UAE businesses could miss out on the full benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) despite growing access to structured financial data through e-invoicing, as gaps in implementation and data management continue to undermine enterprise adoption, industry experts have warned.
Speaking at the NAFA Summit Dubai, experts highlighted how the country’s move towards e-invoicing — scheduled to begin on January 1, 2027 — could transform financial operations, tax reporting and business payments. However, they cautioned that simply having access to data and advanced AI models would not guarantee meaningful results.
Jash Hutheesing, Management Consultant – Strategy and Operations at Cygnet.one, said the biggest obstacle to AI adoption in finance was not the technology itself, but the lack of structure in the information businesses feed into it.
During a session titled ‘From e-Invoicing to Intelligent Finance: Turning Tax and Invoice Data into Smarter AR, AP and Vendor Workflows for AI-Driven Decisions’, he explained that finance departments had traditionally relied on fragmented information, including PDFs, manually entered invoices and data from multiple sources.
“I think the impact that AI has, especially the finance function, isn’t realised and we believe that’s not because the models aren’t as good, it’s because there’s not a lot of structure to it. So, until now, we were living in the legacy era where we got a lot of unstructured data, a lot of different inputs from different sources, we got PDFs, we got manual entry invoices, and reconciliation was a problem.”
With e-invoicing introducing more standardised information, businesses now have access to what AI systems need to function effectively. But Hutheesing warned that the transition from data availability to actual business outcomes remained a significant challenge.
“We have the fuel. Why are enterprise AI implementations still not going very well? There are two statistics that I want to touch on. The first was a study done by MIT where they mentioned that 95 per cent of AI implementations at an enterprise level are failing, and the reason that they’ve given for that is that they generated no measurable return on the PNL or in terms of efficiency gain.”
He also pointed to Gartner findings suggesting that a substantial proportion of agentic AI projects could be abandoned before delivering results.
“The second number is by Gartner, which mentions that 40 per cent of agentic AI pilots will be cancelled by 2027. We believe that, not because there’s a problem with the AI itself, it’s because there are a lot of steps that are skipped in the middle. We’re going from unstructured financial data to autonomous action, which leads to a lot of issues.”
UAE e-invoicing could reshape tax reporting
In another session, experts highlighted the implications of structured financial data extend beyond corporate finance departments, with the UAE’s e-invoicing rollout potentially changing how businesses interact with tax authorities.
Jay Riche, Co-founder and CEO of daribatech, said the move towards real-time reporting could eventually reduce the need for companies to submit periodic tax returns in their current form.
Speaking during a session titled ‘Data Readiness and Developments in Tax Technology’, Riche explained that e-invoicing would allow transaction and tax information to be shared not only between businesses but also with government authorities.
“If you think about e-invoicing, which is going live in this country in a couple of months, on January 1, 2027, it is already happening in Saudi Arabia, with other Gulf countries also moving forward. Essentially, this is the real-time reporting of all your tax data, not only to your counterparties in the supply chain but also to the government,” he said.
He said governments across the region were increasingly investing in big data and AI capabilities to analyse the growing volume of information received through electronic invoicing and other reporting mechanisms.
Such visibility could eventually change the way tax compliance works, with authorities potentially having access to much of the information they currently obtain through periodic filings.
“I think my hypothesis is that, in a couple of years, many countries will move away from this practice because they will already have the data. If information is being reported through e-invoicing mechanisms and other data controls, we may no longer need to file tax returns in the way we do today,” he said.
Riche stressed that this would place greater responsibility on businesses to ensure the accuracy and reliability of their financial information. The data submitted could increasingly be used by governments for purposes extending beyond tax reconciliation, including assessing wider economic trends.
CFOs face new questions as AI agents enter business payments
While e-invoicing is changing how financial information is collected and processed, the next challenge for businesses could be allowing AI systems to take decisions involving actual money.
Armin Moradi, Founder and CEO of Qashio, urged chief financial officers (CFOs) to start considering the risks and accountability questions associated with agentic AI, particularly as autonomous systems become more involved in purchasing and payments.
Speaking during a session titled ‘The CFO of Tomorrow’, Moradi highlighted how AI agents could increasingly make purchases on behalf of consumers, including through major online marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart.
He said this development would eventually have implications for corporate transactions, where finance leaders would need to decide how much authority to give AI agents over company funds.
“If you translate that into what a CFO needs to consider, the question is: when will this enter your B2B payments? When you need to automate payments, will you allow an AI agent, which an accountant is smart enough to set up and which you believe is doing the job correctly, to control how your money flows? And if something goes wrong, who is accountable?
“These are real questions that I believe CFOs need to think about today. The way to protect yourself is not to wait and see, because if you are not adopting these technologies, your peers and competitors are.”
Source: Khaleej Times