Mohamed Alabbar says AI will cut Noon’s workforce by 50% as automation reshapes Gulf e-commerce

Mohamed Alabbar has said artificial intelligence will significantly reduce jobs at Noon, as the company accelerates automation across its operations and adopts AI-driven workflows.

Speaking at the Business Summit 26 in Belgrade, Serbia, last week, Alabbar said the e-commerce platform’s workforce would shrink dramatically over the coming months as AI agents increasingly handle tasks traditionally performed by employees.

“I have 12 AI agents working for me … running at the same time. In our companies, Noon will go down 50 per cent in staff in three months,” Alabbar said.

The billionaire entrepreneur, who also founded Emaar, described AI as a transformative force that is rapidly reshaping recruitment, operations and decision-making across his businesses.

“It’s the first time we have 45 minutes automated interview for staff. We don’t conduct interviews anymore. It’s the AI that does that. It does the analysis and also measures your breathing while interviewing you. It will change everything,” he said.

Alabbar added that Emaar has effectively frozen hiring for the past three years while continuing to expand operations.

“In Emaar, we haven’t hired people for the past three years and our business moved up 150 per cent,” he said. “We are very efficient people, thanks to my staff. But in general, there is no need for people anymore.”

The comments come as AI adoption accelerates across industries globally, with companies increasingly deploying automation tools to manage customer service, coding, logistics, hiring and administrative work more efficiently.

Noon’s planned workforce reduction follows earlier restructuring efforts. In 2023, the company laid off around 10 per cent of its workforce as part of cost-cutting measures, affecting roles across marketing, advertising and other departments among its roughly 3,400 employees at the time.

Alabbar later told Bloomberg that Noon had been reducing staff “for the past year and a half”, while also pursuing broader automation initiatives.

According to reports from Argaam and the Financial Times, Noon is working to scale self-driving delivery technologies and robotic systems as it seeks to lower operational costs and improve efficiency. The company reportedly plans to lease robots instead of purchasing them outright.

Alabbar also said Noon was nearing profitability and was exploring a dual listing in Saudi Arabia and the UAE within the next two years.

The company, jointly backed by Alabbar and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, was launched in 2016 with an initial investment of $1 billion. Noon currently operates across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Egypt, and recently announced plans to expand into Syria.

While Alabbar’s remarks highlight the growing corporate push toward automation, they also raise concerns around the future of employment in the region as AI adoption accelerates.

At the same time, forecasts suggest AI could also create demand for new categories of work. A December report by ServiceNow and Pearson projected that the UAE would require more than one million additional workers by 2030, including around 91,000 technology specialists. Researchers said future demand would likely centre on programming, systems analysis and digital marketing strategy roles.

The UAE has positioned itself as a regional AI leader as part of its broader economic diversification strategy, attracting investments and partnerships from global technology companies including Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI. The country is also partnering with the US on a major AI campus project in Abu Dhabi that will support large-scale AI data centre capacity.