The Sharjah conglomerate has launched DIWAN, its own private, group-wide AI assistant, now live for employees across the Group and delivered with technology partner Magure. DIWAN runs on a privately deployed model within the Group’s own cloud environment, designed so that sensitive data stays inside the Group’s infrastructure.
Sharjah and Dubai, UAE August 26, 2026. Bukhatir Group, one of the UAE’s oldest and most diversified business houses, and Magure, a UAE-headquartered enterprise AI company, today announced a strategic partnership to embed AI across the Group’s businesses, beginning with a milestone already achieved: DIWAN, a secure enterprise AI assistant, is now live in production for employees across the Group.
DIWAN, the Group’s own AI, is built on Magure’s agentic AI operating platform, MagOneAI and runs on a privately deployed model within Bukhatir’s own cloud environment. It is designed so that questions and documents are processed within the Group’s infrastructure, governed by its own policies, with audit logging of how AI is used across the organisation.
“Bukhatir Group has always looked ahead with confidence and purpose,” said Salah Bukhatir, Chairman of Bukhatir Group. “Artificial intelligence represents the next chapter in our journey-strengthening how we make decisions, serve our communities and create lasting value. As we embrace its potential, we will remain guided by our values, our responsibility to our people and our commitment to building a sustainable future.”
Charting Their Own AI Course
For a conglomerate spanning construction, education, real estate, retail and commercial development, and sports and leisure, the question was never whether to adopt AI employees across the Group were already reaching for it. The question was how to put AI in everyone’s hands without sensitive data leaking into public tools the Group neither controls nor sees.
Rather than renting AI capability on someone else’s terms, Bukhatir chose to chart its own course: a deployment in which the Group owns the environment, keeps its data within its own perimeter, and holds governance firmly in its own hands. Across every industry, the rise of unsanctioned “shadow AI” has created a new risk, as sensitive information finds its way into public tools that an organisation neither controls nor sees. DIWAN gives employees a sanctioned, secure alternative designed to remove that risk.
“For a group like ours the choice looked binary: put AI in our people’s hands quickly and accept that our data sits on someone else’s platform or keep full control and wait years to build it ourselves,” said Mohamed Sadawy, Group Chief Information Officer, Bukhatir Group. “I didn’t accept that we had to choose. In partnership with Magure, everything that matters to us – our cloud, our data, our governance – stayed inside the Group, and we still moved fast. DIWAN went from a decision to a live tool our people can actually trust with real work in a matter of weeks. And the risk of staff reaching for unsanctioned public tools is no longer something we manage day to day; we’ve designed it out with help of Magure’s MagOneAI platform.”
Aligned with the UAE’s National AI Ambition
The UAE was the first nation in the world to appoint a Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, and its National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031 sets a clear ambition: to make the UAE a global leader in AI, with intelligence embedded across every sector of the economy. The nation’s AI Charter goes further, committing to AI that is safe, fair, transparent and accountable with data privacy and human oversight at its core.
Bukhatir Group’s deployment is the private sector answering that call. A homegrown UAE conglomerate partnering with a UAE-headquartered AI company, deploying a sovereign AI capability on UAE soil with data residency in the country, governance owned by the enterprise, and AI capability that stays under national and organisational control rather than flowing to platforms abroad. In embedding AI across construction, education, real estate, retail and sports, the Group is carrying the national vision into the everyday economy: not AI as a showcase, but AI as working infrastructure across the sectors that UAE families and businesses touch daily.
The deployment reflects an AI ambition that flows from the board down and a conviction, shared with the UAE’s own approach, that AI at enterprise scale must be governed, not merely adopted. MagOneAI provides the governance layer beneath every interaction: role-based access controls, centralised monitoring, cost attribution and full audit trails across every use case, with human task nodes that pause any consequential workflow for human review and sign-off. AI assists and accelerates; people decide.
Magure is ISO 9001, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 (AI Governance) certified, with SOC 2 Type II attestation, and the deployment is mapped to the UAE’s data protection landscape data residency in the UAE, transparency over automated decisions, and enforceable data-subject rights native to the platform rather than bolted on.
From One Assistant to an AI-Woven Enterprise
DIWAN is the first step, not the destination. Bukhatir Group is establishing its own Group AI Centre of Excellence, supported in that effort by its partner Magure, to take AI into the fabric of every business: conversational analytics over the Group’s own data, intelligent document analysis, finance automation, and AI assistants across the Group’s customer-facing brands – each new capability built on the same governed platform and reaching production in weeks rather than quarters.
The Group’s vision extends further: AI copilots embedded in everyday workflows across every entity, predictive intelligence supporting decisions from procurement to enrolment, and a portfolio of enterprise-grade AI solutions that compounds each new use case cheaper and faster to deliver than the last. The destination is a cognitively connected enterprise, where intelligence flows across every Bukhatir business, responsibly and under the Group’s full control.
“The UAE has set out one of the boldest national AI ambitions in the world, and it will be realised by enterprises like Bukhatir Group organisations that treat AI as foundation, not fashion,” said Akhil Koka, CEO, Magure. “Bukhatir understood early what most enterprises learn the hard way: ungoverned AI is a liability, and rented AI is a ceiling. DIWAN is live today on a sovereign stack the Group fully owns, and behind it sits a platform that can carry AI into every corner of the business governed, auditable, and private by design. A year from now this won’t be one assistant; it will be AI woven into finance, operations, education and customer experience. That is the difference between adopting AI and becoming an AI-driven enterprise and it is exactly the future the UAE is building towards.”
About Bukhatir Group
Founded in 1974 and headquartered in Sharjah, Bukhatir Group is one of the most diversified business houses in the UAE, with 16 companies across construction and contracting, education, information technology, real estate, retail and commercial development, sports and leisure, and services. Its operations span the GCC and North Africa.
For more information: www.bukhatirgroup.com
About Magure
Magure is a UAE-headquartered, DIFC-registered enterprise AI company in Dubai, with delivery centres in India and a presence in the USA. Its flagship platform, MagOneAI, is the sovereign enterprise agentic AI platform for building, deploying, and governing AI agents in production on your own infrastructure, with any LLM. Magure serves 80+ enterprise customers across government, financial services, healthcare, and large conglomerates, with 60+ AI deployments in production. Technology and deployment partners include NVIDIA, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and Huawei. Certified to ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, and SOC 2 Type II.
For more information: www.magureinc.com.
