Dubai Meeting Ends With WEF Fellows Charged With Delivery

The inaugural Annual Meeting of Global Future Leaders closed in Dubai on 15 October 2026 with outputs built to outlast the event itself: new initiatives, published research and a designated group of World Economic Forum Fellows tasked with turning three days of discussion into ongoing delivery.

The World Economic Forum convened the meeting from 13 to 15 October in collaboration with the Government of the United Arab Emirates. More than 500 leaders and experts attended, including 78 top officials from government and international organizations and more than 150 CEOs and chairs, drawn from across generations, regions and sectors.

Two reports on the infrastructure and economics of artificial intelligence in the Middle East and North Africa were among the most operationally grounded outputs. Unlocking Value: AI for Resilient Growth in MENA estimates that AI could unlock more than $1 trillion in economic and sustainability value across the region by 2030. It also identifies the gap between AI’s perceived potential and its actual implementation, and sets out pathways for finance, government, energy and cross-sector collaboration to convert adoption into sustainable growth.

A companion report, Powering AI at Scale: Optimizing Hyperscale Data Centre Infrastructure in MENA, examines the physical build-out that growth requires. Its central finding is a speed advantage: new data centres in the region could connect to the grid within two to five years, compared with more than a decade in mature markets. The report stresses that integrated planning, smarter design and updated regulation are needed to manage rising energy and water demands sustainably.

The Forum also released the Next-Generation Computing Policy Readiness Framework, a practical tool for policy-makers assessing infrastructure, talent, sovereignty and cybersecurity readiness, alongside Cybersecurity’s Strategic Inflection Point: A Senior Leadership Agenda for 2027, which calls for stronger governance, investment and coordinated action.

Delivery mechanisms ran through the whole programme. The meeting piloted Opportunity Labs, collaborative sessions that worked backwards from a better future to explore how today’s challenges could be addressed over the next 10 years. Participants examined how AI can advance productivity and create better jobs, how resilience can be strengthened at scale, and what tools for shared accountability might look like, including a potential resilience index to measure progress and help direct capital towards climate adaptation. Insights from the labs will feed the forthcoming Future Leaders Outlook, a synthesis of participant perspectives on the opportunities and capabilities likely to shape the decade ahead.

The World Economic Forum, the UAE Government and the Dubai Future Foundation also expressed their intention to establish the Centre for Global Opportunities, focused on expanding access to opportunity for current and future generations of leaders.

Several initiatives launched in Dubai come with defined timelines and funding. The UAE Government and the Global Shapers Community introduced the Global Agentic AI Award and Innovation Challenge, a year-long initiative inviting all 500 Global Shapers hubs to use agentic AI to address local community challenges. It will award $1 million annually over five years, with winners recognized at the 2027 meeting. The Centre for Intelligent Future and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence expanded access to AI for All, a programme equipping young leaders in 100 cities with practical AI skills, prioritizing regions with limited access to training.

Water delivery featured too. Ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference in Abu Dhabi, the Centre for Nature and Climate and the UpLink Aquapreneurs Initiative convened water innovators and Young Global Leaders to identify priorities for scaling water solutions. The meeting hosted the announcement of a new two-year partnership between the WEF and the Mohamed bin Zayed Water Initiative to accelerate practical solutions to water scarcity.

Implementers framed the meeting’s purpose in execution terms. “Over the course of the meeting, leaders tested ideas, launched initiatives and identified ways to keep the work moving beyond Dubai. That is how dialogue becomes action,” said Alois Zwinggi, President and CEO of the World Economic Forum and Principal Chairman of the meeting. His Excellency Mohammad Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs of the UAE and co-Principal Chairman, said: “We want partnerships that turn into action, opportunities that turn into achievement, and impact that reaches generations to come.”

“The future is something we actively design,” said Khalfan Belhoul, Chief Executive Officer of the Dubai Future Foundation and a Co-Chair. “Foresight helps us understand change, but it is action that turns opportunities into reality.”

Meanwhile, on trade and economics, discussions highlighted how supply shocks and disruptions are testing economic policy-making, underscoring the need for more adaptive approaches at a time of rising government borrowing costs and heightened uncertainty. “We want to lower the risks for businesses so they are more resilient when external shocks come,” said Milojko Spajić, Prime Minister of Montenegro and Co-Chair. “You need to lower fixed costs so they can better deal with whatever the situation brings.”

On agentic AI, participants stressed that deployment should improve people’s quality of life, with safeguards and responsible oversight essential to maintaining trust. “If you are able to improve people’s quality of life by deploying that agent, then you are moving in the right direction,” said His Excellency Omar Sultan Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence.

Leadership outputs included the Leadership Commitment Framework, a self-assessment tool developed by the Global Future Council on Leadership and the Forum of Young Global Leaders; Future 20, spotlighting 20 young leaders from the Global Shapers Network; and Global Youth Pulse insights drawn from nearly 4,600 young people across 144 countries and territories. The Global Alliance for Future Generations advanced its work, with UAE-based Apparel Group joining more than 20 existing member companies.

World Economic Forum Fellows were designated to shape strategic priorities and carry the work forward beyond Dubai. The Global Shapers Community and Young Global Leaders will take its outcomes into communities worldwide, and insights from the meeting will inform the Forum’s year-round work and the Annual Meeting 2027 in Davos. Whether the two-to-five-year grid connection timeline for MENA’s data centres holds in practice may be the clearest early test of whether Dubai’s commitments translate into delivery.