HighLevel has opened a new Dubai headquarters and AI Center of Excellence as the business software provider increases its investment in artificial intelligence, automation and agentic workflows. The facility brings engineering and product teams together to accelerate AI development across HighLevel’s marketing, CRM, sales and business-operations platform.
HighLevel is putting a larger bet behind agentic AI and business automation, opening a new Dubai-based AI Center of Excellence intended to shorten the distance between AI research, product development and deployment.
Known as HighLevel HQ East, the facility officially opened September 17, 2026, in Dubai Media City. The company says it will bring engineering and product teams together while creating a base for recruiting technology talent in the region.
The move comes shortly after HighLevel received alpha access to OpenAI’s GPT-Live-1, according to the company. HighLevel has not publicly detailed the specific products or workflows it plans to build around the model, making the access more notable as an indicator of its broader AI development strategy than as a standalone product announcement.
HighLevel operates a platform that combines marketing automation, customer relationship management, sales enablement, communications and other business functions. The company says its platform powered 2.2 million businesses in 2025, facilitated 6.9 billion leads and supported $4.2 billion in sales.
Those figures illustrate the scale of the software environment into which HighLevel is attempting to embed AI.
Rather than positioning artificial intelligence as a separate chatbot or add-on, HighLevel says the new center will focus on embedding intelligence into the workflows businesses already use to attract prospects, communicate with customers, manage relationships and run operations.
That strategy reflects a broader shift across enterprise software.
AI assistants initially focused on helping users retrieve information or generate content. The next phase is increasingly about AI agents that can execute multi-step tasks, make decisions within defined boundaries and interact with business systems.
Gartner predicts that 33% of enterprise software applications will incorporate agentic AI capabilities by 2028, compared with less than 1% in 2024. The research firm also expects agentic AI to make at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions autonomously by that point.
For platforms such as HighLevel, the opportunity is significant because the underlying software already contains customer data, communications, sales activity and workflow information that AI systems can potentially use as context.
But that also creates an implementation challenge.
An AI agent embedded into a CRM or marketing platform is operating closer to real business processes than a general-purpose chatbot. Errors can affect customer communications, lead management, campaign execution or sales operations. As a result, the value of agentic AI depends not only on the capabilities of the underlying large language model, but also on data quality, workflow integration, permissions and operational controls.
HighLevel’s decision to establish a dedicated AI center therefore reflects a broader industry trend toward building AI capabilities directly into application platforms.
Microsoft is embedding Copilot and agents across its business software ecosystem, while Salesforce is pushing Agentforce as an autonomous layer across CRM workflows. Adobe has similarly been integrating generative and agentic capabilities into its creative and marketing products. The competitive distinction is increasingly shifting from whether a software vendor offers AI to how effectively its AI can use business context and execute useful workflows.
HighLevel is particularly focused on the small and medium-sized business and agency market, where managing multiple specialized applications can create operational complexity.
A platform that can combine CRM information, marketing activity, communications and automation provides a potential foundation for agents that can coordinate those functions.
For example, an AI agent could theoretically move beyond drafting a marketing message to identifying a lead, determining an appropriate communication sequence, triggering outreach and updating the CRM. Such capabilities would shift AI from content generation toward workflow execution.
That transition could also change how businesses interact with software.
Gartner estimates that up to $234 billion in enterprise application software spending could be exposed to “agentic arbitrage” through 2030, as AI agents increasingly complete tasks across multiple systems and reduce the need for users to interact with traditional application interfaces.
For HighLevel, this creates both an opportunity and a strategic requirement. If agents become the interface through which businesses perform work, platforms need to make their data and workflows accessible to those agents while retaining sufficient control over what autonomous systems can do.
The Dubai center appears designed to strengthen HighLevel’s ability to move quickly in that environment.
The company says HQ East will combine internal relocations with local hiring and provide opportunities for leaders from across HighLevel to work directly with engineering and product teams. Dubai’s technology ecosystem and international connectivity were cited as reasons for selecting the location.
HighLevel also says its AI approach is intended to support faster product development, with co-founder Varun Vairavan claiming the new setup could allow teams to build and deploy at “10x the speed.” That figure is a company claim rather than an independently measured productivity result.
The more important question will be what HighLevel ultimately builds with the additional capacity.
The AI Center of Excellence gives the company a dedicated organizational structure for developing AI automation platforms, enterprise AI applications and AI agents inside a business operating system. Success will depend less on model access alone and more on whether those capabilities produce measurable improvements for agencies and businesses without adding another layer of complexity.
As AI shifts from generating outputs to taking actions, HighLevel’s strategy reflects a larger change underway across business software: the application itself is becoming the environment in which humans and autonomous agents work together.
Market Landscape
HighLevel’s Dubai expansion comes as business software vendors move from embedded AI assistants toward autonomous workflow execution. CRM, marketing automation and sales platforms are particularly well positioned because they already contain structured customer data and repeatable processes.
The competitive field includes Salesforce Agentforce, Microsoft Copilot, Google Cloud AI services and Adobe’s AI capabilities, alongside AI-native automation platforms. The key differentiator is increasingly the ability to combine models, enterprise context, workflow orchestration and governance.
Gartner’s latest research also suggests that specialized agents will be particularly important: the firm predicts 80% of tangible agentic AI ROI will come from domain-specific agents by 2028.
For SMB-focused platforms, that could favor vendors capable of embedding specialized agents directly into existing business workflows rather than requiring customers to assemble separate AI infrastructure.
Top Insights
- HighLevel’s Dubai AI Center of Excellence will unite product and engineering teams around faster development of AI-powered business workflows.
- The company is positioning AI as infrastructure embedded across CRM, marketing, sales and communications rather than as a standalone chatbot.
- OpenAI GPT-Live-1 alpha access gives HighLevel another foundation for experimenting with next-generation AI capabilities and agentic workflows.
- Gartner expects agentic AI to reach 33% of enterprise software applications by 2028, signaling a major shift in application design.
- HighLevel’s challenge will be converting model capabilities into reliable automation that produces measurable outcomes for businesses and agencies.
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