UAE training 80,000 government employees as AI 'super users', minister says

Abu Dhabi: The UAE is training about 80,000 government employees to become "super users" of artificial intelligence, capable of building AI agents and working with advanced models, the Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Omar Sultan Al Olama said on Tuesday at the ‘Ai Everything Abu Dhabi’.

He said the programme reflects the government's view that anyone who wants to benefit from the technology must first understand how to use it. "Our playbook is simple: every single person to ride this wave needs to understand this technology, needs to be able to utilise it, and needs to be able to benefit from it," he said.

Al Olama described the training drive as "very aggressive". He did not, however, give a timeline for completion or details of the curriculum during the session.

Al Olama spoke about how governments can balance innovation with oversight. He said many administrations keep the two functions separate, with little exchange of ideas between them.

"The challenge that most governments have is that the innovator sits in the innovator's section and the regulator in the regulator's section, with no cross-pollination of thought and planning," he said. In the UAE, however, innovators have at times taken the regulator's seat, while regulators have been asked by the country's leadership to think like innovators.

Al Olama also predicted the rise of one-person companies run with AI agents, which he said could grow into multimillion-dollar or even billion-dollar businesses.

For a country like the UAE, he said, such agents could ‘multiply their ability, scale and impact’, allowing it to compete economically with much larger markets.  

The UAE was ahead of the curve in artificial intelligence, he added, recalling that the technology was widely dismissed as a gimmick when the country began working on it nine years ago. He highlighted the shift has brought added responsibility. As AI moves into the mainstream, it falls to him to protect the UAE's reputation and to ensure it continues to serve as a role model in the domain.

During an audience question-and-answer segment on autonomous agents, intellectual property, competitiveness and opportunities for young people, the minister was asked what it means to "win" in AI.

He said the government was looking beyond productivity gains and economic output, and success should be measured by how many people's lives are improved. "Our definition of winning is that you change the largest number of lives of people positively by using artificial intelligence," he said.

On competition with established global AI hubs, he said the largest economic and social gains do not necessarily go to the places where technology is invented, but to those that adopt and apply it, in the most effective way possible. "We want to be the fastest to market," he added.