By: Bindesh Vijayan, Chief Technology Officer at Myndlab

There is a line that gets repeated at every tech conference in Dubai, in every government briefing, and across most pitch decks: the UAE is building the future. Artificial intelligence is projected to contribute $96 billion to the UAE’s GDP by 2031, according to PwC and corroborated by the UAE’s own National AI Strategy. The country has invested AED 543 billion in AI since 2024 alone, as confirmed by Omar Sultan Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence. And according to Microsoft’s AI Diffusion Report for Q1 2026, the UAE has become the first country in the world to cross the 70 percent threshold for AI tool adoption among its working-age population. 

These are not vanity metrics. They reflect a deliberate national strategy that has positioned the UAE as one of the world’s most ambitious AI markets and laid the foundations for long-term technological leadership. Yet despite that progress, a disconnect is emerging between the country’s AI ambitions and the day-to-day reality of the people building products within the ecosystem.

The Gap Between AI Infrastructure and AI Adoption

Much of the discussion around AI in the UAE has focused on infrastructure, whether that is sovereign AI models, data center investments, national strategies, or the capital required to support them. These are all essential components of a successful AI ecosystem. However, infrastructure alone does not create products. Founders, developers, and businesses still need the tooling layer that sits between AI capability and real-world execution.

This is precisely the challenge a new generation of AI-native development platforms is trying to solve: embedding software engineering best practices directly into the building process so that users can focus on the product rather than mastering prompt engineering.

One of the clearest examples of this challenge is language. Arabic is spoken by more than 400 million people across 22 countries. Yet developers across the region still rely heavily on tools that were primarily designed for English-speaking users. Researchers at Nature Middle East have previously highlighted how the relative lack of robust Arabic language models continues to create limitations around linguistic nuance, dialects, and cultural context.

At the same time, the developer tools, AI coding assistants, and product-building platforms that define the modern software stack were largely built around Western markets and workflows. They assume a particular type of user, a particular language, and a particular development environment. For many builders in the GCC, those assumptions become a source of friction that compounds throughout the product development lifecycle.

A founder in Dubai building a fintech product for Emirati consumers has to work through documentation written in English, prompts that perform better in English, and interfaces that treat right-to-left text as an afterthought.

The challenge is not that these tools fail outright. Rather, they introduce small points of friction throughout the development process that compound over time, affecting productivity, iteration cycles, and ultimately product delivery. Over time, that friction compounds across teams, product cycles, and entire businesses, becoming the difference between shipping and not shipping.

We’ve Seen This Before

This pattern plays out clearly in payments, an industry where many founders across the region have spent much of their careers. The UAE has built a sophisticated financial infrastructure, but for years, the tooling that sat on top of that infrastructure, the APIs, developer documentation, and integration frameworks, was largely oriented toward Western payment methods, Western card schemes, and Western compliance frameworks. Local founders had to build workarounds. Some of those workarounds were innovative, but workarounds are not a strategy. More often than not, they are a sign that the underlying stack was never designed for the people using it.

The same lesson applies to AI. Infrastructure creates possibilities, but it does not automatically create innovation. Innovation happens when builders can move quickly, efficiently, and confidently on top of that infrastructure. If the tools developers use every day are not designed for the realities of this market, then the UAE’s AI ambitions risk being partially realized by people working around their environment rather than with it.

What Comes Next

There is a real opportunity here to address the gap between the infrastructure the UAE has built and the tools its founders, developers, and businesses actually need.

The UAE has already demonstrated that it can build AI infrastructure at scale. It has invested heavily in research, talent, adoption, and national AI initiatives, creating one of the most ambitious AI ecosystems anywhere in the world.

The next phase of that strategy is not simply building larger models or attracting more capital. It is ensuring that the people responsible for creating products, launching companies, and deploying AI solutions have the tools they need to succeed. It also means reducing dependence on a small number of external AI providers. As AI becomes embedded in critical business and government workflows, questions around privacy, data governance, and long-term resilience become increasingly important. Building capable regional AI ecosystems is not simply about innovation; it is about ensuring that organisations can deploy AI with greater control, confidence, and sovereignty.

The countries that win the next decade of technology are not necessarily the ones that spend the most money. They are the ones where the people doing the building have the right tools for the job.

Infrastructure creates possibility. Tooling turns possibility into innovation. The next phase of the UAE’s AI story will be defined by how effectively it enables the people doing the building.

KnowBe4, the global leader in digital workforce security, securing both AI agents and humans, today announced the launch of its new research report, “From Agentic Risk to Human Wins: Building a Culture of Security in the Era of Agentic AI.” The findings expose a dangerous reality for modern organisations in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia: autonomous AI tools are expanding the corporate attack surface faster than security teams can implement guardrails.

With agentic AI now widely embedded in day-to-day work, 84% of cybersecurity leaders in the UAE & Saudi Arabia report that AI agents are already taking actions within organisational workflows. However, a lack of governance is leaving organisations exposed; the report shows that around 1 in every 4 organisations (24%) report their use of AI is unapproved or ungoverned. This unmanaged “Shadow AI” effectively operates as an invisible layer of shadow employees handling sensitive organisational data without oversight.

Key Findings from the Report:

• 88% of employees in the UAE & Saudi Arabia say that deepfake voice and video content is now so realistic it is impossible to know what to trust and 52% openly admit they could be tricked by a deepfake scam at work.
• More than half (54%) of cybersecurity leaders in the UAE & Saudi Arabia report that mistakes during everyday work have had the greatest impact on their organisation’s cybersecurity in the past 12 months. Compounding this, 44% of employees acknowledge that time pressures and workplace distractions actively drive them to make critical security mistakes, even when they know the safe protocol.
• 36% of cybersecurity leaders in the UAE & Saudi Arabia identify AI-enabled attacks as a key driver of future human-related cybersecurity risks.
• 41% of employees reported that they commonly source their own agentic AI tools where options are unavailable or restrictive, leaving organisations vulnerable to cyberattacks. Concurrently, 52% of cybersecurity leaders report that the use of unsanctioned software and AI apps has actively impacted their security posture over the past 12 months.
• Although 76% of security leaders feel “very well prepared” to handle unexpected or emerging AI-driven threats over the next year, 84% of them confirmed that improvements are still needed to ensure AI tools and agents operate within organization’s security policies and approved risk limits.

The report shows that organisations making progress are those who prioritise cybersecurity as a culture over a mere function, seamlessly incorporating secure behaviours into daily work. These organisations are creating environments where employees feel safe reporting mistakes, with 82% of employees agreeing.

“Cybersecurity has entered a volatile phase where organisations are trying to secure a hybrid human and AI workforce that’s changing more quickly than security leaders can keep up,” said Dr. Martin Kraemer, CISO Advisor at KnowBe4. “Attackers are moving at machine speed, using attacks such as deepfakes to target employees and prompt injections to hijack AI agents. Leaving almost a quarter of your corporate AI usage ungoverned is a massive open invitation to threat actors.”

The “From Agentic Risk to Human Wins: Building a Culture of Security in the Era of Agentic AI” report concludes that achieving “Wins” requires organisations to design systems that guide behaviour, build supportive cultures, and shift from tracking failures to reinforcing positive actions, and extending a security-first mindset across both AI agents and humans.

The GCC People Pulse, the region’s first dedicated monthly workforce sentiment tracker, is out and survey results indicate that positive sentiment among employees working for organisations across the region outperforms global benchmarks.

The report, which has been launched by Employee Experience Exchange (EXE), a bold new community for business leaders and professionals working in people, culture, and communications in the Middle East, and Ipsos, one of the world’s leading market research companies, was based on data collected from a representative sample of 1,500 employees across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar via online survey.

Respondents were adults in full or part-time employment at the time of fieldwork, and the survey covered 11 questions across five themes: advocacy, confidence, wellbeing, inclusion, and AI.

A key result of the survey showed that 81 percent of respondents have indicated that they would recommend their organisations as a great place to work, which is higher than the global benchmark by nine points. In addition, 77 percent of respondents said that they are confident in the future direction of their organisation, with a higher margin of 22 points from the global benchmark.

“What this means for organisations is huge,” said Ruth Dance, Co-Founder of EXE. “Advocacy is one of the most telling signs of real engagement, and it’s directly linked to business performance and talent outcomes. When employees recommend their workplace, they become powerful brand ambassadors, which is a huge boost for recruitment and reputation. But when advocacy is weak, it gets a lot harder to attract and keep good people in a market this competitive and growing.”

“When people feel confident and clear about where their organisation is headed, they talk about it,” Lorna King, Co-Founder of EXE, added. “That confidence comes from clear communications and visible leadership. When employees understand the direction and see leaders walking the talk, they become genuine advocates, and that’s your strongest brand asset.”

Other notable positive indications from the survey results include more than a quarter of respondents (78 percent) saying they can be themselves in their organisations, as well as (77 percent) seeing an organisational commitment to nationalisation.

On the adoption of AI, 73 percent of respondents see AI as a critical business enabler and believe that AI will make their organisation more competitive. However, 49 percent or almost half of the respondents expressed concern on the impact of AI on job security.

Furthermore, the survey results have also indicated that 54 percent of respondents feel that they have been in constant strain in recent months, with only 18 percent reporting a complete absence of strain at work.

“Strain is what happens when employees come under sustained stress or pressure. It creates anxiety, fatigue, and eventually burnout,” said James Tarbit, Global Head of Employee Experience at Ipsos. “Our research shows strain has a hugely negative impact on decision-making, on team dynamics, and on overall employee performance. Strain might not lead to an employee leaving but, even if they stay, they won’t be performing at their best, contributing fully, or helping your business succeed.”

The GCC is one of the world’s most diverse and fast-evolving labour markets and the GCC People Pulse tracker provides a regular, region-specific lens on how what employees think, feel, and experience. This helps inspire genuine dialogue between employees and management, leading to better talent retention and organisational performance.