Abu Dhabi, UAE – Abu Dhabi has signed a package of agreements with OpenAI to use artificial intelligence across government services, investment and education. The deals followed a meeting on 2 November 2026 between His Highness Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
The agreements
- Machine-Readable Government: led by the Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi (DGE), policies and regulations are being converted into machine-readable form so AI can help officials run compliance checks on permits and certificates, with officials keeping oversight of final decisions. The first pilot, with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority on food imports, is already in production and runs on OpenAI GPT models using UAE-based inference infrastructure.
- Investment analysis: Mubadala and Inception42, a G42 company, will use OpenAI tools for investment analysis, opportunity identification and risk assessment.
- Frontier platform: Inception42 and OpenAI signed a five-year agreement to adopt OpenAI’s Frontier platform across government, enterprise and education, and to build enterprise solutions for large UAE organisations.
- Skills: the AiNative training programme, launched with OpenAI and Microsoft, targets 20,000 government employees, teaching ChatGPT, Codex and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Citizens and residents can access free ChatGPT-based training through the Tomouh app.
Part of Abu Dhabi’s digital strategy
The deals sit under Abu Dhabi’s Digital Strategy 2025–2027, which allocates AED 13 billion to digital infrastructure, automating 100% of government processes and sovereign cloud computing. The strategy is expected to add more than AED 24 billion to Abu Dhabi’s economy by 2027 and create over 5,000 jobs supporting Emiratisation.
What it means for businesses
Faster, AI-assisted permit and certificate checks could shorten approval times for importers and licensed businesses, while government demand for AI solutions opens opportunities for UAE technology companies and integrators.
Source: The National.
