Abu Dhabi Says OpenAI Tools Cut Some Government Case Reviews From Days to Minutes

Faisal Al Hawi, director of the AI Factory at the Department of Government Enablement (DGE), gave the figures in an interview with The National. The emirate and OpenAI formalised their partnership on November 2, when Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, met OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. Al Hawi said the work itself began at the start of the year.

The programme is the clearest test so far of Abu Dhabi's goal of becoming what it calls the world's first AI-native government by the end of 2027, part of a Dh13 billion ($3.5 billion) digital strategy. It also shows how a government can use a US company's frontier models while keeping its data, and the software it builds on top of them, under its own control.

Rules Machines Can Read

The government agreement centres on what the DGE calls a Machine-Readable Government initiative. Policies and regulations are converted into a form AI systems can interpret, so the systems can carry out routine compliance checks. According to the Abu Dhabi Media Office, each assessment can be traced back to the rule behind it, and officials remain responsible for final decisions. The first pilot is already running at the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, where thousands of policy documents on food imports have been made readable by the system.

Al Hawi said complex cases that used to take "a few days to a week" can now be handled "in literally minutes". The AI checks applications and supporting documents against the requirements, then passes its findings to an official for review. "AI did a lot of the heavy lifting. But the most important task, which is judgment and decisions, still remains with the human," he said.

Inside the DGE, which has about 1,200 employees, the aim is for each official to direct specialised AI agents that handle research, data analysis, drafting and software development. "We want to get to a workforce that is not purely human, that is human plus agents," Al Hawi said. He said the department's agents already write as much code in a day as 30 developers, though people still review the output. The department is also using AI in recruitment and procurement.

Keeping Data in the Country

The media office said processing runs on OpenAI's UAE inference residency, which uses GPUs in data centres inside the country. Al Hawi said no government or citizen data leaves the UAE. He added that the intellectual property in the applications the DGE builds belongs to the department, not to OpenAI. He also said the DGE was the first civilian government body admitted to OpenAI's Daybreak Blue programme, which supports advanced cyber defence.

Four Deals in One Visit

The government initiative was one of four agreements signed during Altman's visit. Under the first, ADNOC, G42's Inception42 and OpenAI will deploy OpenAI's GPT models across the energy company's operations on infrastructure inside the UAE, which the parties said makes ADNOC the first energy company to use OpenAI's frontier technology. Under the second, Mubadala, Inception42 and OpenAI will use AI for investment analysis, finding opportunities and assessing risk. The third is a five-year agreement under which Inception42 and OpenAI will promote AI adoption across government, business and education in the UAE, and sell enterprise solutions to large local organisations. No financial terms were disclosed for any of the deals.

Speaking at Adipec in Abu Dhabi this week, Altman said human control of AI should not be up for debate. He named AI's growing energy demand as one of the industry's biggest challenges.

The new services will build on Tamm, Abu Dhabi's app that gathers government transactions in one place. The DGE has not said when permits, licences and inspections will move onto the machine-readable system, or how many other government entities will follow the food safety authority.