R/GA is making its Middle East presence official. The creative innovation company has formally established a business in Abu Dhabi, turning more than a decade of work across the region into a permanent MENA hub to meet growing demand for AI, digital products, and customer experience.
Bertrand Morin will lead the new operation as Executive Director, MENA. R/GA says the Abu Dhabi office will serve clients across the wider region, with additional hiring underway and further expansion planned beginning in 2027.
The move comes as governments, financial institutions and technology companies across the Gulf continue investing heavily in AI infrastructure and digital transformation.
For R/GA, that creates an opening to bring more of its applied AI capabilities directly to market, including custom brand AI models, adaptive commerce experiences, and generative interfaces designed around individual user intent.
The agency is hardly new to the region.
R/GA has worked with organizations including G42, Wio Bank, National Bank of Kuwait, Banque Saudi Fransi, Emirates NBD and Bank Al Etihad, developing brand systems, digital products and customer experiences geared toward a mobile-first and increasingly AI-driven market.
Morin described the new office as less of an arrival than a formalization of work already well underway.
“We’re the region’s ‘newest oldest’ player, with the trust and the track record to prove it,” he said. “This region always moves forward, it adapts fast, has huge resilience, and bets on innovation, and that’s exactly how we work too.”
One recent example is R/GA’s work with G42, where the agency helped launch Alpha.G42.ai, which it describes as a generative interface designed to rethink how organizations interact with audiences in an agentic web environment.
Faheem Ahamed, G42’s Group Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, said the project reflected a broader shift taking place in Abu Dhabi. “The UAE is increasingly becoming a place where the next generation of ideas is not simply adopted, but imagined and built,” Ahamed said.
The expansion also comes amid broader change at R/GA.
Following its return to private independence in partnership with Truelink Capital, the company has been investing through a $50 million Innovation Fund focused on talent, technology and new capabilities.
That strategy recently included the acquisition of Addition, an AI system design and development studio, giving R/GA deeper technical capabilities around applied intelligence and system design.
“Independence has been transformative for R/GA,” said Robin Forbes, Global CEO. “It has given us the freedom to invest in new talent, build new capabilities, develop our own AI tools and products, and chart our own course.”
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Forbes said Abu Dhabi stood out because of the scale of sovereign investment and AI infrastructure being built in the region.
“We chose to invest in setting up in Abu Dhabi because of the sovereign ambition and the AI infrastructure being built here,” he said. “We’ve always been driven by the mission ‘to design the future, not the familiar,’ and that’s exactly what we hope to achieve in this market.”
R/GA’s MENA operation is already active, with plans to move into a dedicated office later this year. The agency is also hiring senior creative and delivery talent as it builds out the team.
For a company positioning itself around what it calls the “intelligence age,” Abu Dhabi offers something particularly attractive: a market where AI infrastructure, capital, and ambition are all moving at speed.
Now R/GA wants to be there permanently while that future gets built.
REEL 360 News wishes Bertrand the best of luck.
