Today's Edition
BATOOL GHAITH (ABU DHABI)
Strategic policy, sustained investment and a culture willing to embrace innovation have propelled the UAE to become the first country in the world to surpass the 70% AI adoption mark, experts say.
The country retained its position as the world's leading AI adopter in Microsoft's latest AI Diffusion Report, maintaining a significant lead over the next closest economies.
This milestone reflects years of policy work that have now reached a tipping point, according to Nader Paslar, General Manager at CODE81.
"The policy foundation is well established at this point," he said, citing initiatives such as the UAE AI Strategy, the Zero Bureaucracy Programme, and sector-level mandates that created real demand for AI adoption.
Among the sectors that moved first are the government, financial services, and other highly regulated industries, but organisations are increasingly seeking agentic AI systems capable of making decisions rather than simply automating tasks, Paslar said.
He added that the UAE is not just leading on adoption, but also building the regulatory architecture for what comes next. The DCAI governance commitments and the Zero Bureaucracy Programme targeting agentic AI are frameworks for deploying AI that can be trusted, audited, and held accountable.
Artificial intelligence engineer Rama Al-Meshraqi traces the UAE's lead back nearly a decade, to the appointment of the world's first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in 2017.
"That head start made a huge difference. When ChatGPT exploded globally, people in the UAE had already been seeing AI in their government services for years. There was no fear or unfamiliarity," Al-Meshraqi told Aletihad.
Government services and financial services remain the most advanced sectors in terms of AI adoption, while healthcare is beginning to gain momentum, she said.
Agriculture, education and small and medium-sized businesses, however, still have considerable room for growth, she added.
In a global landscape of rapid AI development, what sets the UAE apart is the speed at which it turns innovation into reality - including homegrown initiatives such as Jais, the country's Arabic-language AI model, said Al-Meshraqi.
Beneath all that innovation, however, is also a culture of trust. "Emiratis have a very high level of trust in both technology and their government, and that combination accelerates adoption significantly," the specialist added.
For AI expert Dr Zaid Rababaah, that trust is part of a wider story: AI became embedded in a national digital transformation effort rather than treated as an isolated technology trend.
"Many countries invest in AI research, and many have thriving technology sectors. The UAE has been particularly effective at turning those investments into practical use cases that people encounter in their daily work and everyday interactions, which makes this achievement noteworthy," Dr Rababaah told Aletihad.
He also highlighted the role of the public sector - through smart city initiatives and digital services - in building the trust and familiarity that has driven adoption beyond the startup and technology sectors.
"The most interesting part of the story is not only the UAE reaching 70.1% in AI usage, but also how it got there," Rababaah said.
