UAE’s AI Gambit: From Bold Vision to a Global Contender

The UAE is not merely participating in the global AI race—it is redefining it. Nearly 80% of AI initiatives in the region today are government-led, making it one of the few nations where public sector ambitions actively shape the future of AI. According to the newly launched report by Dubai Future Foundation, 15 AI Use Cases in Government, unveiled during AI Week 2025, the region is positioning itself to capture 2% of the global economic value created by AI by 2030, amounting to an estimated USD 320 billion. Within the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the UAE aims for the most profound economic impact, with AI expected to contribute nearly 14% to the national GDP by the end of the decade.

But this surge didn’t come overnight. The groundwork was laid back in 2017—a pivotal year in the region’s technological awakening. In March 2017, the UAE announced the UAE Centennial 2071 strategy, a 50-year national agenda to transform the nation into a diversified, knowledge-driven economy less reliant on oil. Technology, innovation, and advanced engineering were earmarked as central pillars. Just months later, in October 2017, the UAE launched its Strategy for Artificial Intelligence and became the first country in the world to appoint a Minister of State for AI. The goal was clear: lead global AI investments, create high-value markets, and anchor innovation into the nation’s long-term economic DNA.

Since then, the region has continued to blaze new trails—becoming the first to use AI to draft legislation, launching the visually captivating Museum of the Future, and embedding AI across public services. Today, the UAE is a first mover in government-led AI, combining long-term vision with execution at scale.

Dubai’s AI Manifesto: Building the Blueprint for a Smart City

While many cities are still drafting AI strategies, Dubai is positioning itself as a fast adopter and a global architect of AI transformation; it has not merely embraced AI—it has taken steps to institutionalize it. Dubai has rolled out 75 pilot AI projects across key sectors, including real estate, healthcare, and enterprise functions such as customer experience and knowledge management. These are not speculative trials; they are live deployments designed to solve real-world problems and boost user productivity and public service efficiency.

In January 2025, Dubai doubled down on AI talent by launching the world’s first and largest AI prompt engineering training initiative—an ambitious program to upskill one million individuals over three years. The program’s objective goes beyond filling jobs; it is about creating a workforce skilled in next-gen intelligence. In parallel, the financial muscle behind this AI drive is growing. Over the past year alone, AED 20.6 billion (USD 5.6 billion) was poured into AI development in Dubai. More than 26 targeted initiatives, ranging from regulatory upgrades to industry-specific deployments, were launched to fast-track adoption.

In a bold move to institutionalize AI across the public sector, every government department in Dubai is expected to have its own Chief AI Officer by May 2025. The government will also begin assessing and ranking each department over the next year based on how deeply AI is embedded into its operations and the readiness of its teams. This performance-based approach accelerates adoption, builds accountability, and fosters a culture of continuous AI-driven innovation. This has necessitated departments and organizations to define a meaningful AI strategy driven on back of a solid data and technology layer, along with considerable thought on AI Governance. In addition, it is heartening to see focus on incorporating responsible AI and ethical AI principles as many of these organizations are dealing with sensitive public and citizen data. This requires that organizations craft a well thought through AI strategy to drive their initiatives forward.

According to the Dubai State of AI Report 2024, the emirate is expected to generate over USD 63.98 billion in cumulative economic value from AI by 2030. But the vision does not end with the government. Dubai is creating a thriving, competitive AI ecosystem that empowers the private sector to rise alongside. Initiatives to unlock public datasets for AI models, funding for AI startups, and international memorandum of understanding (MoUs) with several countries, including China, Kazakhstan, South Africa, and Italy, to foster cross-border collaboration are helping Dubai evolve from an adopter to an enabler. One such initiative is the “Dubai AI Seal,” launched in January 2025. This certification framework vets AI operators based on security, performance, and ethical alignment. It is designed to help public institutions and private enterprises source the right AI models, setting a precedent for global AI governance.

Dubai has spearheaded the UAE’s AI journey, which has become a model for the world. Organizations such as Binghatti, Al-Futtaim, and DAMAC now lead by example, aligning with national strategy and inspiring counterparts across borders to follow suit.

Case in Point: DAMAC Properties – Redefining Real Estate with AI

Speaking at the Dubai AI Festival, Ali Sajwani, managing director of DAMAC Properties, outlined the company’s aggressive AI-first strategy and the transformative role AI already plays. On the real estate side, DAMAC is embedding AI across the entire value chain—from pre-sales and product development to marketing, customer service, and sales. It has adopted a hybrid large language model (LLM) architecture. It combines public AI platforms such as ChatGPT for general tasks with private, internally hosted LLMs to manage sensitive customer and financial data. A significant portion of DAMAC’s data pipelines—nearly 50%—is sourced from public or government datasets, such as market pricing trends, unit sizes, competitor project pipelines, and foreign investments by region. This is layered with internal customer intelligence and fed into LLMs for sharper predictive insights and faster decision-making.

This AI-powered operational overhaul is delivering tangible results. For example, DAMAC has restructured its customer service function from a team of 20 analysts to just three, empowered by speech-to-text models that analyze customer queries in real time. These insights are processed through LLMs to identify recurring complaints and recommend personalized resolutions. This shift led to a 20% boost in monthly financial collections—an additional AED 200 million by improving communication around payment delays. Customer satisfaction has also dramatically risen from a rating of 3.5 to 4.5 (out of 5) within a year. Similar gains are anticipated in legal and data operations, where AI reduces dependency on manual review and analysis.

However, Ali Sajwani did not shy away from acknowledging the socioeconomic trade-offs of this shift. He raised a vital concern: as AI displaces skilled white-collar roles, particularly in legal, compliance, and support functions, governments must implement policy interventions to mitigate the looming employment crisis. He emphasized that the real challenge is not whether AI will outperform humans, but how society will support those whose jobs become redundant, urging proactive engagement from both public and private sectors.

Final Thoughts and Reflections

Dubai AI Week was not just another tech conference but an ecosystem-wide movement. Spanning over five days, it brought together every stakeholder in the AI value chain—from startups, Big Tech, and academia to government bodies, developers, coders, and students. It captured the true spirit of how Dubai envisions its AI future: inclusive, action-driven, and globally connected. Three powerful themes stood out:

1. 1. A truly collaborative global forum: Dubai AI Week was more than a showcase of the UAE’s AI prowess; it was a platform to build global AI alliances. Delegations from countries including India, China, Estonia, and Africa came together to share strategies and foster collaboration. Startups from the region displayed world-class innovations alongside Big Tech. Importantly, it wasn’t just talk—multiple MoUs were signed with nations such as Italy and Kazakhstan to jointly advance AI regulations, data exchange policies, and cross-border business. It demonstrated that Dubai’s AI ambitions are rooted in regional leadership and global cooperation.
   2. A top-down culture of AI ownership: The excitement around AI extended far beyond technology teams. It resonated strongly across the highest levels of leadership. Senior leaders from several public and private organizations, including Dubai Future Foundation, DIFC, DAMAC Properties, and Binghatti, attended and demonstrated a deep, hands-on understanding of how AI is reshaping process workflows and core business functions such as sales, customer experience, and operations. This reflects a deliberate top-down approach to AI adoption in the UAE—one where AI strategy is championed by leadership rather than driven by isolated experiments at the department level.
   3. Building a homegrown, AI-first innovation engine: The UAE is making a concerted push to create an AI-first startup ecosystem. Beyond celebrating startups at the event, the government emphasized its role in actively supporting their growth, solving real business problems, providing funding, and shaping academic programs that nurture future founders. The goal is clear: develop startups capable of competing at the highest global standards, ensuring that the UAE is not just a consumer of AI innovation but a producer of it.

While the UAE is undeniably ahead of most countries in AI adoption with faster government buy-in, robust AI infrastructure, and deeper stakeholder alignment, it cannot afford to rest on early successes. UAE must confront its next big challenges head-on to lead the global AI race. Over the next 12 months, three critical priorities must be non-negotiable:

1. 1. Build a comprehensive AI Strategy and Governance Framework: Despite early wins, most government agencies have still not implemented AI at scale which means they are still in the nascent stages of AI maturity. The next phase demands a structured approach—beginning with a clear-eyed assessment of current capabilities through a SWOT analysis. From there, agencies must adopt a five-point action plan:

• • • Organization-wide AI strategy: Develop a comprehensive AI strategy detailing high-impact use cases, clear adoption priorities, and phased timelines. Define KPIs to measure value realization from AI initiatives. Assess the current technology landscape to identify gaps and build a scalable architecture that supports future AI development and enterprise-wide deployment.
    • Data strategy: Design a forward-looking data strategy that enables scalable AI adoption through robust data acquisition, integration, and lifecycle management. Establish strong data governance to ensure data quality, security, and compliance. Embed Responsible AI principles from the ground up by enforcing fairness, transparency, and bias mitigation in training data pipelines. Enable cross-functional data sharing through standardized architectures and metadata management to accelerate AI use-case development.
    • Talent strategy: Develop an organizational change management plan to proactively address AI’s impact on the workforce. Drive enterprise-wide alignment through targeted upskilling and reskilling programs, supported by inclusive communication on the organization’s AI vision. Foster grassroots innovation by running AI hackathons and use-case discovery sessions across all employee levels to ensure bottom-up participation and inclusivity in AI adoption.
    • AI governance framework: Establish a robust AI governance model with clear policies and controls to ensure ethical, transparent, and accountable AI deployment. Define organizational roles for oversight and execution, and implement a risk management framework to proactively address AI-related risks and compliance.
    • AI roadmap: Develop a phased roadmap aligned with strategic goals, prioritizing initiatives based on feasibility and business value, considering the required technology, talent, and budget to operationalize the AI vision effectively. Analyze global AI trends and identify high-impact, context-specific use cases.

1. 2. Smash the bottlenecks stalling AI projects: Despite the flashy AI headlines, the reality is sobering—only about 10% of AI initiatives in the UAE make it from pilot to production. Enterprises are stuck chasing low-hanging fruit such as document processing or knowledge retrieval bots, while transformative, enterprise-wide AI adoption remains rare. Many organizations launch 50–70 pilots optimistically, only to see a handful survive, draining budgets and burning out teams. This isn’t innovation—it is inertia masked as progress. To change course, UAE’s enterprises must ruthlessly prioritize: cut out redundant experiments early, zero in on use cases that impact daily workflows at scale, and build AI into the operating fabric of the organization. Strategic partnerships with consulting firms that bring proven frameworks for AI ROI evaluation will be crucial to separate the hype from high-value impact.
   3. Move beyond outdated data and IT regulations and build AI-native policies: The UAE cannot build a future on yesterday’s regulatory frameworks. Relying on generalized data protection or legacy IT security laws will not be enough to tackle the unique risks posed by LLMs, autonomous AI agents, synthetic data generation, and AI-driven decision-making. Leading economies like the EU, Singapore, and China are racing ahead with AI-specific regulations, mandating audits, transparency, and ethical accountability tailored to AI systems, not just data systems. If the UAE wants to lead, it must urgently roll out AI-first regulations that are clear, flexible, and designed to enable responsible innovation.

By Akshay Khanna, Managing Partner, Avasant, Saugata Sengupta, Partner & UAE Country Lead, Avasant, and  Chandrika Dutt, Research Director, Avasant