AI Governance and Ethics in Saudi Arabia: Building a Responsible Innovation Ecosystem
- Publicado
- Servidor
- Preprints.org
- DOI
- 10.20944/preprints202511.1893.v1
Adopting a secondary qualitative research design, this studyinvestigates how Saudi Arabia can develop sound regulatory measures and ethical standards to develop responsible, inclusive, and sustainable adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the banking industry in line with Vision 2030. The thematic analysis of secondary literature published between 2019 and 2024 (academic articles, policy papers, and institutional reports) reveals that Saudi Arabia has established AI governance frameworks with the help of SDAIA, SAMA, or the National Cybersecurity Authority, and other general frameworks followingthe international standards of transparency, responsibility, and equity. However, the sector is also facing challenges in terms of ensuring enforcement, interpretability, risk classification, and multi-stakeholder engagement along with regulatory fragmentation, cultural perspectives of privacy and trust, low data quality, cybersecurity threats, and internal skills gaps. In spite of these challenges, state-led efforts, fintech partnerships, responsible investment approaches, and innovation-oriented company cultures have become powerful facilitators of responsible AI utilization within the sector. Future studies should conduct interviews from regulators, bank executives, and AI developers to have more insightful opinions about the ethical AI adoption in Saudi banking in a real-life context.