Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Emirates NBD is reshaping its National Digital Talent Incubator (NDTI), until now a program for Emirati startup founders, into an artificial intelligence acceleration program for established Emirati-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), backed by DIFC Innovation Hub, Visa and AWS.
The Dubai-based lender, which operates across the Middle East, North Africa, Türkiye and South Asia, is developing the next phase under the working name NDTI AI. The program aims to help participating businesses adopt practical AI tools and achieve measurable results.
The biggest change is who takes part. Earlier NDTI cohorts were built around early-stage founders, but NDTI AI is open only to SMEs that already bank with Emirates NBD. The program team will work with each company to find the AI uses with the most value, then take them from the first idea through testing and on toward production.
Cohorts will be small. Emirates NBD expects each one to include roughly four to five Emirati-owned SMEs picked from its own SME customer base, and over time it plans to run two cohorts a year, putting deeper work with each business and measurable results ahead of volume.
There is no fixed catalog of solutions. The bank said the program will start with discovery, shaping use cases around each participant's operations. Possible areas include customer service, sales and marketing, workflow and document automation, financial management, compliance and forecasting.
Responsibilities are split between the partners. Emirates NBD will run the program and choose which SMEs join, while DIFC Innovation Hub will help design it, open access to its wider network and give companies a platform to present what they achieve. AWS and Visa are also supporting the program.
Rohit Garg, Group Head of Retail Products and Chief Digital Officer of Retail Banking and Wealth Management at Emirates NBD, said: “For SMEs, adopting AI starts with finding the right use cases and having access to the expertise and support to put them into practice. By bringing leading ecosystem partners together, NDTI AI will help business owners assess opportunities, test relevant solutions and move viable ideas towards implementation. This practical approach can help strengthen SME capabilities and competitiveness, while supporting broader AI adoption and the growth of a more innovative, diversified UAE economy. The program builds on our position as one of the region’s most advanced financial institutions in AI maturity, ranked first in the Evident AI Index for Banks in the Middle East and Africa.”
Mario Makary, UAE Country Manager, Visa, added: “AI is already reshaping how businesses operate, serve their customers and unlock new opportunities for growth. Through this collaboration with Emirates NBD and DIFC Innovation Hub, Visa will bring its payments expertise, innovation capabilities and understanding of evolving customer needs to help medium-sized enterprises turn promising AI use cases into practical, scalable solutions. By combining the strengths of our respective organisations, we can help businesses adopt AI responsibly and translate innovation into meaningful commercial outcomes.”
Visa's contribution centers on payments know-how, according to Makary, which may prove most useful to participants whose chosen projects involve customer transactions or financial management.
The ranking Garg cites dates from June, when Evident published its first AI Index for banks in the Middle East and Africa. It assessed 25 of the largest lenders in the two regions on talent, innovation, leadership and AI governance. Emirates NBD placed first, narrowly ahead of Standard Bank, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Nedbank, all within one point on the index's 100-point scale.
NDTI itself passed its two-year mark in October 2025, when Emirates NBD opened its fifth cohort with four startups, among them payments and rewards platform Smooth Pay and ClimateTech venture HAAY. Earlier groups traveled to Saudi Arabia, Istanbul, Egypt and London, and held immersion days with DIFC Innovation Hub, Visa, Microsoft and Dell Technologies.
In May 2026, the bank's NDTI Founders Summit marked the graduation of Cohorts 4 and 5, bringing the program to 22 founders across five cohorts. According to a 2025 report by Emirates NBD and PwC cited at the time, UAE fintech startups drew around $265 million in 2024, roughly a third of all startup funding in the country.
NDTI AI is the latest step in the bank's AI push. In October, Emirates NBD signed an enterprise collaboration with OpenAI under which it expects to become the region's first lender, across the Middle East and North Africa, running GPT models on in-country inference infrastructure. In August, it teamed up with the Dubai Future District Fund to test fintech and AI tools, including services for small businesses.
Limiting entry to existing customers could also bring the program closer to the bank's SME banking business, since any AI tools that reach production would sit inside companies Emirates NBD already serves.
