E-commerce platform Noon will cut staff by half in the next three months, its co-founder and billionaire entrepreneur Mohamed Alabbar has said, as he hires artificial intelligence agents across his companies.
Mr Alabbar, who also founded Emaar, said AI was fast reshaping his operations. “I have 12 AI agents working for me … running at the same time. In our companies, Noon will go down 50 per cent in staff in three months,” Mr Alabbar said, while addressing the Business Summit 26 in Belgrade, Serbia, last week.
Mr Alabbar said AI was increasingly automating tasks including interviews, decision-making and operational workflows.
“It’s the first time we have 45 minutes automated interview for staff. We don’t [conduct] interviews anymore. It’s the AI that does that. It does the analysis [and also] measures your breathing while interviewing you. It [AI] will change everything,” he said.
Mr Alabbar said that Emaar has not hired people for three years. “In Emaar … in the technology company, in my real estate business, I don’t have a lot of staff. We don’t allow hiring. That’s one thing I do – I don’t allow hiring. In Emaar, we haven’t hired people for the past three years and our business moved up 150 per cent. We are very efficient people, thanks to my staff. But in general, there is no need for people anymore.”
Noon’s move comes as AI reshapes corporate workforce dynamics with sophisticated assistants enabling companies to handle everything from routine administrative work to complex coding tasks with greater speed and accuracy.
The UAE has positioned itself as an AI leader as it diversifies its economy away from oil. The Emirates’ research into the technology has resulted in the establishment of start-ups, partnerships and investments from industry leaders including Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI. The UAE has also teamed up with the US to develop an AI campus in Abu Dhabi, which will include 5 gigawatts of capacity for AI data centres.
The transformation brought by AI will require more workers, according to a ServiceNow and Pearson forecast released in December.
Researchers claim the UAE will need to add more than one million workers by 2030, with organisations requiring an additional 91,000 technology specialists. It also stated that other in-demand roles will revolve around search marketing strategy, programming and computer systems analysis.
Noon, which was co-founded in 2017 by Mr Alabbar and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), operates in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Egypt. Last week, the company said it planned to launch in Syria.
