First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) is phasing its shift towards data-driven operations.

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First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) is accelerating its shift toward data-driven operations by hosting a virtual AI Agentathon in collaboration with Presight and with support from Microsoft.

The event, announced today, brought together internal teams and external participants to rapidly prototype and develop AI agents that tackle real-world banking challenges. Focus areas included trade finance, payments, client operations, compliance, and technology processes.

This Agentathon builds directly on FAB’s broader AI transformation. In February, the UAE’s largest bank revealed it had moved beyond pilots to embed agentic AI and intelligent automation across the enterprise. More than 30 agentic AI use cases are now in progress, supported by a modern data platform where over 90% of structured data is integrated and accessible to AI agents. The goal is to automate routine tasks, deliver faster insights, and improve both productivity and customer experience.

By running the Agentathon with Presight, an AI and big data analytics firm FAB partnered with earlier, the bank is fostering a culture of rapid innovation while identifying practical, production-ready solutions. Microsoft’s involvement provides additional cloud and AI tooling to support development.

For FAB, the initiative represents another step in its long-term strategy to become a more intelligent, agile institution. As one of the world’s safest and largest banks by assets, it is using AI not just for efficiency gains but to strengthen decision-making and risk intelligence in a competitive regional market.

The timing aligns with a wider industry trend: leading financial institutions are moving quickly from generative AI experiments to deploying autonomous agents that can act across systems and workflows. Events like this Agentathon help banks surface talent, test ideas at speed, and accelerate the path from concept to deployment.

No specific winning solutions or immediate implementation timelines were disclosed, but FAB indicated the exercise will feed directly into its ongoing AI roadmap.

This latest move reinforces FAB’s position as one of the most aggressive adopters of enterprise AI in the Middle East, signaling that agentic systems are no longer futuristic, they are becoming core infrastructure for modern banking operations.