Abu Dhabi trains 20,000 civil servants to work with AI

For the civil servants of Abu Dhabi, the working day is beginning to look different. Reports that once took hours to assemble can now be largely drafted by AI agents before a human reviewer steps in. Tens of thousands of government employees are being trained to make that shift safely and confidently, through a programme called AiNative that aims to equip 20,000 of them with AI skills by the end of 2026.

The initiative was announced on October 7 by Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement (DGE) at the Ai Everything Abu Dhabi event. Developed with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), AiNative teaches employees how to use AI tools in the course of government operations. It sits within Abu Dhabi’s AED 13 billion ($3.5 billion) Digital Strategy 2025-2027, which spans AI adoption, digital infrastructure, cloud computing, and workforce development.

For the people on the ground, the training is shaped around what they actually do. Faisal Al Hawi, director of AI Factory at DGE, told Khaleej Times that the curriculum is tailored to employees’ responsibilities. Human resources teams can learn how AI tools support workforce planning, while legal teams can explore applications such as contract drafting. Specialised courses are planned for staff working in taxation, procurement, legal matters, and finance. Al Hawi offered a glimpse of his own routine, saying he uses AI agents to prepare reports and presentations for senior officials, and estimating that the agents complete around 80 to 90 percent of the initial work before he reviews the results.

The programme offers foundational AI training alongside a separate track for senior government officials, with a curriculum covering ChatGPT, Codex, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. DGE owns the curriculum. OpenAI contributes AI training materials, Microsoft supports training on Copilot, and MBZUAI is involved in developing personalised learning sessions. “AI will only create lasting value when people have the knowledge and confidence to use it well,” Wesam Lootah, Director General of GovDigital at DGE, said in the department’s announcement.

AiNative began with a pilot involving several government entities. Al Hawi said the programme is now available across the Abu Dhabi Government, with public access planned for a later phase. That later phase will matter to citizens and residents as well. Courses will be offered through Tomouh, DGE’s digital learning application, accessible using UAE Pass, covering applications such as personal finance management, job searching, studying, and small business operations. DGE said public access will be introduced in phases, though it has not announced a date for general availability. The curriculum is also designed to accommodate additional technology partners.

The new programme builds on groundwork laid earlier this year, when Abu Dhabi rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot to its workforce through its Frontier Employee Programme in July. According to DGE, the government provided licences to 26,000 civil servants across 27 entities, bringing the total to 35,000 when combined with 9,000 existing licences. All licences were provisioned with Microsoft’s Advanced Data Residency arrangement, which the department said keeps AI processing within the UAE. The rollout included an AI Adoption and Enablement framework covering employee training, change management, and responsible AI use, supported by security, data governance, and organisational readiness assessments.

For employees handling sensitive material, data handling is a central part of the AiNative curriculum. Al Hawi told Khaleej Times that staff will learn which types of government information can be entered into AI systems, which require restrictions, and which must not be shared. Behind the scenes, Abu Dhabi operates a central Government Security Operations Centre using Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR for security monitoring and threat response, supporting approximately 60,000 users and tens of thousands of workloads. Chief Data and AI Officer positions have also been established across government entities to oversee AI adoption and governance within individual departments, and a sovereign cloud environment is planned through an agreement signed by DGE, Microsoft, and Core42 in March 2025, intended to support more than 11 million daily digital interactions between government agencies, citizens, residents, and businesses.

Meanwhile, the broader strategy sets targets to automate government processes, deploy more than 200 AI-powered solutions, and expand sovereign cloud infrastructure. DGE is building an AI Factory capability with plans to develop more than 1,000 AI agents for uses including document processing, responses to public inquiries, and policy analysis. In February 2026, DGE reported more than 100 operational AI use cases and a pipeline of more than 200 additional applications under development or planned. DGE is working with Inception on procurement and human capital management applications, including automating supplier registration and supporting contract analysis, while the government’s Mawaheb talent platform uses hiring and retention data to refine candidate matching. The strategy also includes a unified enterprise resource planning platform for internal operations, alongside cybersecurity and digital governance requirements.

There is evidence that the workforce has already embraced the shift. In September 2025, the government reported that more than 95% of its workforce of over 30,000 employees had completed AI training, separate from AiNative. DGE’s official announcement sets the target of 20,000 employees trained under the new programme by the end of 2026, while Al Hawi told Khaleej Times the department aims to reach approximately 23,000 by early 2027. Later phases of AiNative will introduce specialised certifications covering coding and data-related functions, and will train employees to select AI tools suited to their work while following government information security requirements. More detail on the announcement can be found at https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/news/abu-dhabi-ai-training-government-employees/.

For the thousands of employees now working through the curriculum, the change is practical rather than abstract: knowing which tools to reach for, which information to keep out of them, and how to check the work that machines hand back. When public access opens through Tomouh, the same question will extend to residents and small business owners across the emirate.