Saudi organisations are moving beyond AI experimentation, with 90% reporting that their AI initiatives have met or exceeded their original ROI goals, according to Riverbed’s Global Survey on the State of Autonomous IT Operations.
The findings suggest the Kingdom is entering a more execution-focused phase of enterprise AI adoption. Two-thirds of Saudi respondents increased AI investment over the past year, while 85% expect to progress toward human-supervised or highly autonomous IT operations within two years.
Governance, however, remains central to that transition. While 54% of Saudi respondents are extremely confident in their AI governance and human-oversight capabilities, 77% remain hesitant about allowing AI to make operational decisions without human approval. At the same time, 93% believe AI assurance, observability and governance will become a critical IT domain.
“Saudi Arabia has built tremendous momentum around AI, supported by ambitious national programmes and organisations focused on translating innovation into measurable outcomes. The next stage will be defined by how effectively enterprises can govern AI and apply it to improve everyday operations.”
— Salman Ali, Senior Manager – Solution Engineering, GCC, Riverbed
The research also points to employee experience as an important measure of autonomous IT success. Forty-four percent say their IT operations teams are extremely effective at using AI to identify and resolve issues before employees experience disruption, compared with 34% globally. Meanwhile, 96% expect AI-powered operational intelligence to have at least a moderate impact on frontline IT and service desks.
The infrastructure challenge is visibility. Although 95% consider multi-domain visibility important for AI-driven IT operations, only 22% currently have fully unified visibility across networks, applications, endpoints and cloud.
For Saudi enterprises, the next AI challenge is therefore less about proving ROI and more about building the governance, data and observability foundations needed to scale autonomy without sacrificing control or digital experience.
