Skytells Brings Government and Industry Leadership Together at CognitionX Emirates 2026
The Dubai conference welcomed senior public officials, research leaders and international technology executives. Skytells announced Relam and opened its Enterprise System Design guide to the wider engineering community.
By Sarah Burton
Dubai, United Arab Emirates, October 18, 2026. Skytells, Inc. brought government, research and industry leaders together at CognitionX Emirates 2026, held on October 14-15 at Dubai Technology Entrepreneur Campus (Dtec) in Dubai Silicon Oasis. During the two-day conference, the company announced Relam, its AI workspace, and the open-source release of its previously private Enterprise System Design guide.
The conference welcomed H.E. Dr. Abdullah Belhaif Al Nuaimi, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Emirates Scholar Center for Research and Studies, the Center's Secretary-General, and senior leadership from Emirates Scholar, Dtec and Dubai Silicon Oasis (DSO). Distinguished guests also included OWS leadership, members of Navix's global leadership and OWASP leadership.
Convened by Dr. Hazem Ali, Founder and CEO of Skytells and Founder of CognitionX, the program featured more than 50 speakers and participants from over 30 countries. Skytells was a strategic partner and platinum sponsor, developed and maintained the technology platform supporting the conference series, and contributed technical sessions on sovereign AI and infrastructure security.
Government leadership, research and sovereign infrastructure
Dr. Ali, the conference's principal organizer, and Mahmoud Atallah, Founder of Experts Live and a member of the CognitionX Emirates organizing team, welcomed His Excellency and distinguished guests alongside Dubai Silicon Oasis leadership. Before the keynote, Dr. Ali and Mr. Atallah joined His Excellency, Dubai Silicon Oasis leadership and the Secretary-General of Emirates Scholar Center for Research and Studies for a private meeting on artificial intelligence and sovereign infrastructure. Both organizers also met with senior officials and distinguished guests during the conference.
H.E. Dr. Abdullah Belhaif Al Nuaimi previously served as the UAE's Minister of Infrastructure Development, Minister of Climate Change and Environment, and Chairman of the Sharjah Consultative Council. He now chairs Emirates Scholar's Board of Trustees, bringing his public-service experience to the Center's work in scientific research and international academic cooperation.
His keynote, "Designing Tomorrow: Infrastructure, Sustainability, and National Transformation," examined how public policy and resilient infrastructure shape national development. In its coverage of the conference, Emirates Scholar Center for Research and Studies highlighted his emphasis on using AI to improve national projects, strengthen climate resilience and support sustainable economic growth.
In his remarks, H.E. connected the UAE’s investment in advanced, sustainable infrastructure and forward-looking policy with the opportunities presented by AI. He highlighted AI’s potential to improve the efficiency of national projects, strengthen resilience to climate challenges and support sustainable economic growth for future generations.
Following His Excellency’s keynote, Dr. Hazem Ali, Founder and CEO of Skytells, continued the discussion by focusing on sustainability at the organizational level. He thanked His Excellency for joining the dialogue and reflected on the challenge of building businesses that can endure.
Dr. Ali addressed the importance of continuity and sustainability in his own keynote:
I would like to personally thank His Excellency for joining this important dialogue. As a member of the Coalition for Sustainable AI, Skytells believes sustainability is essential to lasting success. Starting a business is one challenge. Building an organization that can sustain its work over time is another.
Together, the two keynotes connected national development priorities with the responsibilities of the organizations that help deliver them. His Excellency addressed infrastructure, public policy and the role of AI in national projects; Dr. Ali brought the discussion to the challenge of building a business capable of enduring over time. This gave the conference’s wider conversations on AI a practical frame: progress depends both on national vision and on organizations able to turn that vision into lasting results.
Dtec hosted the conference as a strategic partner at the DTEC Auditorium in Dubai Digital Park. Dubai Silicon Oasis, which describes its development in terms of the "Middle East's Silicon Valley," is home to startups, multinational businesses, and research and education institutions. Participation by Dtec and DSO leadership connected the international program with the technology community based there.
Relam: Skytells' AI workspace
Skytells announced Relam at the conference, introducing a workspace for research, creation and collaboration. The product brings the company's AI infrastructure into an application for individuals and teams working with information, software and creative media.
Relam combines web and document research with writing, coding, and image, video and music creation. Projects and a shared library organize conversations, files and outputs. Agents, skills, connected applications and scheduled tasks support work that continues across sessions.
Built on Skytells infrastructure, Relam incorporates TrueFusion, Mera and BeatFusion alongside supported provider models. Its published capabilities include governed model routing, account and project permissions, and controls for memory, connections and sharing. Access to model families varies by plan and deployment.
Further product information is available at Relam.ai.
Opening Skytells’ Enterprise System Design Reference
Dr. Hazem Ali authored and published the Enterprise System Design Reference as an open-source resource for engineers working on complex systems. At CognitionX Emirates, he announced that Skytells would contribute its internal enterprise systems design materials to the repository for engineers designing and operating enterprise and sovereign systems.
The Enterprise System Design Reference covers the architecture and operation of complex systems, including distributed systems, data and retrieval, AI control planes and inference, high-performance computing, model lifecycle, security, reliability, governance, and edge deployments. It brings these areas into full architectural reviews, with attention to real traffic, partial failure, security scrutiny, and changing requirements.
In his keynote, Dr. Ali connected the announcement to the capabilities required to build sovereign systems:
In the era of AI, a nation’s sovereignty depends on its ability to design, secure and operate the systems its institutions rely on. Governments play an important role in advancing technology adoption and building the expertise this requires. Yet engineers still need better practical resources for this work; too much system-design learning focuses on interviews rather than systems in production. I authored and open-sourced the Enterprise System Design guide to help address that gap. Effective immediately, Skytells will contribute its private enterprise systems design materials to the repository, giving engineers access to the company’s guidance on designing and operating these systems.
The repository is organized as a course and architectural reference, taking engineers from foundational concepts through the design and operation of production systems. Its curriculum covers system design foundations; data and retrieval; AI control planes and inference serving; compute and high-performance computing; model lifecycle; security and safety; operations and governance; edge and hybrid deployments; and complete system-design case studies.
The lessons focus on decisions teams must make in practice: how identity and data access are controlled, how capacity and failure are handled, how AI models and tools are governed, and how a system can be observed, changed and audited. They connect these decisions to design artifacts, including architecture and trust boundaries, request and recovery flows, capacity assumptions, security controls and review records.
Alongside Microsoft’s Azure Well-Architected Framework, which the course uses as a recurring review lens, the repository will house Skytells’ own engineering principles, curriculum and architectural references for enterprise, AI and sovereign systems. This gives practitioners an established framework for reviewing workloads and a focused body of Skytells guidance on the design choices, controls and operations those systems require.
Building on H.E. Dr. Abdullah Belhaif Al Nuaimi’s keynote on sustainability and national development, Dr. Hazem connected long-term progress to the resilience of the systems behind it. Mission-critical systems cannot afford to say “sorry” after failure: milliseconds matter, and the architecture must account for disruption, attack, and recovery before services are at risk. By contributing its internal design materials to the reference, Skytells aims to strengthen the engineering expertise needed to advance the UAE’s AI ambitions and develop the capabilities prioritized in its AI Strategy 2031.
Advanced expertise shared through live technical sessions
CognitionX, Skytells and their partners convened internationally recognized specialists and senior executives to share enterprise and sovereign technology expertise. Live demonstrations and advanced sessions were a substantive part of that exchange, giving delegates access to the methods and reasoning behind security and architecture decisions.
Seyfallah Tagrerout, Microsoft Regional Director, Microsoft MVP in Security and CEO of STC Consulting SARL, delivered an advanced enterprise cybersecurity session. His session covered identity security, Zero Trust and Microsoft Entra ID, including a live attack-chain demonstration and a step-by-step approach to hardening access. These subjects addressed a practical requirement of sovereign infrastructure: maintaining control over identities, permissions and security operations.
Dr. Ali, a Microsoft AI MVP and Distinguished AI & ML Engineer / Architect, contributed to the opening session, "Initializing the Future," and presented "Beyond the Boundaries: Building a Sovereign Enterprise AI Stack." The latter examined models, agents and SDKs within an environment governed by private networks, identity controls and observability. It addressed where AI runs, what data it can access, which tools it can invoke and how its actions are traced.
In "In Action: Hacking the Silicon Behind AI," Dr. Ali examined GPU architectures, memory hierarchies, kernel scheduling, interconnect fabrics and inference runtimes. He also contributed to "Ask the Experts: AI, Infrastructure & Security." These sessions extended the discussion of AI security into the infrastructure that executes models and isolates workloads.
Representing Microsoft, Lee Stott, Principal Cloud Advocate Manager, presented "Empowering Developers with Next-Gen AI." His session explored model choice, agent frameworks, tool connections through the Model Context Protocol, and enterprise governance and observability, using Microsoft Foundry and GitHub Copilot as practical examples.
Healthcare, public-sector adoption and production engineering
Ben Leane, Enterprise AI Architect at Microsoft, and Shabnam Sarjami addressed AI in health through the development of a personal health product, taking it from concept to a working experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot.
Public-sector experience added another perspective on adoption. A session on the UK Government's cross-government AI coding assistant programme covered 2,500 licences across more than 50 public-sector organisations. Contributions from Digital Egypt addressed human-centric intelligent systems and measurable impact.
The wider program examined privacy protections for prompts and responses, automated security posture, edge AI containment and threat detection in regulated healthcare. Engineering sessions covered data platforms, retrieval-augmented generation, AI gateways, observability and MLOps, as well as neural network architectures beyond Transformers and AI-assisted coding in production.
The public-sector and healthcare examples placed the technical sessions in an operational context, covering the move from initial development to adoption across organizations.
Connecting global AI research with operational experience
For Skytells, the conference brought its work in AI research, enterprise systems and digital infrastructure into direct discussion with the institutions and practitioners deploying AI. Data access, reliability, auditability and control over autonomous actions were recurring technical concerns across the program.
These questions are relevant to Skytells' research into agent security, LLM memory architecture, trust boundaries, AI bias and AI-assisted software development. Its LAAF research, for example, examines logic-layer attacks on agentic LLM systems. As agents use memory, retrieval and external tools, their security depends on how information and permissions persist across interactions, as well as on individual model responses.
The international participation gave researchers and engineers an opportunity to compare these questions across different infrastructure environments, data restrictions and institutional requirements. That exchange is valuable to research because it exposes the conditions under which proposed methods must work. It also gives practitioners access to research questions that may affect the systems they are already operating.
Emirates Scholar's participation added an institutional research perspective alongside the conference's government and industry contributions. The open release of the Enterprise System Design guide gives this exchange a resource that remains available to engineers and researchers after the event.
Sustainability and industry collaboration
Skytells is a member of the Coalition for Sustainable AI, having announced its membership in April 2026. Co-initiated by France with the United Nations Environment Programme and the International Telecommunication Union, the coalition brings companies, research institutions and public organizations together around environmentally sustainable AI and the UN's 2030 Agenda.
Within AI infrastructure, resource efficiency depends on decisions such as model selection, workload scheduling, hardware utilization and deployment architecture. Those engineering considerations give practical substance to the sustainability discussion that ran through the conference.
Skytells also maintains a strategic relationship with NVIDIA focused on hardware acceleration, advanced GPU computing and research into optimizing large language models for NVIDIA GPUs. This work complements the company's focus on the performance and operating requirements of AI infrastructure.
Partners and the next edition
Microsoft, OWS, Experts Live Emirates and Skytells participated as platinum sponsors. The partner community included OWS Automotive, Experts Live and Navix Logistics, alongside Dtec as strategic partner and host.
Skytells thanks the distinguished guests, institutional leaders, partners, speakers and delegates for their contributions to CognitionX Emirates 2026. The series is scheduled to continue with CognitionX Tunisia 2026 on December 5-6 in Tunis.
About Skytells, Inc.
Founded in 2012, Skytells is an AI research and infrastructure company developing models, platforms and systems for intelligent applications. Its work spans machine learning, enterprise architecture, cloud and on-premise deployment, and GPU infrastructure. The company is led by Founder and CEO Dr. Hazem Ali.
For more information, visit skytells.ai.
About CognitionX
CognitionX is an international conference series on artificial intelligence, cloud computing and emerging technologies, founded by Dr. Hazem Ali and powered by Skytells. Its programs bring government leaders, executives, researchers and technical practitioners together for knowledge exchange.
Media inquiries: Skytells Newsroom | CognitionX Press & Media.