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Abu Dhabi Sets 2027 Target For AI-Run Government
Officials attended the Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council meeting, where AI trends and investment opportunities were also discussed.
Abu Dhabi has set a deadline of 2027 to run the world’s first government fully enabled by artificial intelligence. The plan was reviewed this week at a meeting chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, Deputy Ruler of Abu Dhabi, with Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed in attendance.
The Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology Council assessed the Government Digital Strategy 2025-2027, which places AI at the center of public services. The push combines new technologies, expanded research, and training for civil servants. Public awareness campaigns are also being rolled out. “Equipping the workforce and the broader community to participate in Abu Dhabi’s digital transformation is essential,” Sheikh Tahnoon said.
State entities including ADQ, Adnoc, the Department of Government Enablement and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence briefed the council on projects already under way. The oil and gas major Adnoc is pursuing its own AI targets, aiming to be the most AI-enabled energy company by 2030. Abu Dhabi is committing Dh13 billion ($3.53 billion) between now and 2027 to accelerate adoption across government departments.
The review comes as the federal government advances its own program. From 2026, the UAE’s National Artificial Intelligence System will sit in Cabinet meetings as an advisory member. It is designed to provide technical analysis and policy input. In August, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid launched a new federal strategy cycle that places AI at the heart of planning and service delivery.
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The UAE is also opening channels with global players. Last week, President Sheikh Mohamed met OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman in Abu Dhabi. Altman, who received MBZUAI’s first honorary doctorate during the visit, discussed research partnerships and practical applications with local institutions.
Formed last year, the council is tasked with shaping Abu Dhabi’s AI policy, investment and research agenda. Its work is anchoring the emirate’s attempt to establish itself as a global hub for advanced technology, a position reinforced by direct engagement with international firms and talent pipelines.
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UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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