AI Everything Abu Dhabi 2026
Artificial intelligence is changing what citizens expect from their governments, shifting the focus of digital transformation across the Middle East and Africa from simply putting services online to making them faster, smarter and genuinely responsive to individual needs.
The UAE is leading that shift by a wide margin. According to a 2026 survey from Boston Consulting Group showcased at the AI Everything Summit in Abu Dhabi, the UAE ranked first globally in citizen satisfaction with digital government services, with 89% of respondents rating the country’s services highly. The UAE also topped the global rankings for actual usage of digital government services, at 53%, and 76% of respondents said government digital services now provide a better experience than equivalent private-sector offerings.
Abu Dhabi’s own figures reinforce the broader trend. The emirate has cut the cost of delivering government services by more than 30% while simultaneously raising public satisfaction from 78% in 2022 to 92% in 2025, gains officials attribute directly to the expanding use of artificial intelligence across government operations, proof that AI adoption in the public sector can cut costs and improve service quality at the same time rather than forcing a tradeoff between the two.
Egypt features in the same BCG survey as one of the African and Arab nations actively expanding its digital infrastructure and building out AI applications for government services, part of a broader regional pattern of Middle Eastern and African governments racing to adopt AI tools rather than treating the technology as a Gulf-only phenomenon.
The scale of the UAE’s ambitions extends well beyond incremental improvement. The government has set a target of shifting half of all UAE government services to autonomous, AI-powered delivery within two years, a move that would position the country among the most aggressive adopters of agentic AI in public administration anywhere in the world. Taken together with Abu Dhabi’s cost and satisfaction figures, the push from Cairo to Abu Dhabi suggests regional governments increasingly see AI not as a future consideration but as the current operating model for how public services get delivered.
