UAE Launches Annual Government Challenge With AED9 Million Agentic AI Contest

The challenge was announced on November 2 at the start of UAE Innovation Month. It is open to all federal ministries and entities and their staff. Nine winning projects across three categories will share total prizes of AED9 million. The Mohammed bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation at the Ministry of Cabinet Affairs will oversee it, and teams register through a dedicated digital platform.

"We want unconventional ideas. Solutions that make a difference. Projects that take government work to new levels," Sheikh Mohammed said, according to WAM's translation. Gulf News, quoting his post on X, described the first theme as AI assistants. WAM's official English text calls it agentic AI.

How the Challenge Works

Each yearly edition will focus on a single national priority. This year's has three categories. Government Services covers solutions that redesign customer journeys, simplify procedures and cut processing time. Internal Operations covers work inside government entities, including coordination, monitoring, analysis and decision-making, with the aim of reducing repetitive tasks and raising productivity. A third category, Unconventional Ideas, invites proposals that rethink how government works.

Entries will be judged on how well they match strategic priorities, the quality and feasibility of the solution, whether agentic AI suits the problem, measurable impact and scalability, and governance and sustainability, WAM reported.

Part of a Wider Agentic Push

The contest supports the federal government's target of moving 50 percent of government sectors, services and operations to agentic AI models within two years. Mohammad bin Abdullah Al Gergawi, Minister of Cabinet Affairs and Chairman of the National Committee for the Agentic AI Project, said the next phase would put agentic AI assistants alongside employees. "Agentic AI is not merely a new technical tool. It is an opportunity to redesign how government works," he said.

The announcement came on the same day Abu Dhabi launched a Machine-Readable Government initiative with OpenAI. That programme turns regulations into a form AI systems can use to help officials with routine compliance checks. Together, the two moves show the UAE's federal and emirate-level governments shifting from trying out AI tools to rebuilding core public-sector processes around them.

For technology vendors and consultancies in the region, a contest that draws ideas from inside federal entities could reveal concrete use cases and procurement priorities over the coming year. For other governments, it is an example of building agentic AI adoption through staff-led projects rather than only through top-down programmes.