- Employees developing own tools
- Language prompts instead of code
- Engineers refine suggestions
Saudi companies say they are finding greater success with generative AI by putting it into the hands of employees outside their technology departments.
Staff are building software and automating tasks using plain-language prompts instead of computer code.
The approach is helping companies overcome a common problem with early AI adoption, where projects were largely confined to technology teams and often failed to address the needs of frontline employees or customers.
By allowing business users to develop their own tools, companies have told AGBI they are seeing more practical applications and stronger returns.
Recent advances in generative AI assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are reducing barriers by allowing people who understand business problems best – not just software engineers – to build software and automate tasks using plain-language instructions.
Ian Mahoney, chief technology officer at webook.com, said the Saudi entertainment platform has given employees outside its technology team access to Anthropic’s Claude tools.
“We’ve rolled out Claude across our entire business, not just tech,” Mahoney said.
“What we’ve seen, some of the most valuable things that have come to us have been applications that have been built by end users that us in tech would have had no idea there was even a problem to go and solve.”
Engineers then refine, secure and deploy the most useful applications, Mahoney said.
Other Saudi executives described a similar shift.
Talal Albakr, country lead at Scale AI, said organisations were increasingly focused on identifying specific business problems AI could solve, rather than deploying the technology for its own sake.
“What we see with productivity gains is the better you define the problem, the better you are able to quantify the different elements of that problem, the better we can come up with tangible outcomes that have better ROIs,” he said.
Nawwaf Almutairi, director of digital platforms quality and digital experience at the Saudi ministry of municipalities and housing, said government agencies were using AI to move employees away from routine administrative work towards more complex tasks.
“Replacing people with AI, that’s hype,” Mahoney said. “In reality, what we’re doing is augmenting our existing engineering team. It’s a force multiplier in many areas for us, like fraud detection at scale. That’s where we’ve seen a huge benefit.”
The executives were speaking at the Global AI Show in Riyadh this week.
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Most AI pilot programmes fail to move beyond the testing phase, according to US-based research house IDC. Of every 33 AI proof-of-concepts a company launched, only four made it into production, according to a 2025 report produced with technology company Lenovo.
A report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that while generative AI holds promise for businesses, 95 percent of pilot programmes fail to deliver a positive impact on companies’ bottom line.
Mahoney said webook.com also holds a weekly AI academy where employees present applications they have built and seek help from engineers to make them secure enough for production.
He said the wider use of AI had changed the way employees worked rather than removing the need for human judgement.
“Where there’s a big impact to our customers, that’s where we want to make sure we’ve got a human in the loop here,” he said.
“Whenever you’re looking at metrics about the value of AI, it’s important to zoom right out to the business side and not just focus on the tech side, because within tech teams we can constantly sit there and go into an infinite feedback loop.”