The landscape of enterprise AI adoption is changing rapidly. Across regions, the Middle East stands out as one of the fastest-growing enterprise AI markets, underpinned by ambitious national AI strategies in countries such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The region’s executives are highly bullish on GenAI: in the GCC, close to nine in ten CEOs report using GenAI in some form, and more than two-thirds of organisations expect to increase AI investment, seeing it as critical for productivity and new business models.
HCLTech’s multi-year partnership with OpenAI is at the forefront of this transformation. This large-scale, multi-year initiative is primed to help Global 2000 enterprises industrialise GenAI across core business processes, not just in pilots or labs.
“This partnership underscores our commitment to empowering Global 2000 enterprises with transformative AI solutions,” said Vijay Guntur, Global Chief Technology Officer and Head of Ecosystems at HCLTech. “It reaffirms HCLTech’s engineering heritage and aligns with OpenAI’s spirit of innovation. Together, we are driving a new era of AI-powered transformation across our offerings and operations at a global scale.”
The collaboration makes HCLTech one of OpenAI’s first global strategic services partners, with a mandate to embed OpenAI’s full product portfolio, such as GPT-4, GPT-4o, ChatGPT Enterprise and OpenAI APIs, into enterprise environments. The relationship is global in scope, with joint focus on North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and is framed around multi-year roadmaps rather than point solutions, aligning with large enterprises’ multi-stack cloud and data strategies.
“The collaboration with OpenAI marks a pivotal moment in accelerating AI adoption for our clients worldwide,” said Vineet Shukla, Business Head at HCLTech. “By integrating OpenAI’s advanced capabilities with our AI Force and AI Foundry platforms, we’re enabling enterprises to reimagine their operations, boost productivity, and create new value at scale. This is not just about deploying technology, it’s about shaping the future of digital economies.”
Platforms, accelerators and IP
HCLTech is integrating OpenAI models into its proprietary platforms including AI Force, AI Foundry, AI Engineering and more than 30 industry-specific accelerators that cover domains like customer operations, IT automation, supply chain and financial operations. These assets are intended to give clients “80% ready” solutions – pre-built components for use cases such as intelligent document processing, knowledge assistants, code modernisation and contact-centre augmentation – reducing time-to-value for GenAI programmes.
Enterprise AI lifecycle coverage
The partnership explicitly spans the full AI lifecycle: AI readiness and maturity assessments, architecture and integration, model and data governance, security and compliance, and organisation-wide change management. This includes setting up enterprise AI operating models, defining policy frameworks (for topics such as data residency, access controls and human-in-the-loop review) and building internal centres of excellence to sustain adoption.
Governance, risk and responsible AI
A key emphasis of the collaboration is responsible, governed AI at scale, including support for regulatory and industry requirements such as data privacy, sector-specific compliance and auditability of AI-assisted decisions. HCLTech’s frameworks around model monitoring, bias assessment, role-based access control and content filtering are designed to help enterprises adopt OpenAI models while managing operational, reputational and regulatory risk.
Business impact enterprises can expect
The combined capabilities of OpenAI and HCLTech are focused on three main outcome clusters:
- Operational excellence: GenAI-powered automation for IT operations, software delivery, back-office workflows and field support.
- Experience transformation: AI copilots for agents and employees, self-service customer channels, hyper-personalised content and knowledge assistants.
- Growth and innovation: New digital products and services, analytics-driven decision support and rapid experimentation with GenAI use cases across business lines.
Looking ahead, AI is projected to contribute around USD 320 billion to Middle Eastern economies by 2030, or roughly 11% of regional GDP, with the UAE and Saudi Arabia capturing the largest shares. In this context, the HCLTech–OpenAI partnership offers Middle East enterprises a practical pathway to translate national AI ambitions and rising investment levels into scaled, governed and high-impact GenAI programmes across industries.
