Abu Dhabi’s $3Bn AI-Native Play Is Ready, but Are Its Assets?

Abu Dhabi is investing $13 billion in a bid to become the world’s first AI-native government. 

Suliman Gaouda, Regional VP of Industrial AI, MEA, at IFS, believes that the UAE capital is “AI-ready” – but doesn’t think its assets are. 

In a recent global poll conducted by The Observer, Abu Dhabi ranked 11th overall in the AI Cities Index. 

It placed fifth in terms of its operating environment, but in an interview with Arabian Business, Gaouda has raised concerns over whether or not enterprises across Abu Dhabi can keep pace with the change that is required to deliver AI-native government services. 

“Only 15 per cent of AI decision-makers saw an EBITDA lift in the past year, according to Forrester, and Gartner expects more than 40 per cent of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027. 

“BCG believes that roughly 70 per cent of AI value comes from redesigning people and process, and only 10 per cent from the algorithm. Most pilots invert that ratio,” said Gaouda. 

Abu Dhabi’s government is furthest ahead and leading the way, with more than 100 AI use cases in production across 40-plus Abu Dhabi entities. 

“Construction anchors a GCC pipeline worth about $2 trillion, yet its productivity grew 0.4 per cent a year for two decades, against 3 per cent in manufacturing. You cannot put an agent on top of data nobody can find.

“The fix is unglamorous. One of the largest US energy delivery companies we work with consolidated six asset management systems and 17 scheduling applications into a single view of its estate in under six months. That consolidation is not an alternative to AI. It is the precondition,” said Gaouda.

AI Action

As the IFS leader has highlighted how if a chatbot gets it wrong then it writes a bad paragraph. An agent that is wrong in a substation causes an outage. 

“Unplanned downtime already costs the world’s 500 largest companies $1.4 trillion a year, 11 per cent of revenue, and Booz Allen puts average attacker breakout time under 30 minutes. The test before deployment is simple: when the agent acts, who signed off, and where is the record? 

“At a gas compression operator we work with, technicians were losing hours chasing spare parts. The agent now raises the parts request rather than recommending it, and every action is logged. Its CIO prices the return at $3 million a year and 90,000 technician hours if half the workforce uses it once a day,” said Gaouda. 

Talent Gap 

ManpowerGroup has said that 76 per cent of UAE employers struggle to fill roles. 

Gaouda further expands on the issue. 

“The instinct is to hire data scientists. The scarcer profile is the technician who knows why a pump fails. Roughly 80 per cent of the world’s workforce does not sit at a desk, and the Gulf imports much of its technical expertise from ageing markets, where 41 per cent of US certified aircraft mechanics are already over 60. 

“Siemens found recovery from unplanned downtime stretched from 49 to 81 minutes in five years, even as incidents fell. Fewer failures, slower fixes: the signature of expertise walking out of the door,” said Gaouda.

AI-Native 

The $3.5bn (AED13 billion) strategy will make Abu Dhabi’s government faster than many of the companies that serve it. 

As Gaouda points out a ministry that answers in seconds exposes every contractor, utility, and operator still answering in weeks.

“The UAE has around 700 execution-ready projects worth $138 billion, each an asset someone must run for decades. The cheapest moment to capture its data is at handover, not in a retrofit three years later. 

“In the Gulf, a drilling joint venture we work with brought maintenance, supply chain, and finance for its onshore and offshore rigs onto one system in nine months. That is the pace the government’s timeline now demands of everyone else. The cities have been ranked. The next ranking will be of who runs the machines,” concluded Gaouda.