Abu Dhabi is preparing to overhaul how its government works under a new partnership with OpenAI, and artificial intelligence is already speeding up some complex procedures from days to minutes. Faisal Al Hawi, director of the AI Factory at Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement, said in an interview published on 6 November 2026.
Although the agreement was announced this week, work began at the start of the year. The partnership gives Abu Dhabi access to OpenAI’s frontier AI for complex tasks in business and government departments. The technology will be hosted in the UAE, keeping sensitive data within the country.
Four agreements signed after a meeting with Sam Altman
The partnership was one of four agreements announced after Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, met OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman on Monday. The deals cover government services, energy, investment and AI adoption across businesses and education.
They include an agreement involving Adnoc and G42 to deploy OpenAI’s frontier technology in the energy sector, and plans to use AI to support investment analysis. A separate five year agreement between Inception42 and OpenAI will drive AI adoption across government, enterprise and education.
From days to minutes: the first pilot is already working
As part of the roll out, the Department of Government Enablement is introducing what it calls machine readable government, a system that turns policies and regulations into formats AI can interpret. The first pilot is already operating at the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, where thousands of food import policy documents have been made accessible to AI.
The cycle time that it used to take, a few days to a week, for some complex cases, now can be done in literally minutes, Al Hawi said. Previously, officials had to examine applications against extensive regulatory requirements. The AI system now carries out much of that preliminary work before presenting its findings for review.
AI did a lot of the heavy lifting. But the most important task, which is judgment and decisions, still remains with the human, Al Hawi said. Building permits, business licences and inspections are next, and the department wants to extend the approach across government.
A workforce of humans plus AI agents
The department, which has about 1,200 employees, is working towards a model in which each official can direct specialised AI agents to handle research, analysis, writing and software development. We want to get to a workforce that is not purely human, that is human plus agents, Al Hawi said.
The department is already seeing significant gains in software development. According to Al Hawi, its AI agents can generate as much code as 30 developers in a day, although human oversight remains necessary. AI is also being used in recruitment and procurement, helping staff to identify candidates and research potential partners.
The move is part of Abu Dhabi’s Dh13 billion digital strategy to become the world’s first AI native government by the end of 2027. The work also builds on Abu Dhabi’s existing digital services infrastructure, including the TAMM platform, which brings government transactions together in one application.
Data stays in the UAE, and Abu Dhabi keeps the IP
Deploying such technology across government raises questions about where sensitive information is processed and who owns the systems being built. Under the partnership, OpenAI’s frontier models are made available through computing infrastructure hosted in the UAE, so government and citizen data is processed within the country.
We have access to their frontier capabilities, but the caveat here is that all of these capabilities are in country, Al Hawi said. We are not processing anything outside.
We are not sending out any data outside of the UAE. That reflects the country’s broader investment in sovereign AI infrastructure, including Stargate UAE, which involves G42, OpenAI and other global technology companies.
Crucially, the government also keeps ownership of the intellectual property behind the applications it develops, even as it uses OpenAI’s underlying models. All the IP of what we build as a machine readable government, and so on, belongs to DGE, Al Hawi said. Cybersecurity is another focus.
The department was the first civilian government entity to gain access to OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue programme, which supports advanced cyber defence. Abu Dhabi is also investing in AI skills training to prepare employees for a workplace in which managing AI agents becomes part of their daily responsibilities.
What Abu Dhabi’s AI native push means for everyone else
Most governments talk about AI. Abu Dhabi is rewiring the paperwork itself, and that is the part that matters. A chatbot on a government website is easy.
Turning thousands of pages of food import rules into something an AI can read, and then trusting it to do the first pass on a real application, is much harder. It is also where the time is saved.
The terms matter as much as the technology. Data stays in the country, the government owns what it builds, and a human still makes the decision.
That is the model other governments will study, because it answers the question every public sector AI project faces: who is in charge here? If Abu Dhabi pulls this off by the end of 2027, the rest of the world will ask how fast they can copy it.
