The UAE has much to gain from an AI-enabled government adviser

The Microsoft AI Tour in Dubai. The UAE is making AI an official advisory participant in government. Antonie Robertson/The National

We will soon live in the artificial general intelligence age. What you do with that information will determine your place in history.

Last week, the UAE announced that a National Artificial Intelligence System would become a non-voting member of all federal and government company boards – and an advisory member of the Council of Ministers starting next year.

The world should take notice.

This isn’t just a headline-grabbing initiative or a clever nod to the AI hype cycle. It is a serious declaration: governance itself is being reimagined. Intelligence – both human and artificial – will now sit side by side at the decision-making table.

Once again, the UAE isn’t waiting for the future to arrive – it is shaping it.

This move comes as the OECD’s latest Reimagining Government report makes a powerful case: that public sectors can no longer function as slow-moving regulators. They must become shapers of behaviour, markets and futures.

While most of the world debates AI’s ethical dilemmas or fears job displacement, the UAE is pivoting boldly towards the opportunity – transforming AI from a back-office assistant into a strategic actor in policy and decision-making.

The UAE is transforming AI from a back-office assistant into a strategic actor in policy and decision-making.

Though it began in academic labs in the 1950s, AI has matured exponentially in the past three years.

Today’s systems can analyse billions of data points, detect anomalies in financial flows, simulate geopolitical risk and model climate shocks in real time. This is more than automation as we progress fast towards AGI – systems capable of human-level reasoning across diverse domains. These systems don’t just respond; they think, adapt and generate original insights, and – according to OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei – AGI could be with us in as little as two years.

If you are sitting in government, prepare for this: an AGI system tasked with revising a national budget could process 30 years of fiscal policy, the current citizen sentiment, environmental data, infrastructure needs and long-term equity goals – then simulate the impact of dozens of policy decisions. Any of this could be done in a matter of hours, not months.

The private sector is already embracing AI-powered leadership. Salesforce, for example, reports that AI performs up to 50 per cent of its work with 93 per cent accuracy. Chinese gaming firm NetDragon Websoft appointed an AI chief executive, seeing a 10 per cent stock increase. In Poland, Dictador placed an AI executive in charge of strategy. These are no longer public relations stunts – they are the front edge of a new executive model.

But the UAE is taking this one step further: it is nationalising the model. Institutionalising it. Making AI an official advisory participant in the heart of government.

The AI entity will not vote or replace ministers. Instead, it will serve as a strategic co-pilot: scanning, simulating and synthesising complex variables to support sharper, faster and more transparent decisions. This is the embodiment of what the OECD calls the shift from “reactive bureaucracy” to anticipatory governance.

AI’s involvement at board level is just the beginning. Ministries of health will use it to model pandemic responses. Trade agencies will forecast demand shifts before they happen. Environmental teams will design adaptive strategies based on real-time data.

And this entire transformation is happening within a sovereign, ethical and encrypted framework, aligning with the UAE’s AI governance standards – building public trust in a moment when “black box” algorithms threaten transparency.

This is critical, as the OECD emphasises that agility is the new legitimacy. In an age of rapid shocks – climate, health, geopolitical – slow governments lose trust. The UAE’s model, by contrast, offers real-time simulation, data-informed decisions and transparency by design.

But this leap forward demands more than infrastructure – it demands people. The OECD notes the importance of system thinking, digital capacity and collaborative leadership. These are not optional skills. They are core to the government’s relevance in the AI age. That means upskilling every tier of public service. Not just AI engineers, but policy designers, frontline officers, educators and regulators. Everyone must learn to work with, not just around, machines.

In adopting AI in the form, the UAE offers a practical answer to one of the OECD’s boldest provocations: what if government itself became a platform for intelligence – human and artificial – to co-create the future?

And yet, as the OECD warns, the future is already here, but it’s not evenly distributed. While countries such as the UAE are sprinting forward, others risk falling behind – locked in outdated bureaucratic routines and legacy decision-making. Some countries will hesitate. Some will worry about legitimacy, ethics, or optics. But others will look at the UAE and say: this is the new blueprint – AI will not replace human leadership. But it will augment it, challenge it and sharpen it.

In a world of rising complexity, that might just be our greatest advantage.