Remarks by Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter at LEAP 2026

Your Royal Highnesses, Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

Good afternoon.

Before I begin, I want to thank all those who worked hard bringing us together at this great event. 

Under the Kingdom’s visionary leadership and with the guidance of HE Abdullah Sawaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Leap has become an integral part of global technology landscape, a gathering for the inquisitive, the innovative, and the industrious. 

I know this fifth edition will be as influential as ever.

Because every year we get to look into the future.

And that future is closer by the day, moving out of the laboratory, into the real economy.

Our questions have changed from what technologies like AI can do, to how we can leverage these technologies to create value?

This kind of distinction matters, because for many, their interaction with AI is through screens, prompts, images, and documents. 

These tools are powerful and are already changing how we work.

But in industry, I want to talk about how AI must meet a higher standard.

It must perform in environments where reliability is essential.

Where decisions affect safety, productivity, and sustainability.

And where complexity is physical, operational, and global.

Aramco is focused on these challenges, and we look at it through three lenses.

Intelligence, trust, and scale.

First, intelligence.

Those of you here last year may remember I spoke about the 10 billion plus data points our operations at Aramco collect every day. 

These are from wells, pipelines, refineries, terminals, and laboratories.

But this data on its own does not create value.

That value comes from combining it with huge computing power and world class technical expertise to put into models which help our engineers, operators, and technologists make better decisions.

This is why we are moving AI deeper into the core of our business.

We are using it to enhance exploration, optimize production, improve reliability, accelerate engineering, strengthen maintenance, and even keep our people safe.

It detects anomalies, recommends responses, and automates workflows, empowering our people to focus on higher-value decisions.

It’s not a matter of reducing our manpower, its about doing more with our existing workforce.

And as I said, this is no longer our hope for the future, but our everyday reality.

Our in-house large language models are used by tens of thousands of employees across Aramco.

They process millions of requests a day and we estimate them to have saved hundreds of thousands of working hours every year.

But intelligence alone is not enough.

Which brings me to the second lens: trust.

Our AI models are no longer just offering advice, they are now taking action.

This means trust is more important than ever.

Because while consumers can be impressed if a model is fast or creative.

In industry, a model must be secure, reliable, and explainable.

Cybersecurity cannot be an afterthought.

Digital ethics cannot be a slogan.

Governance cannot be paperwork.

They all need to be part of the foundations of how AI is developed, deployed, and scaled.

In the age of agentic AI, this is truer and more important than ever.

Autonomous systems need strong guardrails.

When decisions are made faster, governance around them must become smarter and when threats are more sophisticated, defense must become more agile.

Aramco is building the foundations needed to succeed in this area.

Secure cloud environments, resilient connectivity, digital ethics, and AI-enabled monitoring.

And we are already seeing the impact.

AI-enabled monitoring is significantly reducing the time needed to resolve IT service issues, generating many millions of hours of productivity savings.

Furthermore, our CyberMind security system demonstrates how AI is strengthening cybersecurity at scale, automating millions of investigations while processing over a billion potential threats every year.

It enhances our resilience, improves response times, and provides the secure digital foundation we need for the next generation of industrial AI to succeed.

That’s what trusted AI means to us.

Not just confidence in the model, but confidence in the system around it.

The third and final lens is scale.

This may be the biggest challenge of all.

As you will all know, there are thousands of AI projects around the world.

The real value of them won’t be from isolated demonstrations, it will be from scaling them across enterprises, industries, and ecosystems.

Scale has always been a been part of Aramco’s DNA.

We operate some of the largest, most complex industrial systems in the world.

It is a major responsibility, but also a unique advantage.

We have the data and we have the infrastructure, but most importantly we have the people.

Engineers, scientists, operators, geologists, and technologists who understand the difference between a promising model and a practical solution.

That’s why AI is not replacing our industrial knowledge, it is amplifying it.

And our ambition goes further, with Aramco Ventures capital allocation now worth around $7.5 billion. 

Our portfolio includes around 300 start-ups from around the world, most of them in the digital and AI space, and about 30 of which are unicorns. 

I am proud that about one-third of these startups have an active presence in the Kingdom.

This matters because we know leadership in industrial AI will not be built by one company alone, it requires partnerships, entrepreneurs, and the ability to move technology from ideation to implementation.

To help do this, our TecShift initiative is aiming to attract early-stage start-ups from across the world to Dhahran, where Aramco’s headquarters are based. 

We want to provide a better path, an easier path, for these entrepreneurs to work with industrial partners on solving real world challenges, enhancing their innovation with effective collaboration.

Alongside achieving new breakthroughs, TecShift can put Dhahran at the heart of efforts to solve industrial AI challenges, attracting elite global talent to work hand-in-hand with the leaders, innovators, and engineers who make-up the Kingdom’s primary industrial hub.

We are pleased that it will play a key role at next year’s IKTVA conference, and I encourage anyone interested in pursuing these partnerships to visit the Aramco booth to learn more.

To conclude, the future of industry will inevitably become more intelligent. 

But it must also be trusted and scalable.

That is the opportunity we see at Aramco.

Combining nearly a century of industrial expertise with cutting edge technology and world-class talent.

Turning data into intelligence, intelligence into trusted systems, and trusted systems into scalable value. 

Our innovation has moved to implementation, creating value not just for our company, but for the Kingdom and the world.

Thank you very much.

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