Dubai’s recent rollout of 500 AI-powered cameras by Parkin to automate street parking payments is a clear illustration of how rapidly AI-enabled physical infrastructure is becoming embedded into the daily operation of Gulf cities. The system reads number plates, tracks parking duration, and processes payments automatically, eliminating friction for drivers and improving operational accuracy across the emirate. It is precisely the kind of intelligent, data-driven deployment that cities across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the wider GCC are scaling at pace, and it raises a question that applies not to any single project but to the entire trajectory of smart infrastructure development across the region: as these systems multiply and grow more sophisticated, are they being built in ways that will allow them to work together effectively over time, or are cities inadvertently creating the conditions for expensive fragmentation at scale?
This is the conversation the Gulf’s infrastructure community needs to have more openly, and more urgently, than it currently does.
Across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the wider GCC, governments are investing at a scale and pace that has few parallels anywhere in the world. The GCC smart cities market alone was valued at approximately $19.2 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach nearly $69 billion by 2034, reflecting how rapidly intelligent infrastructure has moved from national ambition to operational reality. Smart transport corridors, integrated surveillance networks, logistics hubs, airports, and digitally connected urban districts are being built simultaneously and at speed. The scale of this buildout is genuinely impressive. What is less impressive, and considerably more concerning, is that much of it is being designed without sufficient regard for whether these systems will be able to work together once they are operational.
In physical security environments, systems are routinely deployed at different times, by different manufacturers, and for different operational purposes. A surveillance platform may need to integrate with traffic management infrastructure. Access control systems may need to connect with video analytics platforms. Environmental sensors may need to feed into command centres or broader city operations dashboards. Individually, these technologies often perform well within their own boundaries. Collectively, they frequently cannot exchange data in ways that support real-time visibility, coordinated decision-making, or operational continuity across the wider environment they are supposed to serve.
The consequences of this are not abstract. A European Commission survey found that at least 40% of public procurers have experienced significant vendor lock-in due to a lack of interoperability between systems, and that the resulting absence of competition was costing European governments in the region of €1.1 billion per year in inflated prices alone, before accounting for integration complexity, delayed upgrades, or duplicated infrastructure. The Gulf is building at a far greater speed and scale than Europe was when many of those legacy lock-in problems took root, which means the window for making better decisions is narrowing.
Vendor lock-in in physical security infrastructure is not primarily an engineering inconvenience. It is a strategic liability that compounds over time, restricting flexibility as operational requirements evolve, inflating lifecycle costs, and reducing the ability to adopt new technologies without expensive and disruptive overhauls. Infrastructure decisions that appear efficient at the point of procurement frequently become constraints that limit what a city or organisation can do five or ten years later.
The global physical security market was valued at more than $120 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed $220 billion by 2034, with video surveillance alone accounting for more than half of that revenue. The question of whether that capital is being deployed in ways that preserve long-term flexibility is not a technical question for system integrators to resolve quietly during procurement. It is a strategic question that should be sitting at the centre of every infrastructure planning conversation happening in this region right now.
Open standards do not make individual systems more capable, nor do they determine the effectiveness of any single security product. Their role is more fundamental. They provide a common language that allows technologies from different manufacturers and platforms to communicate in a structured and scalable way, without requiring organisations to commit permanently to a single vendor’s ecosystem. This is what enables infrastructure to evolve as cities evolve, integrating new technologies as they emerge and maintaining operational continuity without the costly reinvention that proprietary lock-in eventually forces upon its adopters.
The Gulf has already demonstrated that it can build smart infrastructure at a scale that commands global attention. The harder challenge is ensuring that the systems being built today are designed to work together tomorrow. Interoperability needs to be a design principle at the foundation of every procurement decision and every infrastructure investment being made across the region. The cities that get this right will scale effectively and adapt as technology evolves. The cities that do not will spend the next decade managing the consequences of decisions that seemed efficient at the time and proved costly over time.
