A Message to Every Startup in Oman
In the past two years, Oman’s AI landscape started to look like every global gold rush: fast, crowded, ambitious, noisy, and uneven.
Suddenly, there were AI voice agents, AI receptionists, AI education platforms, AI legal tools, AI healthcare callers, AI e-commerce engines, AI drone systems, AI sovereign platforms, AI consultants, AI integrations, and AI everything.
This is not a bad thing. It is what always happens when a powerful technology becomes accessible. First, everyone experiments. Then everyone labels. Then the market begins to separate what is useful from what is decorative.
Every major revolution begins with noise. The question is whether you are building for the noise, or building for what remains after it.
The internet had the same pattern.
In the late 1990s, simply adding ".com" to a company name could attract attention, money, and market belief. The dot-com boom created thousands of companies, huge investor excitement, and then a painful correction. But the crash did not mean the internet was fake. It meant the opposite: the internet was too important to remain a playground for weak business models.
The companies that survived were not always the loudest. They were the ones that turned the internet into infrastructure: commerce, search, payments, logistics, communication, advertising, and eventually cloud computing. The weak companies were selling the idea of the internet. The lasting companies were rebuilding how people bought, searched, paid, worked, and connected.
That is exactly the warning for AI startups today.
The market will not reward companies forever just because they say “AI-powered.” It will eventually ask:
What workflow did you change?
What cost did you reduce?
What decision became better?
What risk became lower?
What work became impossible to imagine without you?
AI will not matter because it writes nice emails.
AI will matter when it changes how companies operate.
When reports are generated from live data.
When compliance is tracked before inspection season.
When field incidents are captured before they disappear.
When customer service is not just answering, but resolving.
When procurement, HR, finance, HSE, sales, and operations stop living in disconnected files and begin acting like one intelligent system.
That is when AI stops being a tool and becomes a layer of the economy.
Globally, AI is already moving from fascination to adoption. Stanford's 2025 AI Index reported that 78% of organizations used AI in 2024, up from 55% the year before, and that generative AI attracted $33.9 billion in private investment globally in 2024.
But adoption is not the same as transformation.
McKinsey’s 2025 research says organizations are increasingly experimenting with AI agents, but scaling remains limited. In its survey, 23% of respondents said their organizations were scaling agentic AI somewhere, while 39% were experimenting, and no single business function had more than 10% of respondents saying agents were being scaled there.
The world is not short on AI experiments.
The world is short on AI systems that survive contact with real operations.
To every emerging AI startup in Oman and the region: the excitement is good. The speed is good. The courage to build now, while the market is still forming, is good.
But the next phase will be less forgiving.
The market will begin to distinguish between five types of AI companies:
The AI-label company
The company that uses AI mainly as branding.
The AI-wrapper company
The company that builds a thin interface on top of existing models, useful but easy to copy.
The AI-demo company
The company that looks impressive in presentations but struggles in messy real-life operations.
The AI-productivity company
The company that helps individuals work faster, write better, design quicker, summarize more, or automate small tasks.
The AI-infrastructure company
The company that becomes part of how businesses actually run.
The last category is what remains.
Every technological revolution begins by looking like excess.
Too many railways.
Too many factories.
Too many dot-coms.
Too many apps.
Too many crypto projects.
Too many AI startups.
But history is not offended by excess. History uses excess as a filter.
The first wave brings imagination.
The second wave brings correction.
The third wave brings permanence.
So the question for AI startups is not, “Can we enter the market?”
Many already have.
The question is:
Can we become painful to remove?
