QIA sees AI as ‘wonderful’ technology in some applications: CEO

The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) is examining artificial intelligence (AI) as a theme of investments and sees it as a "wonderful technology" in some applications, CEO Mansoor Ebrahim al-Mahmoud said Tuesday.
Participating in a panel session at Qatar Economic Forum powered by Bloomberg he said, “From time to time we tell our teams to look at those things that are important and are coming. Make sure we build a portfolio that tap into this field. For example, the same thing for climate change, digitalisation, life science. These are long term themes.”
In terms of AI, al-Mahmoud said: “We have been investing there. I think the level of using the AI in terms of extreme in that the machine will do everything...personally I have a mixed feeling about it. I feel we need some sort of legislation that could manage this.
“But it is a wonderful technology in some applications such as marketing, or understanding businesses.
“We (Qatar) are one of the leading countries in the region in terms of digitilisation and connectivity infrastructure that we have. We would like to really tap into this as a strength of the country to make sure that we can attract and invest in technologies such as Fintech.”
QIA, al-Mahmoud said, has been very active in private and public credit over the past two years.
"Companies that have been feeling the tide, they have good business models but they have an issue with their balance sheet because of this acceleration of hikes of interest rates," al-Mahmoud noted.
"So normally institutions like us, which are very liquid, very long term, have a risk appetite in these types of investment. I would advise that for the next maybe one year, the credit space would be an interesting space to deploy some investment," al-Mahmoud said.
Al-Mahmoud also expects the Adani Group to get through "smoothly".
Earlier, the Indian conglomerate was pummelled by a US short seller (Hindenburg Research) critical report and lost billions of dollars in market value.