From top left, clockwise, Bassel Kakish, CEO at Publicis Groupe Middle East & Turkey; Amit Jain, CEO at Luma AI; Jason Day, Head of EMEA at Luma AI; and Tareq Amin, CEO at HUMAIN.Publicis Groupe Middle East has strategically partnered with Luma AI, a frontier artificial intelligence (AI) company building multimodal artificial general intelligence (AGI), to support AI-driven advertising, creative production and serve as the preferred generative AI technology partner for the Groupe across Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region.
Through the partnership, Publicis Groupe Middle East will integrate Luma AI’s advanced generative video and multimodal AI technologies into creative and production workflows, enabling brands to deliver faster, more personalised, and culturally relevant advertising across markets and channels.
“This partnership reflects how we see the future of creativity in the region, where generative AI is not an add-on but embedded at the heart of how ideas are conceived, produced, and scaled,” said Bassel Kakish, CEO, Publicis Groupe Middle East & Turkey.
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Kakish added, “By partnering with Luma AI and HUMAIN, we are accelerating transformation across our creative systems, enabling our teams to deliver more ambitious, culturally grounded, and technologically advanced work, while helping our clients unlock a higher level of creativity, relevance, and impact across the region.”
Jason Day, Head of EMEA, Luma AI, added, “Advertising is entering a new era where creativity, intelligence, and production converge. Partnering with Publicis Groupe Middle East and HUMAIN allows us to embed generative video and multimodal AI directly into the creative process, unlocking speed, scale, and creative ambition for brands across MENA, while building AI systems that truly understand the region.”
Luma AI opens office in Riyadh; partners with Publicis Groupe and HUMAIN to help enhance Arabic-native AI systems
The partnership coincides with Luma AI’s announcement that it will open a dedicated office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, marking a significant expansion of its presence in the Middle East and furthering the acceleration of HUMAIN Create. For Luma AI, this office will serve as a regional hub for client engagement, partnerships and advanced AI development.
Luma AI’s Riyadh office will also deepen Luma AI’s partnership with HUMAIN and support ongoing development of the world’s first Saudi-built, Arabic-native foundation model to be deployed through HUMAIN Create, which HUMAIN’s generative AI initiative and platform that brings together advanced AI models, tools and infrastructure.
“This new office marks a major step forward in deepening our collaboration with Luma AI. Through HUMAIN Create, we are accelerating the development of Arabic-native, culturally fluent AI systems that enable creators, brands and organisations across the region,” said Tareq Amin, CEO, HUMAIN.
“Our collaboration with Luma AI is supported by frontier compute through Project Halo, a large-scale 2GW AI supercluster under development in Saudi Arabia that will provide frontier training and inference capacity to power next-generation generative AI applications at scale. Together, we are redefining how intelligence, creativity, and scale come together in the next era of AI-driven content.”
Through HUMAIN Create, Luma AI’s models will be trained on Arabic language and regional data, enabling creators in the public and private sectors to adopt AI systems that reflect local language, culture and creative context.
As part of the expansion, Luma AI plans to hire locally across a range of roles, including AI and software engineers, go-to-market leaders, and forward-deployed creatives and technical teams working directly with customers and partners in Saudi Arabia and across MENA.
“Saudi Arabia is the natural home for our regional headquarters in MENA. The Kingdom has one of the most ambitious and technically capable workforces in the world,” said Amit Jain, CEO and Co-Founder, Luma AI.
Jain added, “Establishing a local office allows Luma AI to work directly with this next generation of builders and creators, while developing AI that is deeply connected to the region it serves. We are proud to establish our presence in Riyadh, aimed to deepen our partnership with HUMAIN and support the delivery of high quality content.”
