Tealium’s Shadi Hatoum explains why trusted, real-time customer data will become increasingly important as AI moves from experimentation into everyday business operations.
The Middle East is moving rapidly from AI experimentation towards production, but for businesses operating directly with customers, the next competitive advantage may not come from the model itself. It may come from the quality of the context surrounding it.
Techpulse: The region is moving from AI experiments to production. What is the real test now?
Shadi Hatoum: “The next challenge is operationalisation. Scaling AI requires more than models and infrastructure. It requires trusted, connected and real-time context. For consumer-facing businesses, AI systems need to understand customer behaviour, identity, consent and intent as it happens.”
Techpulse: Where are companies falling short?
Hatoum: “Customer data often sits across disconnected systems. That creates fragmented signals and limits AI’s ability to understand what a customer is doing, what they need and what their intent is at that moment.”
Techpulse: Is the market aware of the gap?
Hatoum: “Our Future of Customer Data research found that 88% of organisations consider real-time data essential to achieving business objectives. And 68% increased investment in first-party data strategies in the previous year.”
Techpulse: What should businesses build on those foundations?
Hatoum: “The opportunity is to create a trusted, governed contextual layer that connects identity, consent, historical data and live behavioural signals, and makes that context available to AI models and agents in real time.”
Techpulse: Why does this become more critical as AI spreads?
Hatoum: “As AI becomes more embedded across customer service, marketing, commerce and other functions, access to this real-time customer context will become increasingly important. AI models and agents can generate powerful outputs, but their relevance depends on the quality, timeliness and completeness of the context they receive.”
Techpulse: So what separates the leaders from the rest?
Hatoum: “AI is only as intelligent as the context it receives. Models provide the intelligence, but they need trusted, consented and real-time behavioural context to make relevant decisions. The organisations that can connect live customer signals with historical context and make that intelligence available to AI models and agents in real time will be the ones that turn AI adoption into measurable business outcomes.”
For the Middle East’s rapidly developing AI market, the next phase may therefore be less about how quickly businesses adopt AI and more about how effectively they give it the context to make those systems useful.
I kept all the original words and only fixed punctuation and layout. The one punctuation change worth noting is that I removed the comma after “in real time” in the last answer, since it separated the subject from its verb.
