Abu Dhabi's partnership with OpenAI began its work at the start of the year, months before four agreements were formally signed, and is already returning routine compliance decisions in minutes rather than days, a senior official has said. Faisal Al Hawi, director of the AI Factory at the Department of Government Enablement, said the collaboration goes beyond automating transactions and aims to change how officials work, make decisions and deliver services while keeping sensitive data and government-developed technology under Abu Dhabi's control. The programme sits within the emirate's Dh13 billion ($3.5 billion) digital strategy to become the world's first AI-native government by the end of 2027.

The first pilot of the machine-readable government system is running at the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, where thousands of policy documents governing food imports have been made accessible to AI. Cases that once took a few days to a week to resolve are now completed in minutes, with the system carrying out the preliminary review before findings are presented to officials. AI did the heavy lifting, Al Hawi said, while judgment and final decisions remain with the humans. Building permits, business licences and inspections are among the next services being targeted.

The department, which employs about 1,200 people, is working towards a model in which each official directs specialised AI agents across research, data analysis, document writing and software development, and its agents can already generate the equivalent of the code produced by 30 developers in a day, although human oversight remains necessary. All frontier capabilities are hosted in-country, and Al Hawi said no government or citizen data leaves the UAE, while the intellectual property in what the government builds remains with the department. The department was also the first civilian government entity to gain access to OpenAI's Daybreak Blue cyber defence programme.