H.E. Wesam Lootah, Director General – GovDigital, Department of Government Enablement, explains why its success will depend on data, resilience and keeping people accountable for the decisions that matter
Our success is measured in the satisfaction of our citizens and residents with government services. Our success is making sure that government does not stand in the way or create friction when someone wants to invest in Abu Dhabi, create a business, work in Abu Dhabi or live in Abu Dhabi.”
It is a deceptively simple measure of success for one of the world’s most ambitious government transformation programmes. But when I sat down with H.E. Wesam Lootah, Director General of GovDigital at Abu Dhabi’s Department of Government Enablement (DGE), to understand what an AI-native government really means, it became clear that the ambition can be measured through remarkably human moments.
It can be seen in a patient receiving an earlier warning about a potential health risk. In an entrepreneur spending less time waiting for a business approval. In a resident having a question answered without needing to understand which government entity sits behind the service. Or in a government employee being able to focus on a complex decision because an AI agent has taken care of the repetitive work surrounding it.
These individual moments sit behind the scale of Abu Dhabi Government’s Digital Strategy 2025–2027. Backed by an investment of AED13 billion, the strategy aims to make Abu Dhabi the world’s first fully AI-native government by 2027. But for Lootah, the number of systems deployed or the sophistication of the technology will not, on their own, determine whether it succeeds. The real test is whether government becomes faster, more consistent and easier for people to navigate. The strategy initially set a target of implementing 200 AI use cases by the end of 2027. More than 100 examples can already be found across government, from AI agents responding to citizen enquiries to systems supporting patient-risk management, building permits and other public services.
Yet the ambition has evolved. Abu Dhabi is no longer asking only how many AI tools it can introduce. It is examining how those capabilities can connect, build on one another and transform the way government operates as a whole.
That requires more than access to advanced AI models. It depends on trusted data, secure cloud and computing infrastructure, common systems across government and a workforce prepared to exercise its judgment alongside AI. It also raises a more consequential question: as AI becomes embedded in the machinery of government, how can it accelerate decisions without weakening the human accountability behind them?
Lootah explains how the answer begins by treating AI not as the destination, but as a means of building a government that works better for the people it serves.
From use cases to complete transformation
Let’s picture an employee processing a procurement request, or a finance team reconciling government expenditure or a resident waiting for an approval, the boundaries between government entities matter far less than the outcome. They expect the system to work as one synchronised unit, even when the reality is that numerous departments, policies and datasets sit behind a single interaction.
It is this expectation that is beginning to shape the next phase of Abu Dhabi’s AI transformation. Early AI adoption gave individual government entities the freedom to identify their own problems and test where the technology could create value. That produced applications across healthcare, licensing, customer service and internal operations. It also allowed the government to observe how AI performed within different institutional environments before attempting to deploy it more widely.
But individual successes do not automatically amount to systemic change. A collection of effective tools can still leave government operating through separate processes, duplicated capabilities and disconnected sources of information. Lootah describes these early implementations as an important starting point, but the focus is now shifting towards what he calls “complete transformation.”
“We introduced a blueprint or a playbook for what an AI-native government is,” he says. The blueprint divides government into two layers. The first covers common domains such as human capital, procurement, finance, legal services and marketing. Because these functions exist across government, DGE can develop the underlying capabilities once and extend them across more than 50 entities, rather than asking each organisation to solve the same problem independently.
The scale of that common foundation is already taking shape. DGE says the government-wide AI pipeline includes around 25 potential procurement use cases and at least 10 within human capital. These are not necessarily the services a resident will see, but they influence how quickly public money is spent, vacancies are filled, employees are supported and decisions move through government. The second layer comprises sectoral domains, including healthcare, community services, law enforcement and the judicial system. These require the knowledge and accountability of the relevant government entities, with DGE providing the infrastructure, capabilities and support needed to develop them. “Our role here becomes [that of] an enabler,” Lootah explains. “We provide the infrastructure. We provide the acceleration. We provide capabilities and work hand-in-hand with the government entities.”
The distinction is important. An AI system used in procurement cannot simply be transferred into healthcare or justice without accounting for different risks, regulations and consequences. But both can rely on common foundations for data, infrastructure, security and governance.
For Abu Dhabi, becoming AI-native therefore does not mean placing the same technology everywhere. It means creating an ecosystem in which shared capabilities can travel across institutional boundaries, while the judgment and accountability attached to each public service remain where they belong.
One country one leadership
Lootah arrived in Abu Dhabi with more than 25 years of experience spanning digital leadership, public-sector transformation and the private sector. Before his appointment as Director General of GovDigital in April 2025, he served as CEO of Dubai Smart Government Establishment and CEO of Dubai Municipality’s Corporate Support Services Sector. His career has also included senior positions at Emaar and Dubai World Trade Centre.
That experience gives him an unusual vantage point from which to assess how different governments approach transformation. Yet when I asked what distinguishes Abu Dhabi after years spent helping shape Dubai’s digital landscape, Lootah did not reach for a comparison between the two emirates.
“We are working under one country, one leadership. So there are a lot of similarities in how we operate and also collaborate together,” he says. It is a significant answer in a conversation that could easily have been framed around which city is moving faster or building the more advanced model of government. Lootah’s view is more philosophical and, perhaps, more useful. Progress in one emirate does not have to come at the expense of another. The experience, infrastructure and institutional knowledge accumulated across the UAE can instead become part of a shared national capability.
That does not mean Abu Dhabi’s approach is indistinguishable. Its advantage, Lootah explains, lies in the foundations already in place and the ability to connect them. TAMM is one of the clearest public-facing examples. By bringing more than 1,170 government services into one platform, it allows people to interact with government without first having to identify which entity owns a particular process. Behind that single point of access sit multiple authorities, datasets and operational systems. For the resident, however, the experience is intended to feel like one government.
The same principle extends beyond service delivery. Abu Dhabi has brought together government entities, state-owned companies, global technology partners and academic institutions as part of a broader AI ecosystem. Lootah points to G42 and its partnership with Microsoft, alongside the research and talent emerging from Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and the development of regional AI models such as Falcon and Jais.
What makes Abu Dhabi stand out, then, is not one platform, company or model. It is the proximity of these capabilities and the possibility of making them work together.
For citizens and residents, that collaboration should eventually become almost invisible. They do not need to see the institutional relationships behind a government service. They need the application to recognise the context of their request, the relevant entities to exchange information securely and the government to respond without sending them from one department to another.
Abu Dhabi’s pursuit of an AI-native government may be locally led, but Lootah’s answer places it within a wider national story: different emirates developing their own strengths while contributing to the same country’s progress. “The approach is […] an integrated ecosystem across private sector, government, state-owned enterprises,” he says.
Resilience embedded in design
Integration creates scale, but it also concentrates risk. When government services, data and decisions become more connected, a failure in one part of the system can travel further and affect more people. Building an AI-native government is therefore not only a question of what the technology can do. It is also a test of whether the foundations beneath it can withstand disruption.
Abu Dhabi has been building those foundations through cloud migration, local computing capacity and shared security infrastructure. DGE’s agreement with Microsoft and Core42 aims to establish a unified sovereign cloud environment capable of processing more than 11 million digital interactions every day between government entities, citizens, residents and businesses. Lootah says the government has also secured the computing capacity required for generative AI through Core42, allowing advanced models to process information within the UAE. Alongside this sits a centralised security operations capability covering more than 50 government entities, designed to provide continuous monitoring, threat intelligence and defensive protection across government.
Recent events across the region have subjected industries and their infrastructure to a significant pressure test. In such operating environments, interconnected systems must continue serving people even as the sectors surrounding them, from aviation and energy to hospitality and public services, navigate pressure and uncertainty.
For Lootah, however, this was not the first test of the UAE’s digital foundations. “The infrastructure, digital infrastructure, and other infrastructure of the country has been tested over many many years,” he says. The COVID-19 pandemic was one such moment. Government employees continued working, students continued learning and public services remained available while physical movement was restricted. More recently, as regional disruption placed high-pressure systems under renewed strain, Lootah says Abu Dhabi Government continued operating without significant interruption.
“We didn’t have any significant disruptions,” he says. “Resilience and security is something that we don’t do as an after fact. This is embedded in our investments.”
That resilience is supported by multiple data centres, redundancy and business-continuity planning, alongside coordination with Abu Dhabi’s crisis-management authorities to identify risks before they develop into operational failures. The principle is straightforward: resilience cannot be added after a system has been built. It must be present in its architecture, infrastructure and everyday operating procedures. Yet infrastructure can only protect the system. People must still know how to operate it.
By 2025, more than 25,000 Abu Dhabi Government employees received training in AI and digital literacy. Lootah says tools such as Copilot have also been made available across the workforce, while a certification programme is being developed to ensure employees can continue adapting as the technology evolves.
Moreover, the scale of the training matters, but participation alone will not make a workforce AI-ready. Employees must understand when a system can be trusted, when its output requires further examination and when a decision must be escalated. As AI agents assume more repetitive work, human value will increasingly lie in context, critical thinking and accountability.
Lootah is optimistic that new roles will emerge as others change or disappear, drawing parallels with earlier technologies that reshaped work without bringing employment to an end. The more immediate challenge, however, is managing that transition while people are still inside it.
An AI-native government cannot be sustained by cloud capacity, cybersecurity controls or advanced models alone. Its resilience will ultimately depend on whether the people using those systems are equipped not simply to work faster, but to exercise sound judgment when the technology cannot.
The measure of progress
At the beginning of our conversation, Lootah took me back to the period in 2024 when Abu Dhabi began shaping the strategy that would define its digital direction from 2025 to 2027. Before discussing AI agents, advanced models or the hundreds of potential applications across government, he established a more fundamental point. “In order to become an AI-native government, there are prerequisites that have to be in place,” he says.
Those prerequisites have surfaced throughout Abu Dhabi’s transformation: trusted data, sovereign cloud infrastructure, local computing capacity, unified government systems, cybersecurity controls and a workforce capable of using AI responsibly. They explain why the strategy has moved beyond encouraging individual entities to experiment with AI and towards changing how entire areas of government operate.
Access to the technology alone will not distinguish Abu Dhabi. As Lootah observes, advanced AI models are increasingly available to governments and organisations around the world. The more consequential advantage will come from the information surrounding those models and whether it is sufficiently reliable, connected and accessible to support decisions.
“The differentiator for us is going to be on the data side, [putting together] consolidated systems that are not scattered, and made available,” he says. That concept could reshape how government knowledge is used. Abu Dhabi has already ingested more than 1,300 government policies into one sectoral implementation.
According to Lootah, it achieved 96 per cent accuracy while reducing work that previously took days to minutes. Instead of an employee searching across documents and systems for the policy governing a decision, AI can retrieve and reason across that information, placing the relevant context in front of them.
The value, however, does not lie in producing an answer more quickly if that answer cannot be understood, challenged or traced to an authoritative source. This is why the final measure of Abu Dhabi’s strategy will not be the sophistication of its models or whether it reaches a predetermined number of use cases. It will be found in the time returned to residents, the hours saved for employees, the consistency of government decisions and the friction removed from starting a business, securing an approval or accessing an essential service.
There is a paradox at the centre of that ambition. If Abu Dhabi succeeds in becoming AI-native, people may encounter less visible government, not more visible technology. They should not need to know which model processed a request, which entity owns the relevant data or how many systems exchanged information behind the screen. They should experience a government that anticipates what they need, responds more quickly and remains fair, secure and accountable when the decision matters.
That brings the feature back to Lootah’s original measure of success: not AI for its own sake, but a government that allows people to live, work and create opportunities with less friction.
As he puts it: “[Technology] for us is not the end; it’s a means to an end.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Pavneet Kaur
Dieser Artikel ist neu veröffentlicht von / This article is republished from: ITP.net, 15.10.2026
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