Abu Dhabi Crisis Centre Aims to Make AI Drones the First Responders to Emergencies

"Today the goal is for the drone to be the first responder to emergencies, crises and disasters in the Emirates," Shaikha Khamis Al Azeezi, director of the centre's Business Continuity and Alternative Services Department, told Gulf News at the military medicine exhibition at ADNEC Centre Abu Dhabi. The centre is showing the drone service there alongside several AI tools it uses to keep the emirate running during a crisis.

The plan puts AI at the front of Abu Dhabi's emergency chain, with machines gathering information before crews arrive. Al Azeezi said that in a large fire the drone tracks the spread of the flames and gives response teams what they need, including safe evacuation routes for people. In severe weather it can show where water is collecting, and it can be sent to incidents in places crews find hard to reach. Because it carries cameras and sensors, she said, it also makes search and rescue easier. She did not give a timeline, fleet size or cost for the service.

The centre's main exhibit this week is a business continuity standard for the health sector, developed with the Department of Health. Al Azeezi said its clauses set out roles and responsibilities "before, during and after any incident" and described it as "the first project across the globe having a detailed standard for each and every critical process across the EMS."

AI is also used to check compliance with the standard. "We use an AI tool to maintain a full agentic AI platform for external audits for the different hospitals and assets, including within the health sector," she said.

Two other systems were on show. Jaheziya is an online platform that simulates exercises and incidents that could happen in Abu Dhabi. It maps available resources, uses AI to assess how mature each organisation's role is, and sends feedback to those organisations. AIN, which Al Azeezi called "a fully agentic AI tool", runs AI agents for business continuity, risk assessment, operations and exercises across the centre. She said the platform is private, was initially built by ADCMC employees and has several layers of security.

ADCMC was set up in 2021. Since then it has run business continuity awareness campaigns across government, semi-government and private organisations, and audits their teams to check they have the resources to deal with an emergency. It has also built a readiness index that assigns each entity a level, which is escalated depending on the nature of an incident in the emirate.

The exhibition is part of the 46th World Congress of Military Medicine, which runs at ADNEC from November 9 to 13.

Al Azeezi said she expects the emergency framework to become more automated over the next five years, with AI tools supporting teams and resources. She added that other countries are welcome to visit the centre to see its projects.