How The Middle East's Biggest Companies Are Rewriting Their Playbooks

From oil and utilities to telecoms and banking, the region's largest firms are rethinking how they operate - shifting capital, embracing AI, and rebuilding for a very different decade ahead.

- By Muhammad Addam

It's Tuesday morning in Davos. The World Economic Forum 2026 is underway, and Saudi Aramco President & CEO Amin Nasser is on stage. He isn't talking about oil prices or global supply chains. Instead, he tells a room full of tech executives that Aramco's technology initiatives have added $6 billion in realised value to the company in just two years.

For a business built on more than 90 years of drilling and physical infrastructure, the number lands hard. The message is simple: scale alone is no longer enough. Even the world's largest oil producer is rewriting its playbook.

Aramco is not alone. Across energy, utilities, telecoms, and banking, the Middle East's biggest listed companies are reworking how they operate. They are investing in AI, digital platforms, advanced manufacturing, and new financing structures – while still carrying national infrastructure on their balance sheets.

Accenture estimates that 82% of organisations in the Middle East accelerated reinvention efforts in 2024.

Energy sector adaptation

Saudi Aramco, the Gulf's undisputed energy heavyweight, is operating more and more as an industrial investor.

• Saudi Aramco

Aramco, the region's most valuable company with a market cap of $1.7 trillion, is leaning into cross-border partnerships while extending beyond conventional oil production into large-scale industrial and AI-related investments. That shift is visible in its 2025 deals, which included arrangements with U.S. companies worth a combined $120 billion across LNG, financial services, advanced materials, and procurement, in addition to an agreement with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, PIF, to acquire a minority stake in HUMAIN, a full-stack AI ecosystem, to advance its growth on a global scale.