The UAE is training around 80,000 government employees to become AI “super users”, capable of building agents and harnessing advanced AI models, H.E. Omar Sultan Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, revealed at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi.
Speaking during the ‘In Conversation’ session, Building the Government of the Future: Data, Agentic AI and a Shifting Global Order, Al Olama said equipping people to understand, use and benefit from AI was central to the UAE’s approach as the technology transforms economies and the global workforce.
“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. “We’ve gone on a very aggressive campaign to train around 80,000 government employees, to become super users of AI, being able to build agents and leverage these models.”
The rise of the billion-dollar one-person company
The Minister also predicted the emergence of one-person companies powered by AI agents, capable of becoming multimillion or even billion-dollar businesses. For a country such as the UAE, he said agents could “multiply their ability, scale and impact,” enabling it to compete economically with much larger markets.
On how governments can balance innovation and regulation, he said: “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. In the UAE, many times we’ve had the innovator come into the regulator’s seat, and the regulator being asked by our leadership to think like an innovator. And that’s a secret sauce.”
From AI leadership to real-world impact
The conversation continued into a lively audience Q&A, spanning autonomous agents, intellectual property, competitiveness and opportunities for younger generations.
Asked what it means to “win” in AI, Al Olama said: “Our definition of winning is that you change the largest number of lives of people positively by using artificial intelligence.” He added that the government was looking beyond productivity gains and economic outputs, with AI deployments focused on improving quality of life.
Addressing competition with established global AI hubs, he said the greatest economic and social benefits do not necessarily come from where technology is invented, but where it is embraced and applied. “We want to be the fastest to market. We want to be the country and the cities that deploy AI to improve quality of life in the most effective way possible,” he said.
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