AI in Oman

August in Muscat means 45-degree afternoons, school holidays, and a genuinely quiet conference calendar, but it is not an empty one. A government-run AI contest reaches its RO13,000 finale, Omani youth are building AI agents and hacking cybersecurity scenarios at the Youth Centre, and one global AI summit is happening online, no flight required. Here is what is actually confirmed for Oman's tech scene this month.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• The final pitch round of MTCIT's "Engineer It with Agentic AI" competition lands on August 24-25, with RO13,000 in prizes and a September 6 closing ceremony.
• The Youth Centre, in partnership with Riyada, is running an AI Agent Development Camp and a Cybersecurity Programme through August as part of its 2026 summer package.
• The virtual Global Data & AI Tech Conference 2026 (August 22-24) is a free-to-attend option for Omani professionals who want global AI content without travel.
• Most of Oman's big-ticket exhibitions, including COMEX 2026, wait for cooler weather; the next major in-person wave starts in September.
• One Dubai-based opportunity worth flagging for Omani founders: an application window closing August 19 for a September AI forum in the UAE.

🌡️ Why August Looks Quiet (And Why It Isn't Empty)

Anyone tracking Oman's events calendar will notice a pattern: big exhibitions and B2B summits cluster in the cooler months, roughly February through June and then again from September onward. That rhythm held true for the fall lineup we mapped out in our July preview of Oman's autumn tech events, and it holds for August too. COMEX 2026, Oman's flagship technology show, is confirmed for the Oman Convention & Exhibition Centre (OCEC) on September 6-9, not August, according to the venue's own listing.

That does not mean nothing is moving. Government-run capacity-building programmes, which do not depend on filling a trade-show floor, keep going through the summer break. That is exactly where this month's real activity is happening.

🏆 Engineer It with Agentic AI: Finals Week, August 24-25

Date: Final pitch presentations August 24-25, 2026; closing ceremony and winners announced September 6, 2026
City/Venue: Muscat (final venue to be confirmed via the Makeen platform)
Cost: Free to follow; this is a closed competition, not a ticketed event
Contact: makeen.gov.om

The Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology (MTCIT) launched the second edition of this national competition on July 1, 2026, under the patronage of Dr Munthir Hilal Al Busaidi, Head of the Oman Vision 2040 Implementation Follow-Up Unit, according to Times of Oman. This year's theme is agentic AI, autonomous systems that can make decisions and execute tasks with minimal human input.

Twenty-five teams of developers, designers and innovators from across Oman's governorates were selected after a registration window that closed May 29, followed by an in-person bootcamp from June 28 to July 2, as reported by Muscat Daily. Teams have spent July and August refining prototypes with mentor support, building toward the final pitch sessions in front of an expert panel. A total of RO13,000 in prizes will be split among the top three teams at the September 6 closing ceremony.

Registration for this edition is closed, but the finals are worth watching. This is exactly the kind of pipeline that feeds Oman's push toward putting national talent into skilled digital roles. As omanvision2040.com recently reported, Oman now has 250 job categories reserved exclusively for Omani nationals, and AI development is squarely one of the skill sets the country needs more of, not less.

🧑‍💻 Youth Centre Summer Programmes: AI Agents and Cybersecurity Drills

Date: Ongoing through August 2026 (launched mid-July; exact per-programme end dates not disclosed)
City/Venue: Muscat, in-person and virtual formats
Cost: Not disclosed; contact organiser for fees
Contact: Youth Centre, yc.om

Oman's Youth Centre, which operates under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth, rolled out a package of summer programmes in mid-July aimed at building "future-ready skills" among Omani youth, according to Times of Oman. Two tracks stand out for tech readers:

• AI Agent Development Camp, run in cooperation with Riyada (the SME Development Authority), where participants design and build a minimum viable AI product addressing a real-world challenge in the Omani market, working alongside industry mentors, as Oman Observer reported.
• Cybersecurity Programme, covering information security fundamentals, cyber-threat awareness, and simulated security incidents, per Muscat Daily.

Cybersecurity training for young Omanis is not a one-off effort. It follows a pattern we covered when 30 cybersecurity graduates completed a national programme earlier this year, part of Oman's broader push to build a domestic security workforce as the sector heads toward a projected $214 million market. Exact dates, fees, and enrollment cut-offs for the Youth Centre's August cohorts were not published in available coverage; readers should contact the Youth Centre directly through its website for current openings.

🌐 Bonus Option: Global Data & AI Virtual Tech Conference (Outside Oman, Online)

Date: August 22-24, 2026
Format: Fully virtual, accessible from anywhere including Muscat
Cost: Free "Explorer Pass" available; paid tiers run from roughly $97 to $997 for added access, per the event's Eventeny ticket page
Registration: Create an account and select a pass at the Eventeny listing above

This one is not an Oman event, it is a global virtual conference themed around AI, data strategy, and enterprise adoption, with speakers and attendees from multiple countries. It is included here because the free tier makes it a low-cost way for Omani developers, data professionals, and students to sit in on international AI sessions during a month when local in-person options are thin. As always with large virtual expos, verify the agenda and speaker list before committing time, and treat the paid tiers as optional rather than necessary.

✈️ One GCC Note Worth Flagging

Outside Oman, an AI and Emerging Technology Forum in Dubai is scheduled for late September, but its application window for funded delegate slots closes August 19, 2026, with a $30 application fee, according to details shared by the organisers on social media. It is not an August event in the traditional sense, but the deadline falls squarely in this month, so Omani founders or researchers interested in a fully-funded seat should apply before that date rather than waiting.

🇴🇲 Why This Matters for Oman

None of this month's activity looks like a splashy trade show, and that is the point. While Oman's big exhibitions wait for cooler weather, the country's AI talent pipeline, the competitions, camps, and mentorship programmes that turn students and young developers into the workforce Vision 2040 needs, keeps running through the summer. A RO13,000 agentic AI contest and a Youth Centre camp will not make regional headlines the way COMEX or Enterprise AI Expo will later this year, but they are arguably more important for Oman's long-term goal of building homegrown digital talent rather than importing it. Anyone hiring for AI or cybersecurity roles in Muscat this autumn would do well to keep an eye on who comes out of these August cohorts.

Before ZabonEx became one of Oman's more talked-about B2B SaaS startups, its two founders were simply colleagues sharing a department at Omantel. Their journey from telecom back-office roles to running a predictive analytics platform for the food and beverage sector is a quiet but instructive case study in how Omani tech founders are turning day-job frustrations into homegrown software.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Hatim Moosa Al Abri and Almuhannad Al Balushi co-founded ZabonEx in 2023 after roughly five years working together in the same department at Omantel.
• ZabonEx is a Muscat-based B2B SaaS platform that gives food and beverage producers, distributors and retailers customer-level demand forecasts to cut waste and protect margins.
• The startup closed a $100,000 pre-seed round in July 2025 led by Future Fund Oman and ITHCA Group.
• Hatim was named "Innovator of the Year in Predictive Analytics (F&B)" in 2025, and ZabonEx won Best Newcomer at the 2023 Middle East Startup Awards.
• The company is targeting expansion into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain after consolidating its base in Oman.

🥛 From Telecom Desks to Startup Founders

Hatim Moosa Al Abri and Almuhannad Al Balushi did not meet in a startup accelerator or a university hackathon. According to an Entrepreneur Mirror interview with the pair, both bring backgrounds spanning ICT and R&D roles, and both spent time working internationally before returning to Oman: Hatim studied and worked in New Zealand, including a stint at Datacom, while Almuhannad worked on data automation projects at DairyNZ, according to his professional profile. That dairy-industry data experience turned out to be unusually relevant preparation for a food-forecasting startup.

The two later found themselves working together in the same department at Omantel, Oman's largest telecom operator, for around five years. That shared office time, spent on ICT and business systems projects, is where the idea for ZabonEx took shape. Almuhannad currently continues to serve as a Senior Expert in Business Systems Support at Omantel while acting as ZabonEx's co-founder and CTO.

📊 What ZabonEx Actually Does

ZabonEx is a B2B SaaS platform built to solve a very specific, very costly problem: food and beverage businesses routinely over-order or under-order stock because they are forecasting demand with spreadsheets and gut instinct. The platform connects to a business's sales and inventory data and generates real-time, customer-level demand predictions, then turns those predictions into concrete ordering recommendations, according to Oman Observer.

"F&B businesses are under pressure to stay profitable while meeting sustainability expectations. ZabonEx was born from this challenge," Almuhannad explained, as reported by Wamda. The pitch is straightforward: reduce spoilage and waste for producers, distributors and retailers while helping them sell more of what customers actually want, when they want it.

The company is headquartered in Bawshar and had grown to roughly nine employees as of mid-2025, per company data cited by industry trackers. It is one of a small but growing cluster of Omani founders building vertical SaaS tools for unglamorous but essential industries; the same pattern shows up in SafaQat, the family-run SaaS startup digitizing Oman's tender process, another example of local founders picking a narrow, painful workflow and building software specifically for it rather than chasing a broader consumer app.

💰 Funding and Growth Trajectory

ZabonEx closed a $100,000 pre-seed round on July 21, 2025, led by Future Fund Oman with participation from ITHCA Group, according to Wamda's reporting. The round was later covered again as the company detailed its regional ambitions, with Oman Observer noting the funds would go toward enhancing the prediction engine, growing the technical team, and building bilingual, locally-compliant versions of the product ahead of a push into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain.

Coverage of the raise also appeared on The SaaS News, which framed the round as part of a broader push by ZabonEx to build a specialized onboarding toolkit for Oman's food supply chain before scaling regionally. The strategy is deliberately sequenced: prove the model at home first, then export it.

🏆 Recognition and Ecosystem Role

The recognition has followed the funding. ZabonEx won Best Newcomer at the Middle East Startup Awards in 2023, and the company's founders were sponsored by Oman's Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology to attend Web Summit Qatar and LEAP in Riyadh, according to the Entrepreneur Mirror profile of the founders. Hatim was separately named "Innovator of the Year in Predictive Analytics (F&B)" in 2025 by a global business awards program, a recognition of the underlying forecasting technology rather than just the business story.

Both founders also credit Omantel Innovation Labs with providing early support and a nurturing environment as they moved from an internal idea to an independent company, a reminder that Oman's incumbent operators are increasingly playing a quiet role as informal incubators for the startups their own employees eventually spin out.

🇴🇲 Philosophy on Building in Oman

ZabonEx's founders have been consistent in framing their company as an Oman-first bet rather than a story that only makes sense once it leaves the country. Their public comments emphasize proving the model domestically, in Oman's own F&B ecosystem, before touching a second market. That is a deliberately conservative approach in a region where founders often talk regional expansion before local product-market fit is settled.

It is also a philosophy shared by other homegrown SaaS teams profiled on this site, including the founders behind eMushrif's smart-transport software, who similarly built for a specific domestic operational problem before pursuing outside partnerships. For ZabonEx, that problem is food waste and the razor-thin margins that come with getting F&B inventory decisions wrong.

💡 Why This Matters for Oman

ZabonEx is a useful data point for Oman's Vision 2040 ambitions around economic diversification and a knowledge-based economy: it is a homegrown SaaS company, not a subsidiary of a foreign platform, tackling a real operational cost problem in the food sector using data science built by Omani engineers. The company's path, from two colleagues inside a state-linked telecom operator to independent founders backed by Future Fund Oman and ITHCA Group, also illustrates a maturing local funding pipeline that did not exist in the same form even a few years ago. As more of Oman's larger employers indirectly seed their own startup competitors through alumni like Hatim and Almuhannad, the Sultanate's private-sector tech base stands to grow a little less dependent on any single anchor employer.