Emerging Technologies in the Cultural Sector: Toward Intelligent Creativity and Digital Identity Governance
How are AI, immersive experiences, and blockchain reshaping culture in Saudi Arabia? Explore their role in heritage, creativity, and the digital creative economy.
This article was written by Prof. Ahmed bin Abdullatif Al-Khateeb and submitted to Soogk as an opinion piece.
Introduction
The world today is witnessing a radical shift in how we understand culture and its role in society. Culture is no longer merely a symbolic output or an accumulation of heritage it has become a renewable digital space where values, knowledge, data, and human experience intersect. Within this profound transformation, the Saudi landscape stands as an inspiring regional model: the Kingdom's cultural sector is undergoing a qualitative leap where national policy, technological vision, and economic strategy converge along a path charted by Vision 2030, which placed culture among the pillars of sustainable development and the engines of quality of life.
Emerging technologies from artificial intelligence to extended reality, blockchain, and open cultural data have become among the most innovative pillars renewing the cultural infrastructure broadly, and Saudi culture specifically, developing the local creative ecosystem and enabling national identity to claim a global presence through modern digital tools. What we are witnessing today the digitization of culture, the governance of cultural data, and the rise of intelligent creative production represents an advanced stage in the Kingdom's broader national transformation project, one that insists on weaving culture together with economy, identity, education, and diplomacy.
Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Cultural Creativity
Artificial intelligence has reshaped the very roots of contemporary cultural work. It is no longer used merely as a software tool or a research aid it has become a genuine knowledge partner in the creative process itself. Generative algorithms are now used to analyze ancient heritage texts, restore paintings and manuscripts, and produce new artistic content that marries tradition with modernity, responding to audience taste and digital behavior. In the Kingdom, artificial intelligence has begun appearing in digital culture initiatives instant translation of cultural content into multiple languages, behavioral analysis of visitors at events and museums, and the personalization of cultural experiences through intelligent recommendation systems.
These shifts open the door to a new kind of cultural-intellectual creativity, one in which machine and human contribute together, redefining the relationship between creator and audience, between text and technology, between identity and globalization. In 2025, the Digital Government Authority launched the Human-Centered AI Framework .a national reference point for adopting artificial intelligence across all sectors, culture included ensuring that values and privacy are respected, and that the use of intelligent technologies remains responsible and ethical.
Extended Reality and the Metaverse: From Representation to Embodiment
Extended Reality (XR) stands as one of the most striking manifestations of the digital cultural revolution, integrating Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and the Metaverse to create immersive experiences in which the visitor lives the cultural event rather than merely observing it. A person can step into an extended virtual Saudi museum and wander through history, antiquities, and traditional crafts, or join a folk festival within a three-dimensional space from anywhere in the world.
The Kingdom has already begun realizing this vision through the projects of the Royal Commission for AlUla, which has adopted digital heritage programs to document archaeological sites using 3D imaging technologies and build an interactive digital library of the antiquities of northern Arabia. This transformation opens the door to a new form of digital cultural diplomacy one that carries the Kingdom's image to the world through interactive artistic experiences blending aesthetic values with emerging technology. In this way, the cultural metaverse becomes a space for civilizational exchange and the reinforcement of cultural identity, allowing others to understand Saudi culture while embodying its tolerant, open spirit within a framework of authenticity and innovation.
Blockchain and the New Creative Economy
Blockchain technology stands as one of the most promising tools for empowering creators and protecting their intellectual rights. It allows for the creation of secure digital records of artistic works and creative content through Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which enable the digital authentication of an artistic work while allowing it to circulate in the global market without intermediaries ensuring transparency and a fair return for creators.
These developments align with the global movement toward building a digital creative economy a direction the Kingdom is pursuing through existing initiatives such as the Ignite program for digital content, which aims to double the size of the gaming, digital arts, and film market by 2030. Studies from the OECD in 2024 indicate that an economy built on creativity and digital innovation, anchored in new technologies, can contribute over 2% of GDP in countries possessing supportive legislative and financial infrastructure. This domain also represents a qualitative shift: from support to empowerment, from cultural consumption to production, and from local art to the global cultural economy.
Digital Cultural Governance for Emerging Technologies
Digital cultural governance for emerging technologies represents the most critical framework for ensuring ethical and intellectual balance in managing this technological transformation. Culture is not merely a digital structure or an application of cutting-edge technology, it is a value system that expresses humanity, identity, and collective memory. For this reason, the development of digital cultural-technical policy in the Kingdom can rest on three pillars:
- Transparency and Accountability: ensuring clarity in the recommendation mechanisms and artificial intelligence systems used on cultural platforms.
- Protection of Rights and Privacy: through intellectual property legislation and blockchain technology.
- Cultural Equity: enabling all segments of society and all regions to access digital cultural services and technologies fairly.
This vision aligns with UNESCO's principles on culture in the digital age, and with global recommendations on culture and artificial intelligence that emphasize the human-centered transformation of technology placing the human being, not the machine, at the center of the creative process. Vision 2030 further cements culture as one of the engines of comprehensive national transformation, one that brings together identity, economic value, and global influence.
Conclusion
Deploying emerging technologies within the cultural sector contributes to building a knowledge-economic-technical structure that supports quality of life. Emerging technologies are not an end in themselves, but civilizational tools that restore to culture its natural role in shaping human beings, their consciousness, and their sense of belonging. This role is embodied in the fusion of identity and openness, of technology and values, of preservation and innovation.
What we are witnessing today is a genuine qualitative leap in the production of cultural knowledge within the Kingdom one that draws on numerous emerging technologies while remaining attentive to the documentation of heritage, moving from a celebration of the past to the construction of a sustainable cultural future.
An opinion piece by Prof. Ahmed bin Abdullatif Al-Khateeb.
