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Global creative innovation company R/GA has formally established its business in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), opening a dedicated presence in Abu Dhabi as it expands its AI-driven creative and technology capabilities across the region.
The move marks the formal culmination of more than a decade of work in MENA for R/GA and comes as the agency seeks to build on growing regional demand, particularly amid significant investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure and ambitious technology and innovation programmes across the Gulf.
The Abu Dhabi operation will serve clients across the wider MENA region, with the company planning to expand its team and pursue further growth from 2027 onwards. Bertrand Morin has been appointed Executive Director, MENA, and will lead the regional business.
R/GA said the establishment of a formal UAE entity follows increasing demand from its growing portfolio of regional clients. The new presence is intended to strengthen the company’s ability to work with locally based organisations and apply emerging technologies to the development of customer and brand experiences.
Its offering includes training custom brand AI models, developing adaptive commerce experiences and creating personalised generative interfaces.
Over the past decade, R/GA has worked with a number of major organisations in the region, including G42, Wio Bank, National Bank of Kuwait (NBK), Emirates NBD and Bank Al Etihad.
Its regional work has included developing new brand systems, launching category-first digital products and redesigning customer experiences for an increasingly mobile-first and AI-driven market. The company said its MENA business continues to grow through expanded programmes with existing clients as well as new engagements across the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
R/GA said its work in the region has increasingly moved beyond initiatives positioned as “first in region”, with projects developed in the Middle East also being applied to global markets.
One recent example is its work with G42 earlier this year on Alpha.G42.ai, which involved the launch of what R/GA described as a world-first generative interface aimed at rethinking the future of the web. The project is being positioned by the agency as an example of MENA-led innovation with potential global applications.
“We’re thrilled to formally establish our presence in the MENA market, following over ten years of servicing clients and building intelligent brand systems that deliver differentiation, customer value and growth. We’re excited to welcome an expanded team on the ground, and turn our award-winning work into a permanent commitment. We’re the region’s ‘newest oldest’ player, with the trust and the track record to prove it. This region always moves forward, it adapts fast, has huge resilience, and bets on innovation, and that’s exactly how we work too,” said Bertrand Morin, Executive Director, MENA at R/GA.
R/GA’s expansion into Abu Dhabi follows the company’s return to private independence in partnership with Truelink Capital. The company has also been backed by a $50 million Innovation Fund as part of a longer-term growth strategy focused on talent, technology and new capabilities.
That strategy has included investment in artificial intelligence tools and products, as well as the acquisition of Addition, an AI system design and development studio. The acquisition has expanded R/GA’s technical capabilities in applied intelligence as the agency builds out its broader offering.
Robin Forbes, Global CEO of R/GA, said Abu Dhabi was selected as the location for the company’s formal regional establishment because of the scale of sovereign ambition and investment in AI infrastructure taking place in the emirate.
“Independence has been transformative for R/GA and it has given us the freedom to invest in new talent, build new capabilities, develop our own AI tools and products, and chart our own course,” said Robin Forbes, Global CEO of R/GA. “And we chose to invest in setting up in Abu Dhabi because of the sovereign ambition and the AI infrastructure being built here. It’s an exciting market to be in and we’re looking forward to harnessing the potential of key technologies to help the region’s leading brands deepen their relationships with customers, and give them a reason to be loyal. We’ve always been driven by the mission ‘to design the future, not the familiar’, and that’s exactly what we hope to achieve in this market.”
The company’s relationship with G42 also highlights the type of AI-focused work R/GA intends to develop from its new regional base.
“Brands across the region are moving quickly from experimenting with AI to building it into how they serve customers every day. Having senior leadership and delivery capability based in Abu Dhabi means we can partner with them more closely at every stage, from strategy through to build. It also connects MENA directly into our EMEA network, giving clients access to specialist teams in data, product and AI systems design, including the capabilities we’ve added through the applied intelligence studio we acquired last year,” said Ryan Wareham, Managing Director, EMEA at R/GA.
“At G42, we value partners willing to question the familiar, not simply improve it. With Alpha.G42.ai, R/GA helped us explore a more fundamental idea: in an agentic world, the interface between an organisation and its audiences no longer needs to be fixed; it can be generated, intelligent and responsive to intent. That thinking came out of Abu Dhabi and travelled globally. R/GA choosing to put down roots here is another signal of something important: the UAE is increasingly becoming a place where the next generation of ideas is not simply adopted, but imagined and built,” said Faheem Ahamed, Group Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, G42.
R/GA’s regional expansion forms part of its broader global business, which works across sectors including government and sovereign investment, financial services, AI and technology, health, and sport and entertainment.
Through its Abu Dhabi presence, the company said it will bring that global sector expertise directly to MENA clients while also providing regional brands with a pathway to international markets.
The company is already operating its MENA business and is preparing to move into a dedicated formal office later this year. Senior leadership appointments across creative and delivery functions are also underway as R/GA continues to build out its regional team.
The expansion gives R/GA a permanent operating base in a market where investment in AI infrastructure and emerging technologies is accelerating, while extending a regional presence that the company says has been built through more than a decade of client relationships and projects.