Oman scores 47 on digital readiness, its highest yet

Oman scored 47 out of 100 on digital readiness in the 2026 International Digital Competitiveness Assessment, alongside Saudi Arabia on 44, Qatar on 42, Kuwait on 41 and Bahrain on 35. The Sultanate climbed 16 places to enter the top 25 countries making the fastest digital progress. It is among the least discussed technology stories in the Gulf, and it is worth understanding before it is set aside as a ranking artefact. Digital readiness indices measure capability and adoption rather than spending, and that distinction is most of the finding. These indices reward things that are unglamorous to announce: the proportion of public services that run end to end, the depth of the domestic skills base, and how much of the technical workforce is national rather than imported. Oman's numbers on the last of those are notable. Its Makeen programme has trained more than 11,000 Omanis in digital skills, and Omanisation in technical IT roles now stands at 69%. Roughly seven in ten technical staff are nationals. That figure is difficult to reach quickly. It reflects a decade of training pipeline rather than a procurement cycle. The strategy behind it is set out in Oman's 2026–2030 digital economy roadmap, which targets the digital economy reaching 10% of GDP and includes a national AI platform and a set of digital centres. A 10% target is ambitious for an economy of Oman's size and hydrocarbon weighting. What the readiness score suggests is that the base being built on is more developed than the Sultanate's investment figures alone would imply. The wider point reaches beyond Oman. The Gulf's technology narrative is often told as a story about capital deployment, and the competitiveness data is measuring something adjacent to that: how far a state has gone in operating the technology it buys. Those two things develop on different timetables. Infrastructure can be procured in a budget cycle. A national technical workforce is assembled over a decade, and it shows up in capability indices before it shows up anywhere else. Oman's score is a result of the second kind of programme. The Gulf's larger economies are running both, at a scale no smaller state can match, and Saudi Arabia in particular has paired its infrastructure programme with substantial national training commitments. The most useful reading here is not a league table. It is that a country spending a fraction of its neighbours' technology budgets can lead on a capability measure, which suggests capability accrues differently from infrastructure and needs to be planned for separately.