UAE plans to run half of all federal government services on AI agents
The Emirates are rebuilding government around AI, decree by decree, and the commitments now have numbers and deadlines attached.
The 50% target
On April 23, 2026, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid announced that within two years, 50% of UAE government services and operations will run on agentic AI: autonomous systems that execute tasks with minimal human input. This is not chatbots answering FAQ questions. Agentic AI means systems that process, decide, and complete government work on their own.
On June 14, 2026, he approved the federal Artificial Intelligence and Data Authority, a single national body for AI, data and digital government. It reports directly to the Cabinet and is led by AI Minister Omar Al Olama, giving the program a centralized owner with top-level authority.
The scale of the retraining
The workforce side of the plan is equally concrete: 80,000 government employees are being trained to work with AI agents. That is a wholesale re-skilling of the federal civil service around the assumption that the colleague at the next desk may be an autonomous system.
Abu Dhabi is pushing further still, aiming to run the world’s first fully AI-native government across its digital services by 2027.
No one else has gone this far
Plenty of governments have AI strategies. What sets the UAE apart is the commitment level: no other country has committed to autonomous AI in public administration at this scale, with a numerical target, a legal authority, a minister, and a two-year clock.
The UAE’s structural advantages make it a uniquely fast mover: centralized decision-making, a small federal footprint relative to large states, and a government that treats digital services as a national brand. If agentic AI in government works anywhere first, it will likely be here. And if it produces failures, those will be instructive too, because dozens of governments are watching this experiment before starting their own.
Would you trust an AI agent to process your paperwork instead of a clerk? In the UAE, that question now has a deadline.
Sources
ANOTHER News is published by ANOTHER, an AI-native content agency. Daily coverage also runs on Instagram.
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