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Abu Dhabi is handing out Microsoft Copilot licenses like they are water rations in a sandstorm. 35,000 workers. All of them. It is not a pilot program anymore. It is a mandate. Meanwhile, in Alexandria, someone taught an AI to read stone from four thousand years ago. And Qatar? They decided the ethics debate was getting messy enough to form a global alliance for it.
Let’s break it down.
Reading the Stone
Ancient Egyptians didn’t leave user manuals for their writing. They left monuments. Now TokenAI, out of Alexandria, built models called Horus Hiero. Two of them: the 9B and the Mini 4B. They read, translate, and reason in hieroglyphics. And 100 other languages.
Why does this matter?
It opens museums to everyone, not just the people who spent twenty years squinting at papyrus in dusty archives. It is open-weight. This is heritage code, essentially. You can run it. You can build on it. The past just got an upgrade.
Technology doesn’t erase history; it translates it for people who were never invited to the lecture hall.
Government as Software
Abu Dhabi wants to be the world’s first “AI-native government” by 2027. To get there they are rolling out Copilot to civil servants across 27 entities. That is the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it is an AI Factory. One thousand agents. Working on the backend. This isn’t about typing faster. It is about automating the state.
Dubai is playing a similar game. They expanded their Digital Twin platform to Phase Three. Over 150 geospatial layers. 195.000 3D building models. They are mapping the city before they build the future of it. And on the streets, Dubai Police rolled out Ghiath II. Hybrid engines, AI brains. The patrol cars are thinking now.
Bahrain says 95 percent of their public services are online. Almost no face-to-face interaction needed by 2027 when biometric ID goes live. Do we want to stop shaking hands? Probably not. But efficiency rarely cares about our comfort.
Oman is watching the pipes. ThermoLeak predicts when water lines fail. They sent the project to London to show off at a science forum. Prevent the break before it breaks.
Presight in Abu Dhabi signed a term sheet with Kazakhstan for a national transport brain. Cameras. Scales. Analytics. Keeping the roads safe while watching them.
The Skills Gap (Or The Chasm)
We have the tools. Do we have the people?
Only 8 percent of firms in Tunisia are ready for AI. The number is 7.8 to be exact. A survey of 1,200 companies says they lack money and skills. That is a harsh reality check.
So the training ramps up. Alef Education and Microsoft trained 25.000 teachers in the UAE. Seven weeks. Seven hundred and ten schools. If you are a student in Abu Dhabi today your teacher knows how to use the new tools. Maybe.
Morocco signed a deal with ALTEN to boost AI skills under their 2030 plan. More engineering. More platforms. It is an arms race for competence.
Ethics. Politics. Sandboxes.
Qatar launched a Global Alliance for AI Ethics in Geneva. Hosted during the UN dialogue. They want culture to shape the code. Who decides what is right? This alliance wants to include the global south in the conversation. It is overdue.
Arab ministers showed up. Egypt. Morocco. Saudi Arabia. The dialogue was loud about digital inclusion.
Saudi Arabia’s education sandbox got a thumbs up from the World Bank. 28.000 participants. Three cohorts. They call it responsible innovation. A sandbox where the stakes feel real.
Money Moves
Emirates NBD started a fintech accelerator. Not for fun. For deployment. Techstars helps pick the founders. They get access to the bank’s cloud and 9 million customers. That is distribution.
In Morocco Attijariwafa Bank picked five employee AI projects. Fraud detection. Risk management. Internal innovation actually paying off for 12 million clients.
And in the air.
G42 designed a helmet for the Tour de France stage in the UAE. AI picked the shape. Nearly 20.000 fans submitted designs before the first version launched. Sport is data now. The helmet is just another algorithm.
The End of The Line
Agentic AI is the new buzz. Inception42 hooked up with Microsoft to keep data in-country. Sovereign agents. Local control. Global tools.
Oman launched a competition for these agents. Twenty-five teams building with open data. Mentored. Judged. Later this year we see what they built.
startAD in Abu Dhabi gave hospitals playbooks for AI adoption. Healthcare moves slower. It should.
Tunisia reminds us it is hard to build readiness without infrastructure.
We are all rushing forward. Some are leading the pack. Others are catching the bus. The gap between “using AI” and “being AI ready” is widening.
