UAE SMEs spend five times more on AI while advertising falls by a third.
Pemo's first SME Spend Index says its UAE business customers spent about five times more on AI tools in the third quarter of 2026 than a year earlier, while their advertising spend fell by a third. The company is a spend-management platform, so the data comes from its own customers.
The index draws on nearly 3.5 million anonymised, settled card transactions worth almost AED 2bn (about $544.5m), from October 2025 to September 2026. Pemo says 29% of its businesses paid for at least one AI tool in Q3, and those that did spent a typical AED 268 a month. AI was the fastest-growing category. Total card spend rose 9% year on year, utilities by a third and software by 19%.
AI was about 1% of total card spend but roughly a quarter of software spend. By sector, half of technology firms (50%) and 46% of marketing agencies paid for AI, against 38% in real estate, 35% in professional services, 17% in construction and 16% in hospitality. AI is 5% of card spend for technology firms and 6% for marketing agencies. Anthropic's Claude was the biggest AI provider by spend in most sectors, while OpenAI led in media, events, healthcare and construction.
Pemo's chief executive, Ayham Gorani, reads the shift as AI becoming a budget line as businesses reset priorities. The figures carry two stated limits: they reflect Pemo's customers and are not representative of all UAE SMEs, and they leave out AI built into Microsoft and Google software suites. The article gives no period for the advertising fall beyond the one-third figure. Pemo plans to publish quarterly, with the next edition due in January 2027.
For agencies and media sellers in the Gulf, the useful signal is the direction, not the size: small firms in Pemo's sample are moving money from advertising toward tools, and marketing agencies are among the heaviest AI payers. It is one vendor's sample, so treat it as a prompt to check against your own client budgets.
Why it matters
In one UAE payments platform's sample, small firms moved money from advertising into AI tools, which matters for agencies pitching SME budgets.
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