Dead Sea, May 16 (Petra) – Industry pioneers and tech executives convened Saturday, at the Tawasol Forum 2026 to analyze the Kingdom's positioning within high-growth, deep-tech sectors. The panel, titled "Where Do Jordan’s Opportunities Lie in Emerging Tech Sectors," was moderated by Abdullah Kafawin and focused heavily on realigning human capital, building digital infrastructure, and expanding into global markets to transcend domestic scale limitations.

Deep Tech, Hardware, and the Rise of Physical AI Amjad Aryan, Founder and CEO of Beyond Limits, addressed the exponential velocity of technological development, noting estimates that global human knowledge now doubles every 24 hours due to artificial intelligence acceleration. He argued that establishing a robust core in AI is a prerequisite for Jordan to compete globally in deep tech. Aryan challenged the conventional narrative surrounding automation and structural unemployment, stating that the dialogue must shift from fear of job replacement to leveraging AI as a computational partner to solve highly specialized, domain-specific problems.

Aryan outlined a massive macroeconomic shift in the drone and autonomous systems market, which projections suggest could scale from approximately 100 billion dollars to nearly 25 trillion dollars by 2050. While acknowledging Jordan's current progress, he emphasized that the domestic sector must transition from basic hardware assembly to advanced software programming and technical R&D. Furthermore, he noted that while generative AI has altered linguistic landscapes, the next phase of global disruption belongs to "Physical AI" – the convergence of robotics, smart systems, and real-world interactions. This transition necessitates an immediate restructuring of academic curricula from primary schools through higher education.

Financial Infrastructure and Human Capital Defenses Maha Bahou, CEO of the Jordan Payments and Clearing Company (JoPACC), highlighted the operational success of the "CliQ" instant payment system as an example of how foundational digital infrastructure unlocks downstream innovation. She noted that a mature fintech infrastructure creates predictable ecosystems for both local innovators and institutional investors.

Addressing human capital, Bahou warned that if human intellect is left uncultivated, AI will replace routine roles. Conversely, deliberate investment in human capabilities turns technology into a cognitive aid rather than a labor substitute. She reviewed JoPACC's university programs, which bridge the gap between academic outputs and commercial labor demands by embedding students directly into complex problem-solving hackathons.

Scale, Arabic LLMs, and Global Market Export Nour Al Hassan, Founder and CEO of Tarjama and Arabic.ai, detailed her firms' progression from traditional translation services to the development of indigenous AI translation engines and Arabic Large Language Models (LLMs). The company leverages a vast network of over 35,000 data annotators and translators alongside a core team of 60 localization engineers based in Jordan to feed intellectual property into global markets. Al Hassan stated that regional expansion was an operational necessity driven by the limited size of the domestic market, reinforcing that economic policy must pivot to grant Jordanian talent international exposure and clear career trajectories.

Reinforcing the scaling thesis, Oday Salamin, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Crown Prince Foundation and Founder of iMena Group, outlined the evolutionary trajectory of tech from SMS text messaging and the desktop internet to mobile computing and modern AI frameworks. Salamin argued that the barrier to entry for building tech enterprises has drastically decreased due to low capital expenditure requirements and democratization of data online. Consequently, the real challenge lies in continuous self-education and adopting a global-first mindset from inception. Salamin concluded that regional and global expansion is vital not only to overcome regulatory and legislative bottlenecks but also to retain high-tier domestic talent by providing them with globally competitive growth and learning environments.

//Petra// AA