IMPORTANT: Building A5 (not Technohub 1) – Dubai Digital Park, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Parking at Gate 5: the first 2 hours are free, then parking charges apply.
CognitionX Emirates 2026 is a premier technology event focused on AI, cloud, security, and modern software engineering, bringing together Microsoft MVPs, architects, developers, AI engineers, cloud professionals, students, and technology leaders to share real-world knowledge and practical expertise. Built around deep technical sessions, hands-on learning, and expert-led discussions, CognitionX creates a high-impact space for the community to explore Microsoft technologies, production-ready AI systems, secure cloud architectures, and the future of intelligent applications. As part of the global CognitionX event series, it supports knowledge sharing, professional growth, and community collaboration across regions, helping attendees gain practical skills, connect with experts, and move from technical awareness to real implementation.
Attendees will also have the chance to connect directly with Microsoft MVPs, industry experts, senior engineers, solution architects, and executives from leading technology companies, creating valuable opportunities for learning, collaboration, mentorship, and professional growth.
Agenda
Times in Dubai time (GMT+4)
8:30 AM
10:00 AM
10:15 AM
10:45 AM
11:10 AM
11:40 AM
12:20 PM
1:30 PM
2:30 PM
3:50 PM
All sessions
Times in Dubai time
8:30 AM to 10:00 AMBreak Area
Welcome and registration
10:00 AM to 10:15 AMAuditorium
Keynote
CognitionX Emirates 2026 Keynote: Initializing the Future
10:15 AM to 10:45 AMAuditorium
Designing Tomorrow: Infrastructure, Sustainability, and National Transformation
Explore how visionary infrastructure, sustainability, and forward-looking policies are shaping resil...
10:45 AM to 11:10 AMAuditorium
KeyNote
11:10 AM to 11:40 AMAuditorium
Beyond the Boundaries: Building a Sovereign Enterprise AI Stack
Building sovereign enterprise AI is not about putting a model behind a wall. It is about designing the full boundary around intelligence: where it runs, what data it can reach, which tools it can use, how developers integrate with it, and how every critical action can be governed and traced.
It is far more architectural than most people think. Agents, deployed models, SDKs, private networks, identity, governance, and observability all have to work together as one controlled enterprise AI stack built for real production environments.
11:40 AM to 12:25 PMAuditorium
AI Squads – How Multi-Agent Systems Turn Enterprise Data into Action
Using Microsoft Fabric to orchestrate specialised AI agents across analytics, operations and business workflows
The session shows how organisations can move beyond single purpose copilots to teams of specialised AI agents grounded in trusted enterprise data, governance and business context. It includes the latest announcements and about half the time is live demos.
Agenda (45 min)
Why single agents stall: the limits of one-assistant designs, and the anatomy of an "AI squad"
The foundation: grounding, orchestration, shared context and governance; Microsoft Fabric (OneLake, semantic models, real-time data) as the shared intelligence layer; what's new
Demo 1 - Build the Analyst: create and ground a Fabric data agent, inspect its reasoning and evaluate it against ground truth
Demo 2 - The squad in action: an orchestrator coordinates specialist agents to answer one business question, and two users get answers scoped to their own access
Demo 3 - From answering to acting: an operations agent detects an anomaly on live data, investigates the root cause and recommends an action for human approval in Microsoft Teams
Trust, takeaways and Q&A: identity, policy, observability and practical architecture patterns
Audience: AI and data leaders, enterprise architects, data engineers and AI developers (Level 200–300). No prior Fabric experience is needed.
11:40 AM to 12:25 PMBoard Room (3rd Floor)
Autonomous Offensive Security: Why the Engagement Model Is Ending
The unit of attack has become smaller and faster than the unit of assessment. Penetration testing tied to consulting cycles and headcount can no longer keep pace. This session makes the case for agentic offensive security, platforms that reason, plan, and execute like a human red team, but at compute economics. Using Aegis as the working example, we explore what it means to have reproducible adversarial work, full audit trails on every token and tool call, and attacker-grade coverage on every pull request. For CISOs, engineering leaders, and security architects rethinking what an offensive security programme looks like in 2026.
12:20 PM to 1:30 PMBreak Area
Coffee Break & Networking
1:30 PM to 2:30 PMAuditorium
Empowering Developers with Next-Gen AI
AI is fundamentally reshaping how software is built, moving from single‑model applications to multi‑model, agent‑driven systems that operate across the entire software lifecycle. In this session, we explore how AI agents are becoming first‑class teammates, planning, coding, testing, deploying, and operating software alongside developers. As organizations adopt agentic architectures, developers face new challenges around orchestration, data integration, observability, security, and deployment across cloud, edge, and local environments.
This talk introduces the paradigm shift toward AI app and agent factories, outlining the essential building blocks required to succeed: flexible model choice, agent frameworks, connected data and tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and enterprise‑grade governance with end‑to‑end observability. Using real‑world examples, we’ll show how platforms like Microsoft Foundry and GitHub Copilot enable teams to build, deploy, and govern intelligent, action‑oriented agents at scale, accelerating innovation while maintaining trust, safety, and control.
1:30 PM to 2:30 PMBoard Room (3rd Floor)
Engineering AI-Augmented Threat Detection for Regulated Healthcare at Scale
Healthcare organizations must protect sensitive patient data while keeping pace with an increasingly complex threat landscape — a challenge that demands more than theoretical models. This session walks through the engineering behind a production AI-driven security system deployed at HealthSec, showing how machine learning was integrated into a HIPAA-compliant environment to materially improve threat detection while reducing false positives compared to legacy signature-based tooling.
Drawing on real-world deployment across multiple healthcare facilities, the talk breaks down three implementation phases builders can apply directly: (1) data preprocessing and feature engineering under PHI anonymization constraints, (2) model training using federated learning to preserve data locality across distributed healthcare networks, and (3) production deployment with real-time monitoring for high-volume security event processing.
Beyond the architecture, we'll cover the engineering trade-offs of operating AI in regulated environments: proven approaches to model explainability that satisfy both engineering and compliance stakeholders, automated compliance reporting that cut audit preparation overhead, and measurable gains in mean time to detection (MTTD). We'll also share how AI-augmented detection improved SOC team efficiency, freeing analysts to focus on high-priority threats while preserving the audit trails healthcare regulations require.
This session is built for AI/ML engineers, security architects, and infrastructure leaders looking for a real-world, engineering-first blueprint for deploying AI security solutions in heavily regulated, enterprise-scale environments.
AI coding can make development much faster, but once it reaches production, new bottlenecks appear. In this talk, I will cover the business side of AI-assisted development: unclear specifications, inconsistent UI, conflicts between different AI agents, and overengineering. I will explain why writing code is no longer the main problem, and what teams need to control to turn fast AI-generated development into a reliable product.
8:30 AM to 9:30 AMAuditorium
Welcome & registration
9:30 AM to 10:15 AMBoard Room (3rd Floor)
Real-Time Streaming and Intelligent Decision Systems for Telecom at National Scale
Modern telecommunications infrastructure handles millions of customer interactions, network events, and billing updates every day, yet most of the systems managing them were built for a different era. Batch architectures that aggregate data overnight cannot detect fraud in seconds, reroute a customer call intelligently, or keep distributed systems synchronized during a live migration. The result is degraded customer experience, operational blind spots, and infrastructure that struggles under peak load.
This talk presents scalable, event-driven streaming architectures and intelligent runtime decision systems purpose-built for national-scale telecom operations, offering engineering patterns relevant to any team building intelligent, high-throughput systems. Drawing on applied engineering work across distributed message brokers, stateful stream processing, and incremental synchronization frameworks, it addresses the core design challenges practitioners face: managing backpressure under fluctuating workloads, maintaining state consistency at scale, and executing phased migrations without service interruption.
A central focus is real-time customer routing optimization. Telecom operations route millions of interactions daily across segmented workforces, regional specializations, and dynamic capacity pools. The session introduces a distributed assignment model that continuously minimizes a composite cost function across workload factor, expected resolution time, and current capacity load, with practical discussion of how IVR integration, distributed caching, and asynchronous processing reduce latency during live interactions.
Attendees will leave with a framework for evaluating where streaming architectures deliver the most impact, how to design hybrid systems that pair continuous processing with batch analytics for historical depth, and how to embed secure CI/CD controls across distributed pipelines, patterns directly transferable to teams building intelligent, production-grade systems at scale.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation transformed how AI systems access knowledge. But what if the real bottleneck isn't finding information—it's finding, securing, and governing the right tools?
As organizations build increasingly capable AI agents, tool sprawl becomes a major challenge. Teams create duplicate integrations, credentials are scattered across applications, governance becomes inconsistent, and every new agent requires yet another round of tool wiring. Microsoft Foundry Toolbox introduces a different approach: curate tools once, expose them through a single MCP-compatible endpoint, and let agents dynamically discover and use the capabilities they need.
In this session, we'll explore why Foundry Toolbox can be thought of as "RAG for tools", a centralized, governed, and discoverable layer for APIs, MCP servers, search services, code interpreters, and other agent capabilities. You'll learn how Toolbox enables reusable tool catalogs, centralized authentication, policy enforcement, versioning, and seamless consumption from any MCP-compatible agent framework.
Through practical demos and architecture walkthroughs, we'll show how to reduce integration complexity, improve governance, and accelerate agent development by connecting agents to a single endpoint instead of dozens of individual services. Whether you're building enterprise copilots, multi-agent systems, or AI-powered applications, you'll leave with a new mental model for tool orchestration and a blueprint for scaling agent ecosystems without creating tool chaos
10:10 AM to 10:50 AMBoard Room (3rd Floor)
From Content to Intelligence: Building the Knowledge Layer That Powers AI Agents
AI agents are only as effective as the knowledge layer that supports them and building that layer requires more than theory.
In this session, we dive into the technical foundations that make enterprise content usable for AI‑driven experiences. You’ll explore how knowledge is stored, structured, and accessed across SharePoint sites, OneDrive, and SharePoint Embedded containers, and what those choices mean for authentication, permissions, compliance, performance, and scale.
We’ll walk through practical patterns for content modeling, metadata design, and retrieval optimization that improve grounding quality and response relevance. You’ll also learn how these content sources integrate with Copilot Studio, including how agents ground answers, respect security trimming, and orchestrate workflows across Microsoft 365 services.
Through live demos, we’ll showcase SharePoint Embedded containers in real-world implementations and highlight tuning, governance, and operational strategies you can apply immediately when building secure, scalable AI‑native solutions.
Who should attend:
Developers, solution architects, and ISVs designing AI agents and copilots on top of Microsoft 365 content services.
10:50 AM to 11:10 AMBreak Area
Cofee break
11:10 AM to 11:50 AMAuditorium
Map Before Machine™: Engineering Pre-AI Sense-Making in Copilot Systems
Every major AI interface (from ChatGPT to Microsoft 365 Copilot) opens to a blank prompt field with no structure, no warm-up, and no invitation to THINK first.
When teams reach for generative AI before establishing internal clarity, automation bias is immediately triggered.
The brain stops reasoning, resulting in faster output, shallower thinking, and accumulating enterprise cognitive debt.
AI does not create clarity; it only refines what the HUMAN brings to it.
This session delivers an architectural and workflow blueprint for Map Before Machine™, a deployable pre-AI interaction protocol grounded in the peer-reviewed framework, Somagraphic Learning™ and it's (Attempt → Map → Refine) sequence.
Attendees will learn how to engineer an upstream pre-AI cognitive onboarding layer into Copilot and developer workflows:
1. The Pre-AI Prompt Gateway:
How forcing users to build a timestamped, visual-spatial artifact and claiming directional relationships: ([Concept A] affects [Concept B] because [Reason] ), transforms users from passive output receivers into critical evaluators.
2) From Generation-Based to Gap-Based Prompting:
How pre-AI mapping eliminates prompt drift, reduces excessive prompting, and optimizes token consumption.
3) Architecture:
Practical patterns for integrating pre-AI visual canvases into Microsoft Copilot extensions, internal developer portals, and enterprise LMS platforms to capture verifiable human intent before model invocation.
4) Governance & Verification:
Concrete metrics to audit human-in-the-loop validation, protect domain competence, and maintain compliance in high-stakes environments.
Key Takeaway
Attendees will leave with a production-ready pre-AI framework to transition enterprise Copilot implementations from passive generation engines into structured, human-grounded thinking partners.
Website: https://soulfullearningwithai.carrd.co/
Substack (Soulful Learning with AI): https://substack.com/@devikatoprani
Modern work is evolving from tool-based productivity to AI-assisted collaboration. In this session, we explore Microsoft Copilot as a true digital coworker—one that helps you think, create, analyze, and communicate more effectively across your daily workflows.
Through a live, end-to-end walkthrough, attendees will see how Copilot integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 apps such as Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to assist in real-time work scenarios. From drafting emails and summarizing meetings to generating reports and analyzing data, this session demonstrates how Copilot actively participates in work rather than just supporting it.
We will also showcase practical enterprise use cases, highlighting how teams can collaborate with Copilot to improve speed, accuracy, and decision-making across departments like finance, HR, and operations.
Whether you are an individual contributor or part of a large enterprise team, this session will help you understand how to effectively work alongside Copilot as your everyday AI coworker.
Key Takeaways
Understand how Microsoft Copilot functions as a digital coworker.
See Copilot in action across Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams.
Learn real-world workflows for daily productivity enhancement.
Explore how Copilot supports collaboration and decision-making.
Gain practical tips for maximizing value from Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Audience Level: Beginner
Target Audience: Business Professionals, Microsoft 365 Users, Team Leads, Managers, and Productivity Enthusiasts.
This session presents a practical AI Reference Architecture that enables organizations to design, deploy, and operate enterprise-grade AI solutions securely and at scale. Attendees will explore the essential building blocks of a modern AI ecosystem, including data platforms, Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), vector databases, AI gateways, agent frameworks, APIs, observability, security, governance, and MLOps/LLMOps.
Drawing on real-world enterprise architecture principles, the session demonstrates how to integrate AI capabilities into existing business and technology landscapes while maintaining compliance, resilience, and operational excellence. Participants will gain actionable guidance for building AI platforms that support multiple business units, accelerate innovation, and reduce technical complexity.
Whether your organization is starting its AI journey or scaling AI across the enterprise, this session provides a blueprint for creating a secure, governed, and future-ready AI architecture.
12:30 PM to 1:10 PMAuditorium
PromptArena: Gamified Prompt Engineering for Everyone
High-energy session where we turn prompt engineering into a competitive game! PromptArena is a gamified learning experience that teaches participants how to write powerful AI prompts through real-time challenges, scoring, and live interaction.
In just one session, you’ll learn how to craft smarter prompts, improve AI outputs, and understand the techniques behind effective prompt design, all while competing, collaborating, and having fun.
Perfect for beginners and experts alike, this session will show how gamification can transform the way teams learn and apply AI skills across Azure OpenAI, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the Power Platform.
1:10 PM to 1:35 PMBreak Area
Coffee break
1:25 PM to 2:05 PMBoard Room (3rd Floor)
Squad Goals: Orchestrating Multi-Agent Engineering Teams in Your Repo
Single-agent coding tops out fast. A single AI is a great sprinter; it cannot plan a marathon. Multi-agent Squad workflows go further by letting specialized agents plan, implement, test, review, and recover inside a structured engineering ceremony. In this demo-driven session, Microsoft Global Black Belt Marco Antonio Silva shows how a repository can run with an always-on agentic crew: planning a feature, executing with clear handoffs, enforcing review and merge gates, and fixing a broken build. Attendees will leave knowing when to reach for a squad instead of one agent, how to define roles, and which guardrails make multi-agent engineering usable in enterprise teams.
2:00 PM to 2:35 PMAuditorium
Building the Future of Personal Health with Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot
What does it take to turn an ambitious health-tech idea into a real digital product—and how can AI support every stage of that journey?
In this practical, story-led session, Shabnam Sarjami and Ben Lean will take attendees behind the scenes of developing an AI-powered health and wellness app that aims to make personal health information more connected, understandable, and useful.
Using the app as a real-world case study, they will demonstrate an AI-first approach to product creation. Shabnam will show how Microsoft 365 Copilot supported ideation, user research, scenario development, feature definition, project planning, and documentation. Ben will then demonstrate how GitHub Copilot helped move the concept toward execution through architecture, prototyping, coding, testing, debugging, and iteration.
The session will follow the journey from identifying a health-related challenge to shaping a product concept and building a working experience, while highlighting the essential roles of human judgment, privacy, security, and responsible AI.
Attendees will leave with a practical framework for combining Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot to move from idea to plan to execution—and confidently bring their own ideas to life.
2:00 PM to 2:35 PMBoard Room (3rd Floor)
AI-Enabled Incident Management for Resilient B2B Payment Platforms
B2B payment systems facilitate $180 trillion in annual transactions globally, but growing platform complexity creates significant operational vulnerabilities. This session examines how payment organizations can build more resilient incident management capabilities using scalable operational frameworks, advanced monitoring, AI/ML-driven anomaly detection, and automated response.
Drawing on empirical analysis of 127 organizations across 23 countries, survey data from 847 payment professionals, longitudinal studies of 34 critical incidents, and 18-month pilot implementations across 18 organizations, the research demonstrates why traditional IT incident management approaches often struggle with the complexity of modern payment environments.
Participants will explore practical patterns for enterprise-scale incident management, including AI/ML anomaly detection that achieved 78% prediction accuracy with six-hour advance warning and automated mechanisms that resolved 67% of infrastructure incidents autonomously within 4.3 minutes, compared with 2.8 hours for manual resolution.
Case studies show how organizations applying these practices reduced incident frequency by 67%, improved mean time to resolution from 6.8 to 1.4 hours, enhanced regulatory compliance metrics by 89%, and achieved 287% ROI within 24 months.
The session concludes with a five-level maturity framework that helps teams benchmark current capabilities and build an evidence-based roadmap from reactive incident response toward increasingly automated, resilient, and self-healing payment operations.
2:35 PM to 3:15 PMAuditorium
Deep dive into the Zero Trust journey : Securing your MS Entra ID with our Zero Trust Approach !
Zero Trust Principles in Enterprise: Where are we today and why accelerate adoption?
Why and how to strengthen your MS Entra ID tenant starting tomorrow? Our 'step-by-step' approach"
The benefits of adopting Zero Trust principles to secure the enterprise are numerous. For over 4 years now, the pandemic has led to an increase in cyber risk, prompting many companies to consider adopting it or adopting it faster than planned.
In this presentation aimed at both security managers, architects, and IT managers, we will review the latest MS Entra ID Zero Trust updates and security issues related to hybrid AD & MS Entra environments.
We will also discuss why it is essential to start strengthening your MS Entra tenant now, in addition to AD On-Premise.
The session's themes will include:
• Zero Trust Reminder: What is it, and where are we today with Microsoft?
• Examples of several Zero Trust approaches
• Focus on AD / MS Entra ID security issues
• Introduction of the 'MS Entra ID Kill Chain' with Live Demo ✨
• Our approach to MS Entra ID Hardening 👌 in 'step-by-step' mode with ZTNA approach through Global Secure Access ( Internet and Private access ) the new era of Zero Trust !
• A soft and gradual action plan to complete the Zero Trust journey with a secure MS Entra ✨
3:15 PM to 3:50 PMAuditorium
Azure Security: Building the Castle That's Never Finished
The Cloud Castle began as a small conceptual talk at Schuberg Philis, in Schiphol. Then it refused to sit still. It got rewritten over busy weekends and too many "zwarte koffies". Retold, anonymised, rewritten again. Every pass made it sharper, and a little more alive.
So it travelled! CognitionX at Microsoft Cairo. AICD at Microsoft Singapore. An honourable mention on the Microsoft MVP blog. The story kept living.
And then it came home. Back to the same building and same room where it all started, carried there by Global Azure Heroes.
Now the castle gets fortified even more.
This is the current build. We treat your Azure estate as a castle that is never finished. Identity as the gate. Zero Trust as the rule that nobody walks the halls unchecked. Terraform as the blueprint, so the walls go up the same way every time.
Then the hard part. The doors you never drew. How AI adoption quietly punches new openings, why managed identities and diagnostic settings are load-bearing walls people treat as decoration, and what a blast radius really looks like when one corner falls.
You leave with a practitioner's checklist, not a vendor pitch. A castle you keep building in daylight, with the gate open and the guards awake.
It survived this long because it never pretended to be finished. Neither should yours.
Takeaways
Why "secure" is a verb in the cloud, and how to design for permanent construction.
Identity, Zero Trust and IaC as the three load-bearing walls, with the failure mode for each.
A blast radius lens for AI tooling and supply chain risk, so you can reason about which corner falls first
3:30 PM to 4:10 PMBoard Room (3rd Floor)
Beyond the AI Hype: A Practical Framework for Deciding When AI Truly Adds Value
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming central to digital transformation strategies across industries. As AI capabilities continue to expand, many organizations are eager to integrate intelligent technologies into their products, services, and internal operations. However, this surge in enthusiasm has also created a technology-driven adoption pattern in which AI is applied to problems without carefully evaluating whether it is the most appropriate solution. The challenge for modern engineering and product teams is not simply implementing AI, but determining when its use is truly justified.
This session explores the growing gap between technological possibility and practical application in the adoption of artificial intelligence. While machine learning and advanced data-driven systems can unlock powerful capabilities, many challenges that organizations attempt to solve with AI can be addressed more effectively through well-designed software architectures, structured workflows, or conventional analytics. Recognizing the difference between problems that genuinely require AI and those that do not is essential for building sustainable, production-grade systems that scale with confidence.
The session introduces a practical framework for evaluating whether AI is the right approach for a given problem. Key considerations include the nature of available data, the complexity of patterns that must be detected, the need for interpretability, and the operational environment in which the system will function. AI tends to deliver the strongest outcomes in domains involving large-scale pattern recognition, predictive analysis, personalization, and the interpretation of unstructured information.
At the same time, engineering teams must account for the operational responsibilities that accompany AI systems, including data pipelines, model training, monitoring, and ongoing maintenance. A disciplined approach to AI adoption balances innovation with practicality, ensuring that intelligent technologies are deployed where they meaningfully improve outcomes while avoiding unnecessary complexity. By focusing on clear problem definitions and rigorous evaluation, teams can move beyond the hype cycle and build AI-powered systems that deliver lasting, measurable value at enterprise scale.
3:50 PM to 4:25 PMAuditorium
Building an AI-Ready Workforce: The Missing Link in Government AI Transformation
Governments worldwide are investing heavily in Artificial Intelligence to modernise public services, improve operational efficiency, and enhance citizen experiences. Yet many AI initiatives fail to deliver their expected outcomes, not because of technology limitations, but because organisations overlook the most critical factor in successful AI adoption: people.
While discussions often focus on AI platforms, models, governance, and infrastructure, the real challenge lies in preparing employees, leaders, and stakeholders to work effectively alongside AI. Without the right skills, culture, trust, and change management strategy, even the most advanced AI programmes struggle to move beyond pilot projects.
In this session, we will explore how government and public sector organisations can build an AI-ready workforce capable of embracing AI responsibly and confidently. Drawing on practical experiences from AI adoption, Microsoft Copilot enablement, workforce transformation programmes, and regulated industry engagements, attendees will learn what it takes to create sustainable organisational change in the age of AI.
Key topics include:
1.Why workforce readiness is the biggest predictor of AI adoption success
2. Common barriers to AI adoption in government and regulated environments
3. Building AI literacy across technical and non-technical employees
4. Creating AI champions and change networks
5. Balancing innovation with governance, security, and compliance requirements
6. Developing trust, transparency, and responsible AI practices
Measuring adoption, engagement, and business impact
7. Practical lessons learned from real-world AI transformation initiatives
Attendees will leave with a practical framework for building an AI-ready workforce that can accelerate AI adoption while maintaining the trust, accountability, and public service values expected within government organisations.
Whether you are a CIO, digital transformation leader, AI practitioner, policy maker, or public sector manager, this session will provide actionable insights and proven strategies to help your organisation move from AI experimentation to lasting organisational transformation
This event took place on 14–15 October 2026. Thank you to everyone who came, spoke, sponsored and volunteered.
21
speakers took the stage
30
sessions on the agenda
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