Today's Edition
MAYS IBRAHIM (ABU DHABI)
The UAE is among a small group of developing economies building its own artificial intelligence technology, according to a new World Bank report.
"The World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence" highlights the country's measures to attract AI talent, strengthen AI literacy and develop domestic AI capabilities. Its findings track the movement of top AI researchers and inventors between countries from 2011 to 2024.
The UAE ranked 10th for the net flow of top AI talent, ahead of several larger economies that recorded net losses over the period, including Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Israel, Japan, South Korea, France and India.
The World Bank points to several UAE initiatives that it says are helping build AI capacity. These include long-term residency incentives for AI specialists and measures to strengthen the country's national AI ecosystem.
The report also says the UAE has embedded AI literacy into its national competency framework, placing it among countries taking steps to prepare workers and students for an economy increasingly shaped by the technology.
At the government level, the UAE has established AI executives within federal entities as well as a unified federal authority for AI, data and digital government, according to the report.
The World Bank's broader analysis divides the path for developing economies into three stages: adopting existing AI tools, adapting them to local needs and, for countries with sufficient resources, advancing the technology by developing their own models and infrastructure.
It says most developing economies should initially focus on adoption and adaptation because building frontier AI requires substantial investment in computing infrastructure, data, chips and highly specialised researchers.
The UAE is cited as one of the countries making inroads into the third stage. The report cites the UAE's development of the Falcon family of AI models as an example of an emerging economy moving beyond adapting existing technologies to developing its own models.
The Technology Innovation Institute developed the Falcon family for Arabic and later extended the models by training them on Arabic-language data and regional dialects, the report says.
The World Bank also highlights the UAE's Technology Innovation Institute among organisations releasing open AI models that can be downloaded and modified on local hardware.
It says the spread of open-weight and open-source models could make advanced AI more accessible to developing economies, allowing them to build applications tailored to local languages and needs without having to create every part of the technology stack from scratch.
That is particularly relevant as AI development remains highly concentrated in a small number of countries and companies, creating potential dependencies for economies that rely entirely on external technologies.
The report says developing economies can reduce those risks by building local capabilities while also using and adapting technologies developed elsewhere, rather than attempting to achieve complete AI self-sufficiency.
