Saudi National Guard ministry signs digital transformation MoUs at LEAP 2026

Saudi Arabia's Ministry of National Guard signed several memoranda of understanding with technology and digital companies during LEAP 2026, part of what the ministry described as an effort to expand cooperation and support its own digital transformation. The agreements were signed by Deputy Minister Saad Al-Babtain, and the one company named in the available coverage is Devoteam, the France-headquartered digital transformation and technology consultancy. Its memorandum with the ministry covers digital transformation and technology consulting, including the development of digital transformation strategies and the adoption of what the reporting calls global best practices — language that describes an advisory relationship rather than a specific system being built or deployed. Devoteam is a European technology consultancy with a substantial Gulf advisory practice, more often found designing transformation roadmaps and target operating models for government clients than delivering the underlying software itself. That specialism is consistent with an MoU pitched at strategy and consulting rather than at a named system or platform. That framing matters because the National Guard, unlike the Ministry of Interior or the civil defense and passports agencies that have used LEAP's Interior Ministry pavilion to show finished products this week, is not showing hardware or a working platform of its own. It is signing a set of relationships — plural, unspecified in number beyond "several" — with companies it intends to draw on as it builds out its technology function. That is earlier-stage activity than a pavilion demo, and the honest way to read it is as an intent to work together rather than evidence that any particular capability now exists inside the ministry. The Ministry of National Guard runs security and administrative operations distinct from the Ministry of Interior, and its LEAP presence has drawn far less coverage than Interior's, which built an entire pavilion around passports, civil defense, border security and its own AI-enabled healthcare unit. That contrast is itself informative: it suggests the National Guard's digital transformation work is at an earlier, less publicly documented stage, with this week's MoUs functioning as the first visible marker of it rather than a showcase of results. No financial terms, project scope or delivery timeline have been published for the Devoteam agreement or for the other, unnamed memoranda the ministry signed. "Several MoUs" is doing a lot of work in the available coverage, and it is not clear how many companies beyond Devoteam are involved, or what each covers. Saudi Arabia's other security-facing institutions used the show to sign comparable cooperation agreements this week — the National Cybersecurity Authority struck a bilateral MoU with Pakistan's IT ministry on cyber-threat cooperation, and the Interior Ministry built its entire pavilion around a similar theme of security agencies adopting AI and digital tooling. The pattern across Saudi security institutions at LEAP this year is consistent: consulting and cooperation agreements signed in public, with the underlying technical work — if any follows — disclosed later, or not at all. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.