The question every board asks
"Where does our data go?" is the first question in every UAE AI conversation — and it deserves a better answer than a vendor shrug. Residency isn't a blocker; it's a design input.
The practical framework
Classify before you architect. Most operations split cleanly into three buckets: data that can use global model APIs as-is, data that needs masking or tokenisation first, and data that should never leave your environment. The architecture follows the classification — not the other way around.
Residency is a routing decision. Make it explicit, write it down, enforce it in code.
What we implement
Boundary rules live in the agent layer: which fields are masked before any external call, which workloads route to in-region or local models, and an audit trail proving the policy held. Regulators, partners and your own security team get the same answer, because the system only has one.