Microsoft president wants to see US replicate Abu Dhabi's AI efforts

Brad Smith praises UAE's artificial intelligence applications

Microsoft's president and vice chairman Brad Smith on Thursday praised Abu Dhabi's AI initiatives and apps, which he said empower residents.

"We need to bring it to America," he told a US Senate commerce, science and transport committee hearing, referring to the need for apps that simplify the process of renewing driver licences, reporting potholes, obtaining various forms and other services.

"You can do all these things with your phone, by the way and you can do this today in Abu Dhabi."

Mr Smith did not specify what app he was referring to, but in February at a UAE event, Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's corporate vice president of business and industry, witnessed how the company's AI products were being used in various UAE-made apps.

At one point, he was shown Abu Dhabi's TAMM government services AI assistant, which acts as a one-stop shop for government services including transport, health care, housing and police services.

“We are moving away from large language models to large action models,” Wael AbuRizq, AI and advanced analytics adviser with the Department of Government Enablement, said at the demonstration of the app, which uses Microsoft technology.

Microsoft's Charles Lamanna speaks with Wael AbuRizq about the UAE's TAMM app for government services and community tools. Photo: Cody Combs

Mr Lamanna told The National that TAMM's demonstration was among some of the most impressive he had seen in his travels throughout the world.

Microsoft has been a proponent of the UAE's AI aspirations in recent years. The company made a $1.5 billion investment in UAE AI and cloud company G42 in 2024, and later announced that it would open its research-based 'AI for Good Lab' in Abu Dhabi, a first in the Middle East.

Mr Smith was joined at the Senate hearing by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Advanced Micro Devices chief Lisa Su and CoreWeave boss Michael Intrator.

US President Donald Trump is preparing to visit the UAE during a trip to the Gulf.

On Wednesday, he told reporters that his administration might soon change a controversial chip export policy that some say could stifle AI aspirations in the UAE and other countries in the region.

"We might be doing that, and it’ll be announced soon," Mr Trump said in the Oval Office.

Sam Altman, co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, right, with Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, before the Senate hearing in Washington. AP Photo

The policy, referred to as the AI diffusion rule, was drafted during the final months of former president Joe Biden's administration as it sought to protect the US lead on AI development by preventing highly powerful central processing units and graphic processing units from being obtained by rival countries, such as China.

Under the chip export rules, countries and territories would be split into tiers that would determine how many powerful chips and GPUs they could buy.

Falling into the first tier and unaffected by the rules are Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and the UK.

Other countries, such as Switzerland, Poland, Greece, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, would fall into a second-tier category, making it more difficult – although not impossible – to obtain the chips needed for AI research and development.

Microsoft has openly criticised the proposed policy. “Left unchanged, the Biden rule will give China a strategic advantage in spreading over time its own AI technology, echoing its rapid ascent in 5G telecoms a decade ago,” Mr Smith said in February.

“This tier-two status is undermining one of the essential requirements needed for a business to succeed – namely, confidence by our customers that they will be able to buy from us the AI computing capacity that they will need in the future."