Standfirst: An artificial intelligence pilot run by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement (DGE) with OpenAI has reduced the processing of complex food import applications from up to a week to a matter of minutes, a senior official told The National in an interview published on November 6. The emirate now plans to extend the approach to building permits, business licences and inspections as it pursues a goal of becoming an “AI-native” government by the end of 2027.
Turning regulations into machine-readable code
The pilot, carried out with the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, is the first application of what the government calls “Machine-Readable Government”. The concept involves converting policies and regulations into formats that AI models can interpret, so that the systems can assist officials with compliance checks on permits and certificates. For the food import trial, thousands of policy documents were converted, according to Faisal Al Hawi, who directs the DGE’s AI Factory.
The initiative was one of four agreements signed with OpenAI in Abu Dhabi on November 2, after a meeting between Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Chairman of the Executive Council, and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, the state news agency WAM reported via Gulf News.
Four deals across government, energy and investment
Beyond the government programme, the agreements cover three other areas. ADNOC, G42’s subsidiary Inception42 and OpenAI agreed to deploy OpenAI’s frontier models inside the energy group’s operations and decision-making, with inference hosted in the UAE, making ADNOC the first energy company to do so, according to WAM. Mubadala, Inception42 and OpenAI will apply AI to investment analysis, opportunity screening and risk assessment. A fourth, five-year agreement between Inception42 and OpenAI targets AI adoption across UAE government, enterprise and education.
Altman said Abu Dhabi and the UAE were “setting a bold, global standard for AI integration across both the public and private sectors”.
A workforce of “humans plus agents”
The government programme sits within a Dh13 billion ($3.5 billion) digital strategy and builds on Tamm, the emirate’s single app for public services. Work with OpenAI started at the beginning of 2026, The National reported.
Inside the DGE, which employs about 1,200 people, each official is expected to direct specialised AI agents for research, data analysis, document drafting and software development. Al Hawi said the department’s agents already generate code equivalent to the daily output of 30 developers, with humans still reviewing the work. AI is also being used in recruitment and procurement. “We want to get to a workforce that is not purely human, that is human plus agents,” he told the newspaper, adding that judgment and final decisions remain with people.
Data stays in the country
Data sovereignty is central to the model. OpenAI’s models run on computing infrastructure hosted in the UAE, so government and citizen data does not leave the country, Al Hawi said: “We are not sending out any data outside of the UAE.” The DGE also retains the intellectual property of the applications it builds on top of OpenAI’s models. The department was reportedly the first civilian government entity to gain access to OpenAI’s Daybreak Blue programme for advanced cyber defence.
The partnership adds to the UAE’s broader bet on sovereign AI infrastructure, including the Stargate UAE project involving G42, OpenAI and other global technology companies. For regional GovTech players, the Abu Dhabi pilot offers a concrete benchmark: if the food import results hold as the system scales to permits and licences, the emirate could become one of the first governments to run routine regulatory checks largely through AI ag
