By Ibrahim Alseghayr
Regional Vice President, Saudi Arabia, Salesforce
For years, global discussions about AI have focused on productivity: how automation can accelerate workflows, reduce effort, and help organisations do more with less. It is an important lens, but an incomplete one. In Saudi Arabia, something far more profound is taking shape, because here, the real impact of AI is not measured solely in business outcomes, but in human ones. It is not only about how efficiently people work, but how seamlessly they live.
To understand why, we need to recognise a shift that has quietly but fundamentally transformed the Kingdom, Saudi Arabia’s public sector has evolved into one of the most advanced digital ecosystems in the world.
Government platforms no longer simply digitise services, they orchestrate them. Renewals, licences, verifications, applications, interactions that used to require branches, forms, or queues have collapsed into near-instant moments. What disappeared was not only friction, but the expectation that friction was ever necessary.
This new reality has created a second, equally transformative pressure point, as the public sector accelerates, the private sector must now keep up.
Globally, digital innovation is typically driven by the private sector. In Saudi Arabia, Vision 2030 has reversed this pattern. The Kingdom’s public services are now so advanced that they set the standard for everyday digital experiences. Citizens implicitly compare retail, banking, telco, and healthcare interactions not with competitors, but with the government’s benchmark, reshaping expectations across every industry.
And these expectations are rising alongside a demographic truth with enormous implications. The Kingdom is home to one of the youngest nations in the G20, with 63% of the population under 35. This generation has grown up in an environment where digital services move at the pace of thought, not bureaucracy. Their mindset is not about protection from AI, it is about participation in it. They are not asking how AI will take jobs, they are asking how to build new ones with it.
This convergence, world-leading digital government, rising private-sector pressure, and a generative youth mindset, is enabling something uniquely Saudi:The emergence of the Agentic Citizen.
An Agentic Citizen is not defined by their ability to access digital services, but by their ability to collaborate with them. Instead of systems reacting to manual inputs, AI agents anticipate and execute on behalf of the individual. Tasks do not require reminders, they simply occur.
Imagine a life where, your passport renewals happen automatically, your children’s school registrations manage themselves, small-business licences update without a single touchpoint and healthcare interactions, appointments, follow-ups, prescriptions, are predicted and orchestrated intelligently.
In this model, convenience becomes capability, access becomes agency and digital systems evolve from tools into colleagues and day to day life changers.
Far from diminishing human value, this shift expands it. AI does not replace judgement, empathy, creativity, or ethics,it amplifies them. Humans move from administrative tasks to higher-order work: solving problems, designing solutions, and shaping opportunities that did not exist before.
The early data is already compelling. Salesforce has found that AI agents can reduce service handling time by up to 40%, with organisations adopting agent-supported workflows resolving issues 65% faster (Salesforce, 2025). Productivity gains no longer come from individuals working harder, but from systems removing friction that never needed human intelligence.
Global economic forecasts reinforce the scale of what this means. McKinsey estimates that AI could contribute $135 billion annually to Saudi Arabia’s economy by 2030 (McKinsey & Company, 2023). In a society where citizens interact through agents rather than applications, this becomes not a stretch goal, but a natural trajectory. A workforce augmented by intelligent systems does not simply operate more efficiently, it operates at a different altitude.
And this is where the next era begins.
The world will look for who digitised first. Then it will look for who digitised best.
But the more interesting benchmark, the one I believe Saudi Arabia is capable of setting, is who digitised most humanly.
Because the future will not belong to the country with the most AI. It will belong to the country that empowers its citizens with it.
And if the Agentic Enterprise defines the next years, the Agentic Citizen may define the next decade, not just in Saudi Arabia, but for countries watching its trajectory and asking not how to keep up, but how to learn.
