UAE Begins Classifying Which Government Tasks AI Can Decide

The United Arab Emirates has opened the strategic phase of its national agentic AI project, aiming to convert half of federal government operations, services and tasks to agentic AI models within two years, according to a report by www.artificialintelligence-news.com.

More than 100 federal officials attended a workshop this month to launch the effort, organized by the National Committee for the Agentic AI Project. The session set implementation priorities and timelines and began building frameworks to classify which government tasks can be delegated to autonomous AI agents, the outlet reported.

The UAE has pursued AI adoption for nine years, publishing a national AI strategy in October 2017 and appointing Omar Sultan Al Olama as the world’s first minister of state for artificial intelligence shortly afterward, per the report. Since then, the government has developed digital identity systems, sovereign cloud infrastructure and data-sharing capabilities, including a performance-tracking system that monitors more than 150 million data points monthly, according to the outlet.

Despite that infrastructure, the classification task now underway represents an unresolved challenge, the report noted, stating that no government has yet published a defensible method for distinguishing tasks an autonomous system may complete outright from those it may only recommend for human action.

Huda Al Hashimi, Deputy Minister of Cabinet Affairs for Strategic Affairs, described the workshop as the operational beginning of deploying AI models across government activity, according to www.artificialintelligence-news.com. The outlet reported that the program spans multiple sectors, though further details on specific timelines and classification criteria were not fully disclosed in the source material.

Based on reporting by www.artificialintelligence-news.com.