Meydan Free Zone published an expanded activity list this month covering 11 AI-adjacent business activities. Generative-AI consulting, prompt engineering, model fine-tuning, applied-research services, data-labeling, AI-augmented translation, AI training-data preparation, AI-powered marketing automation, AI software publishing, AI-led market research, and AI-assisted recruitment are now explicitly listed and licensable.
Why this matters: until this update, AI businesses in Meydan typically licensed under broader 'IT consultancy' or 'management consultancy' codes. That worked, but it sometimes raised banking eyebrows when the actual revenue line was clearly an AI service. Explicit codes mean the activity, the invoice, and the marketing collateral all match.
What this means for our clients
If you are running an AI service business and were planning Meydan as your free zone, the licensing decision just got cleaner. We are also seeing existing Meydan clients ask us to add one of the new activities to their license — that's a one-week, AED-low-thousand amendment, not a re-license.
What this does not solve: bank KYC officers still want to see what the AI service actually does, who the customers are, and how revenue flows. The activity code helps the licensing story; the bank story still needs the same pre-built narrative we always prepare.
Meydan's bulletin is linked below. If you want us to scope a Meydan setup with the right AI activity for your model, the 60-second calculator gives you the cost number and we can take it from there.