UAE's AI Push Lifts Regional Ranking; Investment Surge Drives Market Maturity Gains

A 13-point improvement in AI maturity scoring has placed the United Arab Emirates among the world’s most aggressive markets for artificial intelligence investment, according to ServiceNow’s latest Enterprise AI Maturity Index.

The analysis, compiled by research firm ThoughtLab from surveys of approximately 4,500 executives and 2,000 employees across 19 countries, documents how government backing and strategic capital allocation have created measurable competitive advantages for UAE enterprises. Major technology investors, including Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI, have followed that policy signal into the market.

Saif Mashat, vice president for the Middle East and Africa at ServiceNow, framed the UAE’s position as a direct result of policy infrastructure. “The UAE remains one of the world’s most ambitious AI markets and the government’s long-term strategy and regulatory leadership have given organisations a genuine head start,” he said. He was quick to add, however, that capital deployment alone does not translate to operational advantage. “The ones pulling ahead are moving from AI pilots to AI orchestration, connecting legacy systems, data, governance and AI agents in one control tower,” Mashat said.

The investment outlook reinforces that momentum. UAE organisations project that artificial intelligence will represent nearly one fifth of total information technology budgets by 2027, a forecast that signals sustained capital commitment and broad confidence in AI’s business case.

Yet the report identifies a significant gap between investment and implementation maturity. While 57 percent of UAE organisations have implemented agentic AI, tools designed to execute repetitive tasks autonomously, only 7 percent have deployed it to build autonomous workflows. Globally, the pattern is more pronounced: 59 percent of organisations surveyed possess the capability to use agentic AI, but only 9 percent have achieved significant progress in creating autonomous, multistep workflows.

This implementation lag points to structural challenges that capital alone cannot resolve.

The ServiceNow analysis found that many organisations are attempting to layer AI onto fragmented technology environments, disconnected data systems and siloed workflows. The UAE’s advantage lies not in investment volume but in the governance conditions that enable more coherent technology integration. Mashat put the responsibility squarely on individual enterprises: “The challenge for enterprises now is to bring that same discipline and consistency into their own organisations.” Companies that fail to align legacy systems, data governance and AI deployment risk squandering their competitive position despite favorable market conditions.

The UAE’s decade-long push toward AI leadership has been framed as part of broader economic diversification away from hydrocarbon dependence. That strategic pivot has translated into tangible infrastructure investments, most visibly the AI campus under development in Abu Dhabi in partnership with the United States, which will include 5 gigawatts of capacity dedicated to AI data centres.

By contrast, comparative analysis across the 19 surveyed markets reveals uneven adoption patterns elsewhere. France demonstrated greater resistance to AI deployment compared to peer economies. In Saudi Arabia, employee resistance was more pronounced, attributed to risk-averse workplace cultures, fragmented data infrastructure and overlapping technology tools that complicate implementation.

The ServiceNow findings suggest that the UAE’s maturity advantage reflects not technological superiority but alignment between government policy, capital availability and enterprise readiness. As global markets grapple with the gap between AI investment and operational deployment, the question that will determine the next wave of competitive advantage is whether individual UAE enterprises can translate a favorable policy environment into disciplined, enterprise-wide execution before that window narrows.