IBM and e&, the Abu Dhabi-based global technology group, have announced a landmark collaboration to advance towards an enterprise-grade agentic AI foundation at e&, starting with policy, risk, and compliance.
Unveiled at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, the solution embeds agentic AI capabilities from IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate directly into core compliance systems at e&, enabling AI agents to interpret legal and regulatory data, accelerate decision-making, and provide traceable responses aligned with enterprise governance requirements.
Unlike traditional AI tools that depend on prompts, agentic AI can autonomously reason, plan, and act across workflows. Effectively extending beyond simple natural language interactions into action-oriented execution within business processes. This represents one of the early large-scale applications of agentic systems in enterprise governance and compliance frameworks.
The deployment builds on IBM’s broader strategy to help clients transition from isolated AI experiments toward deeply integrated, governed AI at scale. The solution combines more than 500 tools and customisable domain-specific agents from IBM and partners, designed to support employees and auditors in navigating complex regulatory environments. A joint proof of concept delivered within eight weeks demonstrated that these systems can operate under real-world enterprise conditions, offering trusted, explainable AI for decision-support and compliance tasks.
e& Group CEO Hatem Dowidar said the partnership positions the organisation to embed AI deeply into its risk and compliance operations, improving consistency, speed of interpretation, and the foundation for broader AI adoption enterprise-wide.
The initiative underscores a broader market trend toward more autonomous, governed AI that can help organisations balance innovation with accountability.
Despite this, organisations that embed agentic capabilities directly into core operations stand to gain significant efficiencies and faster compliance workflows.
This collaboration marks a strategic milestone in e&’s AI journey and sets a new benchmark for how enterprise-grade agentic AI can be used responsibly in governance and compliance a domain where accuracy, traceability and human-aligned oversight are paramount.
