The UAE is training around 80,000 government employees to become AI “super users” capable of building AI agents and using advanced models, HE Omar Sultan Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, said on Tuesday.
Speaking at AI Everything Abu Dhabi on October 6, Al Olama said developing these skills was central to the country’s efforts to strengthen its competitiveness as AI reshapes economies and workforces.
“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,” he said.
During a session on the future of government, data and agentic AI, the minister said people needed to understand the technology, use it and benefit from it.
Al Olama also predicted that AI agents could enable individuals to build multimillion-dollar or even billion-dollar companies. For the UAE, he said, the technology could expand its economic capacity and help it compete with larger markets.
On regulation, he argued that closer cooperation between regulators and innovators was necessary to support AI adoption.
“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,” he said.
Responding to audience questions, Al Olama said the UAE would judge its progress in AI by its impact on people’s lives, alongside productivity and economic gains.
“Our definition of winning is that you change the largest number of lives of people positively by using artificial intelligence,” he said.
He added that the benefits of AI would depend on how effectively countries adopted and applied it, rather than solely on where the technology was developed.
“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.
