA, Ring, said that Ring is driven by the goal to provide our customers with peace of mind.

“We continue to focus on making homes more intuitive, as well as making it easier to connect and control devices so that everything works together effortlessly.”

The most commonly used lighting brands in smart homes in the UAE are Smart Life, Xiaomi, and Surplife. In the television segment, the top brands connected to Alexa are Samsung, LG and Broadlink IR Remote. For cameras in the region, Ring, Eufy, and TP Link reign supreme. When it comes to climate control, customers in the region turn to Smart Life, LG, and Honeywell.

ProsParity gets $2m funding to simplify credit access for EV purchases

Ana Mary Joseph
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ProsParity gets $2m funding to simplify credit access for EV purchases
  • The current landscape in India is catered by very few large NBFCs and private banks, primarily serving a limited customer base.

Electric vehicle financing platform ProsParity secured a $2 million in pre-seed funding for building proof of concept, technology, and expanding origination networks, starting with Central India.

The funding round was led by BEENEXT, Sparrow Capital, All In Capital, DeVC, and Huddle Ventures. Other investors such as Dr Ashish Gupta (Co-founder of Junglee & Helion Ventures), Raj Dugar (Ex-Eight Roads Ventures), Dhyanesh Shah (Co-founder of Mosaic Wellness), Abhishek Goyal (Co-founder of Tracxn) and Nitin Kaushal (Co-founder of Country Delight) also participated in this round.

ProsParity is looking to simplify credit access for purchase of EVs (two and three wheelers) as well as for setting up EV dealerships. 

“ProsParity’s technology platform and omni channel presence coupled with our experienced team and lender network will help evolve and grow the nascent EV financing landscape in India,” Saurabh Khodke, CEO and Co-founder of ProsParity, said.

Moreover, he said that Indian EV market is poised for exponential growth and affordable financing solutions are critical to enable this transition.

However, he said the current landscape is catered by very few large NBFCs and private banks, primarily serving a limited customer base.

Creating a level playing field

Anirudh Garg, Partner at BEENEXT, said that the team’s mission is to create a level playing field between EVs and ICE vehicles by democratising access to finance not only for customers but also the dealers.

ProsParity is building a comprehensive partnership network across original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), fleet operators, dealerships and lenders.

According to NITI Aayog, the size of the annual loan market for EVs in the country is projected to hit Rs3.7 trillion in 2030.

Individual OEMs such as Mahindra, Tata, Ola Electric and others are tying up with financial institutions to facilitate loans to EV buyers. 

Core42’s Arabic Large Language Model now available on Microsoft Azure

Ana Mary Joseph
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Core42’s Arabic Large Language Model now available on Microsoft Azure
  • JAIS 30B Chat is trained on a total of 1.63 trillion tokens, which includes a substantial contribution of 475 billion Arabic tokens, complemented by English tokens and code.

Core42, a G42 company and AI enablement solutions provider, has announced the availability of its latest Arabic Large Language Model (LLM), JAIS 30B Chat, on Microsoft Azure.

Announced by Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, at the kick-off of Microsoft Build 2024, this collaboration aims to simplify access to cutting-edge AI, enabling deployment across diverse industries.

JAIS, available through Microsoft Azure AI’s Model-as-a-Service offering, provides pre-trained model and infrastructure allowing customisation to build with Core42’s models to meet diverse needs and specifications.

The integration bridges the gap in generative AI accessibility for the world’s 422 million Arabic speakers, enabling use-cases such as connecting to end-users with localised solutions, opening new market opportunities, and facilitating multi-lingual driven innovation for developers.  

Efficient processing

Tailored for the Arabic language’s intricacies, JAIS 30B Chat fosters inclusivity and addresses critical technology gaps for Arabic speakers. JAIS 30B Chat is trained on a total of 1.63 trillion tokens, which includes a substantial contribution of 475 billion Arabic tokens, complemented by English tokens and code.

With this code-augmented bilingual training dataset, JAIS 30B Chat enhances logical reasoning abilities in both languages, positioning it as the premier Arabic LLM for high-quality output and complex downstream tasks. JAIS 30B Chat enables more efficient processing over larger volumes of Arabic text compared to most other English LLMs.

 “This next step in our collaboration with Microsoft signifies a pivotal moment in our commitment to equitable access to cutting-edge AI technologies. By taking advantage of Microsoft Azure to expand the reach of JAIS, we empower individuals and organizations worldwide to leverage AI for diverse applications, ultimately driving positive societal impact and advancing the frontier of artificial intelligence for all,” Talal Al Kaissi, Chief Product & Global Partnerships Officer at Core42, said.

“Our goal is to offer the most diverse and comprehensive model catalogue, and JAIS 30B Chat is another addition to our Model-as-a-Service offering on Azure AI for developers to expand their reach and uphold our commitment to offer more model options. That’s why we welcome Core42’s Arabic-centric state-of-the-art JAIS model to Azure,” said Ali Dalloul, Vice President, Azure AI Customer Experience Engineering at Microsoft Corp. 

Cybersecurity should be treated as a “business investment”

Ana Mary Joseph
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Cybersecurity should be treated as a “business investment”
  • So the real question is: can finance leaders defend the choices they have made on cybersecurity to their key stakeholders?

Chief finance officers (CFO) need to be comfortable handling cybersecurity investments that provide defensible performance and outcomes to business stakeholders, an industry expert said.

Paul Proctor, Distinguished Vice President Analyst at Gartner, said that CFOs need to find a cybersecurity posture they can defend to business stakeholders, to regulators, to employees, customers, and partners, in the event of an incident.

“There is no such thing as perfect protection. No matter how much an organisation spends, it can still get hacked the next day, so the real question is: can finance leaders defend the choices they have made on cybersecurity to their key stakeholders?”

He said the best way to do this is to treat cybersecurity as a business investment, which means that CFOs need to determine the business value of cybersecurity using outcome-driven metrics and a business value benchmark.

Critical step

 “The emergence of protection level benchmarks is a critical step in the development of a cybersecurity standard of due care,” Proctor said.

This enables CFOs to make informed cybersecurity investments that balance the need to protect and run their business while also better managing chief information security officer (CISO) demands for budget.

“Treating cybersecurity in a manner that reconciles measurable levels of protection with the needs of the business, which are called Protection-Level Agreement (PLA) decisions, creates a defensibility of their implementation,” Proctor said.

“This kind of defined agreement leads to better cybersecurity investment decisions, better execution and a safer world overall.”

Instead of reporting on the number of attacks an organisation receives, he said that executives should report on the number of days to patch critical systems. This has a direct line of sight to the value proposition of patching, which is to limit the number of days vulnerability is available for hacking.

Then executives can weigh the cost of faster patching against the reduced risks to critical systems which are a business decision based on a measurable level of protection, he said.

There are two measures of cybersecurity value, he said, first is operational value delivery, and second is the target level of protection.

“Both are important to create defensibility for executives. Did they pick defensible targets? Did IT and security deliver their desired level of protection?”

“The organisation must make conscious decisions regarding what it will do, and more importantly, what it will not do to protect itself. Residual risk must be accounted for, and as the business grows, CISOs, CFOs and other executives must continually reassess how much risk is appropriate,” Proctor said.

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Which are the jobs that will be impacted the most due to AI?

Naushad K. Cherrayil
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Which are the jobs that will be impacted the most due to AI?
  • Workers in AI-exposed roles may need to demonstrate or acquire new skills to stay relevant in a jobs market that is fast-evolving.
  • Workers who build the skills to harness AI will be more valuable than ever and bring a bright future for companies.

Demand for jobs that are difficult for AI to do, such as sports coaching or personal care, dam construction or waste collection, are booming while skills required to build AI systems, such as machine learning interference or natural language programming, are also flourishing.

According to PwC’s 2024 AI Jobs Barometer, examining half a billion job ads from 15 countries to uncover AI’s impact, showed that  demand for skills that can be done with AI, such as coding in Javascript and demand for Regression Analysis, a type of analysis AI can help to perform, are declining fast.

 “Workers who learn to harness AI are likely to have bright futures in which they can generate greater value and could consequently have greater bargaining power for wages – all within a context of rising societal prosperity,” the report said.

AI makes human labour more valuable

PWC’s analysis suggest that AI’s effect on jobs may be similar to that of the internal combustion engine in the 20th century which reduced numbers of some jobs (such as horse trader) while at the same time creating far more jobs than it displaced (from truck driver to road engineer to traffic police).

There is no going back to yesterday’s jobs market, but – if carefully managed – the AI revolution could bring a bright future for workers and companies.

 “AI makes human labour more relevant and valuable, opening up new opportunities for people to develop new skills and enter new roles. AI will create new jobs for people that we haven’t yet begun to imagine. Many of the fastest-growing jobs of today – from cloud engineer to digital interface designer – didn’t exist 10 or 20 years ago and have been generated by technology,” Pete Brown, Global Workforce Leader, PwC UK, said.

Like a spreadsheet or a saw, he said that AI is a tool that makes people more powerful and capable. Workers who build the skills to harness AI will be more valuable than ever.

Data suggests that AI is already making workers much more productive. Sectors that are especially exposed to AI are experiencing nearly five times higher growth in labour productivity.

AI can help overcome labour shortages

In AI-exposed occupations from teaching to IT, jobs are still growing, but 27 per cent more slowly on average. This could be good news for many nations facing shrinking working age populations and vast unmet needs for labour in many sectors. AI can help to overcome labour shortages that could put a brake on economic growth.

“AI provides much more than efficiency gains. AI offers fundamentally new ways of creating value. We don’t have enough software developers, doctors, or scientists to deliver all the code, healthcare, and scientific breakthroughs the world needs. There is a nearly limitless demand for many things if we can improve our ability to deliver them,” Scott Likens, Global AI and Innovation Technology Leader, PwC US, said.

Workers in AI-exposed roles may need to demonstrate or acquire new skills to stay relevant in a jobs market that is fast-evolving. 

Many who predict AI will cause a sharp decline in the total number of jobs are asking the wrong question. 

Far from heralding the end of jobs, AI signals the start of a new era in which workers can be more productive and valuable than ever.

“Growth in jobs demanding AI specialist skills has outpaced growth in all jobs since 2016. What’s more, these jobs carry up to a 25 per cent wage premium on average, underlining the value of these skills to companies,” the report said.

What can companies do?

  • Business leaders can think beyond using AI to do things the way they have been done in the past and instead use AI to generate new ways to create value.
  • While AI can help to make existing processes more efficient, companies can realise even more benefit from AI by using it to reinvent business models or pioneer new product lines.
  • Thinking inventively about how to use AI helps the company to be the disruptor rather than the disrupted, and it helps to create new opportunities for people.
  • Business leaders should view AI as a complement to people that is best used with human oversight. Companies can support employees to make the most of AI by offering training and helping them see how AI empowers them (and can even make their jobs more enjoyable by freeing them to work more autonomously and be more confident in their roles).
  • Firms can consider hiring on the basis of candidates’ skills rather than focusing solely on their degrees, job history, or previous job titles. This helps firms find the workers they need, and it helps workers more readily adapt to a fast-changing jobs market.

What employees can do?

  • Workers, for their part, should embrace AI, experimenting with it and seeking ways it can complement and enable them in their work.
  •  Workers should build the skills to be sought after in an AI age (for example, skills that either complement AI or are hard for AI to do).
  • Some workers may need to adapt more than others to succeed in an AI era; for example, some workers may need only a little training to adopt AI tools while other workers may need to move to new occupations which require more extensive retraining or upskilling.
  • Workers, companies, and policymakers share responsibility for helping all workers adapt to an AI era.

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Microsoft to take on Apple with AI-powered Copilot+ PCs

Mohammed Fahad
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Microsoft to take on Apple with AI-powered Copilot+ PCs
  • Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Asus to start selling PCs with Copilot+ from June 18.
  • Copilot+ PCs can deliver up to 22 hours of local video playback or 15 hours of web browsing on a single charge.

Microsoft has joined PCs with AI features bandwagon and adding Copilot+ into products across its business to take on Apple.

Chief Executive Satya Nadella said that Microsoft and a range of manufacturers would sell them, including Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Asus, after introducing its “Copilot+” at its Redmond campus.

With powerful new silicon capable of an incredible 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), all–day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models, Copilot+ PCs will enable you to do things you can’t on any other PC.

Users can easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with Recall, generate and refine AI images in near real-time directly on the device using Cocreator, and bridge language barriers with Live Captions, translating audio from 40+ languages into English.  

Beginning a new chapter with AI

Able to handle more artificial intelligence tasks without calling on cloud data centres, the new computers will start at $999 and begin shipping on June 18.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series is the exclusive platform to power the Copilot+ PCs, but more chipmakers, such as Intel, are set to join soon.

Yusuf Mehdi, who heads up consumer marketing for Microsoft, said the first wave of Copilot+ PCs is just the beginning.

“Over the past year, we have seen an incredible pace of innovation of AI in the cloud with Copilot allowing us to do things that we never dreamed possible. Now, we begin a new chapter with AI innovation on the device. We have completely reimagined the entirety of the PC – from silicon to the operating system, the application layer to the cloud – with AI at the centre, marking the most significant change to the Window platform in decades.”  

Moreover, he said that they are up to 20 times more powerful and up to 100 times as efficient for running AI workloads and deliver industry-leading AI acceleration.

“They outperform Apple’s MacBook Air 15 by up to 58 per cent in sustained multithreaded performance, all while delivering all-day battery life.  With incredible efficiency, Copilot+ PCs can deliver up to 22 hours of local video playback or 15 hours of web browsing on a single charge. That is up to 20 per cent more battery in local video playback than the MacBook Air 15,” he said.

GPT-4o to be available soon

The company expects that 50 million AI PCs will be purchased over the next year. At the press event, Mehdi said faster AI assistants that run directly on a PC will be “the most compelling reason to upgrade your PC in a long time.”

Research firm Gartner estimates that 54.5 million AI PCs will be shipped globally by the end of 2024 while International Data Corporation (IDC) data show that shipments to grow from nearly 50 million units in 2024 to more than 167 million in 2027. 

“As we enter a new year, the hype around generative AI has reached a fever pitch, and the PC industry is running fast to capitalise on the expected benefits of bringing AI capabilities down from the cloud to the client,” Tom Mainelli, group vice president, Devices and Consumer Research, said.

Microsoft executives also said that GPT-4o, the latest technology from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, will “soon” be available as part of Copilot.

At the event, Microsoft also introduced a new generation of its own Surface Pro tablet and Surface Laptop that feature Qualcomm chips based on Arm Holdings’ architecture. It also introduced a technology called Prism that will help software written for Intel and AMD chips run on chips made with Arm technology.

Customers can choose between a 13.8-15 inches display and four stunning colours, providing up to 22 hours of local video playback on Surface Laptop 15” or up to 20 hours on Surface Laptop13.8” on top of all-new AI experiences.

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