Saudi Arabia is already living the future of healthcare

Why isn’t the rest of the world?

While traveling to Riyadh for the Fortune Global Forum, FII9, and the Global Health Exhibition, I witnessed something that should be a wake-up call for health systems everywhere. Saudi Arabia is already operating the kind of connected, AI-enabled healthcare infrastructure many countries are still debating how to build. At FII9, the conversation was unmistakable. Global innovation momentum is shifting toward the Middle East, and nowhere more than Saudi Arabia, where national digital platforms like Sehhaty already give millions of residents unified access to their health data. At the Global Health Exhibition, I saw population-level analytics, AI-powered diagnostics, multiomic initiatives, and interoperable infrastructure deployed at a speed and scale that would take years in other countries. It made something clear: Healthcare does not have a data problem. We have a connection problem.