UAE firms risk missing AI gains as financial data gaps undermine business adoption

Résumé détaillé

The biggest obstacle to AI adoption in finance was not the technology itself, but the lack of structure in the information businesses feed into it ...

UAE businesses could miss out on the full benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) despite growing access to structured financial data through e-invoicing, as gaps in implementation and data management continue to undermine enterprise adoption, industry experts have warned.

Speaking at the NAFA Summit Dubai, experts highlighted how the country's move towards e-invoicing — scheduled to begin on January 1, 2027 — could transform financial operations, tax reporting and business payments. However, they cautioned that simply having access to data and advanced AI models would not guarantee meaningful results.

Jash Hutheesing, Management Consultant – Strategy and Operations at Cygnet.one, said the biggest obstacle to AI adoption in finance was not the technology itself, but the lack of structure in the information businesses feed into it.

During a session titled 'From e-Invoicing to Intelligent Finance: Turning Tax and Invoice Data into Smarter AR, AP and Vendor Workflows for AI-Driven Decisions', he explained that finance departments had traditionally relied on fragmented information, including PDFs, manually entered invoices and data from multiple sources.

“I think the impact that AI has, especially the finance function, isn't realised and we believe that's not because the models aren't as good, it's because there's not a lot of structure to it. So, until now, we were living in the legacy era where we got a lot of unstructured data, a lot of different inputs from different sources, we got PDFs, we got manual entry invoices, and reconciliation was a problem.”

With e-invoicing introducing more standardised information, businesses now have access to what AI systems need to function effectively. But Hutheesing warned that the transition from data availability to actual business outcomes remained a significant challenge.

“We have the fuel. Why are enterprise AI implementations still not going very well? There are two statistics that I want to touch on.

He also pointed to Gartner…

“Th…

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