Adoption of Big Data and AI in UAE SMEs in Unpredictable Environment

Digital technologies like “big data” and “artificial intelligence” have become firmly embedded in corporate operations over the past several years, and they are even starting to play a bigger role in specialized industries like retail, distribution and manufacturing. Despite government and relevant agency understanding, evaluation, support, and training regarding Industrial Revolution 4.0, the use of these technologies is only gradually being adopted in the UAE’s SME sector. This exploratory research paper identifies five major business challenges faced by these SMEs and suggests potential solutions by investigating an opportunity for cross-fertilization between Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Advanced analytics. There have been very limited studies done in past to understand the adoption of these technologies with respect to UAE SMEs sector. An in-depth literature review has been conducted and the technology adoption models such as UTAUT and TOE framework is implemented plus extended, with the goal of conceptualizing a model that incorporates the discovered components. The study's findings may be used as a guide for identifying and forecasting the acceptance of Big Data as well as Artificial Intelligence amongst SMEs in U.A.E