GITEX Global 2026: Dates, Venues, and What to Check If You Run a UAE Business

TL;DR: GITEX Global 2026 runs 7 to 11 December. The Summit is on 7 December at Dubai World Trade Centre, and the expo is on 8 to 11 December at the Dubai Exhibition Centre, Expo City Dubai, the first time the show leaves the World Trade Centre and the first time it runs in December. Expand North Star, the startup show, runs alongside it from 8 to 10 December. If you run a business in the UAE, the timing matters more than the venue. The show falls after the e-invoicing deadline for large companies and before the one for everyone else. Use it to shortlist an e-invoicing provider, to test AI agent demos on your own data, and to ask cloud vendors where your data actually lives. Below: the practical details, then what we would check on the floor and the questions to ask.

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The practical details

Sources: the dates and the Summit/expo split come from the official GITEX Global 2026 page. The Dubai Media Office announced the move to Expo City in October 2025. The Expand North Star site gives its own dates.

Three things change compared with the editions most people remember:

• Two venues, far apart. The World Trade Centre is in central Dubai, and Expo City is in the south of the city, near Al Maktoum airport. If you go to the Summit and the expo, plan two different trips, and allow extra time on 7 December.
• December, not October. The show now sits in Dubai's peak tourist season, and the organiser is selling it as a "TechCation" with events across the city. Hotels near Expo City will fill up. Book early, or stay on the Red Line.
• New show names. The 2026 page lists co-located shows with new names, including GITEX Agentix, GITEX SUPER COMPUTEX (data centres), GITEX Quantum Expo, GITEX Retailx and GITEX Marketing Intelligence. The Summit's stated theme is "AI sovereignty and scalability". For most businesses, Agentix and the data-centre halls are the ones to check first.

Why the timing matters for UAE businesses

The UAE e-invoicing mandate has two dates for each business: the day you must have appointed an accredited provider, and the day your invoices must start going through it. As reported in October 2026:

• Revenue of AED 50 million or more: appoint a provider by 30 October 2026, live on 1 January 2027.
• Revenue under AED 50 million: appoint a provider by 31 March 2027, live on 1 July 2027.

GITEX lands about five weeks after the first deadline and about four months before the second. Large companies will be in the middle of integration by then. Smaller companies still have time to choose, and most of the providers, ERP vendors and integrators will be in one place for four days. These dates have moved once already, so check the Ministry of Finance's pages before you plan around them. We keep a summary on our UAE e-invoicing page.

What to check on the floor

1. E-invoicing providers: ask about your ERP, not their platform

Every provider's demo will look the same: an invoice goes in, a green tick comes out. Your problem is getting clean invoices out of your ERP, in the PINT AE format, with the right data on every line. The questions that separate providers:

• Which ERP do you connect to today, in production, in the UAE? Ask for a customer on the same ERP and version as yours. "We have an API" is not an answer.
• What happens when an invoice is rejected? Who sees the error, in what words, and how does the fix get back into the ERP? A rejection your accountant cannot read becomes a ticket for your IT team.
• Who maps our data to PINT AE? If the answer is "your team", ask for the field list and the effort estimate before you sign.
• What do you validate before sending? Catching a missing TRN or a wrong VAT code before submission is far cheaper than handling a rejection after it.

2. AI agents: bring your own document, and ask what happens after the write

Agentic AI will be all over the floor, and a dedicated show this year makes it hard to miss. Most demos run on clean, prepared data. Bring something real on a USB stick or phone: a supplier invoice, a messy purchase order, a WhatsApp order. Ask the vendor to run it live.

Then ask the question most demos skip: when the agent writes something to your system, how do you see it and undo it? An agent that can only suggest is a chatbot. One that writes needs a clear record of what it changed and a one-step undo. We wrote up what an agent writing to production actually needs after shipping one.

Also ask how the agent connects to your existing software. If the answer is a custom integration per tool, ask whether they support MCP, the open protocol that lets one assistant work with many systems. We explain it in what MCP is.

3. Arabic voice and speech-to-text: test with a Gulf voice note

If your customers or staff send voice notes, you will see speech-to-text demos. Test them with a real Gulf voice message, ideally one that mixes Arabic and English. When we tested 9 models on 54 real UAE WhatsApp voice orders, the best recovered 84% of the ordered products, and the best self-hosted ones 71%. Four of the 18 voice-only orders were partly or fully in Urdu, and models told to expect Arabic could not read them at all. Ask any vendor which languages their model expects, and what happens when a customer switches language mid-sentence. The details are in our Arabic speech-to-text benchmark.

4. Cloud and "sovereign AI": ask where the data lives, and where the backup lives

"Sovereign AI" is the Summit's theme, and the data-centre halls will be selling UAE-hosted capacity. After the AWS outages in the UAE and Bahrain in March 2026, the useful questions are:

• Which country and which facility does my data sit in, and where is the second copy?
• If this region goes down, where do we fail over, and does that respect UAE residency rules for our data?
• Has a customer actually restored from your backups, and how long did it take?

Our post on disaster recovery for Gulf companies after the AWS UAE outage has the full checklist.

Questions to take with you

Copy these into your phone before you go:

1. Which ERP and version do you connect to in production in the UAE? Can I speak to that customer?
2. When an invoice is rejected, what does my accountant see?
3. Can you run my document, not your sample, through the demo?
4. When the agent writes to my system, how do I see what changed and undo it?
5. Which languages does your speech model expect? What happens with Arabic, English and Urdu in one message?
6. Where does my data live, where does the backup live, and has anyone restored from it?

A vendor that answers these clearly is worth a follow-up call. If the answer to most of them is a slide, keep walking.

Related: how we work with companies in Dubai and the UAE.