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Odai Khasawneh

June 19, 2025 21:59

The UAE is considered among the first few countries to implement a national artificial intelligence strategy. This was amply demonstrated by its appointment of the world’s first AI minister, Omar Al-Olama, back in 2017. The following year, the strategic plan for AI implementation was laid out in the UAE National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031.

Figuring out the right policies to guide innovation is a significant global challenge due to the diversity in cultural, legal, and economic contexts in different countries. To address this challenge, a multitude of initiatives and events have been launched in the UAE to foster AI implementation and adoption in the region.

These initiatives allow companies and government entities to develop and test AI technology in a controlled environment actively creating a regulatory sandbox in which different policies can be further tested before being implemented. The UAE’s approach to AI implementation balances innovation and responsibility with human beings at the center of that balance.

This approach provides valuable insights into how to create a flexible yet adaptable AI policy which can help to identify the required measures for a global framework for AI policies. In addition, focusing on the human aspect when developing policies has a significant effect on building trust between citizens and the government.

Figuring out the right policies to guide innovation is a significant global challenge due to the diversity in cultural, legal, and economic contexts in different countries.

Odai Khasawneh

This trust affects people’s attitude toward technology and leads to a positive societal impact. For example, this user attitude is one of the factors that the International Institute for Management Development uses when they generate their Smart City Index. In 2025, the Smart City Index examined 146 cities around the globe, and the UAE has two cities ranked in the top five; Dubai is fourth and Abu Dhabi is fifth.

In addition to AI policy incubators, the UAE released the first Arabic language model (Falcon LLM) as an open-source module and the 101 billion Arabic words dataset by Clusterlab. This is valuable because Arabic is a “highly contextual” language, which means that understanding Arabic text depends highly on the surrounding context. Language models like Falcon LLM help to fill in the gap that currently exists in the Natural Language Processing research.

This model, and others like it, help train AI modules to be capable of understanding and generating more accurate results when handling Arabic content.

Furthermore, in May 2025, the UAE approved an AI curriculum to be introduced to public schools starting in the 2026 academic year. The curriculum will focus on seven key areas such as AI ethics and real-world application and introduce age-appropriate content with hands-on and project-based activities.

In an interview with Fortune magazine in 2023, Al-Olama discussed the UAE’s plans to become a global leader in AI, paralleling the US and China. In 2025, the UAE signed an agreement with the US to build a 10 square mile AI campus in Abu Dhabi, which would be the largest AI campus outside the US.

This creates numerous opportunities for local talent in the MENA region to find jobs and build local economies while contributing to technological advancements at an international level. 

• Odai Khasawneh is a teaching associate professor in information technology management at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee