The Acceleration Of Generative Artificial Intelligence And The Role Of Government In Advancing Their Economies And Empowering Their Citizens Given the endless range of uses and applications for GenAI, it has the potential to significantly further transform countries, industries, and future financial prosperity.

This article was co-written with Paul Cushion, a global leader with deep domain expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), data, and digital transformation. He has worked extensively with global C-suite leaders to successfully create data driven tech enabled businesses. He has until recently been the Global Head of Sales and Strategy at Toloka AI, successfully scaling up a full stack artificial intelligent platform used by many of the world's leading tech companies including Amazon to deploy AI and generative AI solutions into production. Paul previously established new international digital transformation businesses for KPMG, working for leading multinational companies to leverage data and emerging tech to deliver increased revenues and customer growth. Paul is also a member of Integra Seven's Advisory board.

Artificial intelligence, or more specifically generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), has been the subject of discussion for everyone from Dubai taxi drivers to the C-suite since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022.

The potential applications of GenAI are unlimited, and people are understandably both interested and concerned about how their own lives—both professional and personal—will be disrupted by these new technologies. The answer is that it is likely to be substantial, as with all previous general-purpose technologies, but in uniquely different ways for everyone.

As a business owner, one perhaps ponders on how to face the competition. Some employees worry about job security, while others optimize their tasks to accomplish more in less time, freeing up time for side hustles and leisure activities. Meanwhile, parents consider what advice to give their children about the future job market—they are probably already asking ChatGPT for some ideas in this regard!

Depending on how well they understand artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on their particular business models, people will experience varying levels of excitement and fear. Those with more knowledge will likely feel more positive and confident, while those with less understanding may feel more anxious and uncertain.

Here, it's worth remembering these words from Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. Embracing this spirit, we must delve into this topic with the aim of increasing our understanding, and reducing our fear.

Artificial intelligence has existed since the 1960s. However, the exponential increase in compute power, massive data sets, and advances in deep self-supervised learning has enabled the creation of pre-trained foundation models that underpin GenAI. The number of foundation models continues to rapidly increase, with differing levels of transparency and end user customizability, from fully closed models, to open weights and open-source models. These are all critical factors in determining viability and particularly if you are to further fine-tune these models with your own private domain specific data. These foundation models currently typically fall into several subcategories like generative adversarial networks (GANs), variation auto-encoders (VAEs), diffusion models and the most widely known type of models, transformer large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.

With GenAI, the removal of the need for coding skills through a natural language interface has enabled usage to scale very rapidly amongst all strata of society. However, model outputs will vary greatly depending on the prompts that you provide to each GenAI model. As people have now become adept at entering keywords into a Google search, prompt engineering to extract valuable insights from GenAI will become a skill in great demand.

So, how and who is responsible for navigating this changing landscape and deployment of GenAI for a country or a company—and as a reader, where does your responsibility lie? In this article, we explore what you can do to prepare yourself for this paradigm shift, and how Dubai, in particular, has been committed to embracing these technologies to empower its citizens to once again reinvent its own economy, as it has repeatedly done so with great success since its foundational days.

THE DOMINO EFFECT

In the history of both individuals and cities, certain events trigger what is called a "domino effect," leading to outcomes that can be either highly positive or very negative. Dubai's journey of business digitalization and innovation has experienced several such domino effects.

For instance, nowadays, does a business even exist if it's not on Google Maps? But in the mid-2010s, hundreds of thousands of businesses in Dubai were real, functioning enterprises, but they were virtually invisible online, owing to them lacking a presence on Google Maps and a dedicated website. To enhance business digitalization, Dubai Chambers partnered with Google in 2018 on the "Google My Business" initiative to improve its members' online discoverability. The positive impact of this initiative became evident during the recovery seen in the business landscape after the COVID-19 crisis.

The UAE government also has a proven history of being an early adopter of new technologies. In the same year that Google was working with Dubai Chambers to map businesses, the UAE federal government introduced the requirement for SMEs to file their value-added tax (VAT) digitally each quarter. This mandate acted as a catalyst for many SMEs to embrace digital filing and leverage technology in their operations. For SMEs employing 95% of the country's workforce, this marked a radical digital transformation, triggering the transition of many more processes online. The preparation was thorough, with a network of government and private sector organizations proactively hosting sessions on software selection and use cases.

We've also seen a global acceleration in the use of digital technologies since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was an event that rapidly forced many to embrace digital technology in order to access e-commerce, food and grocery delivery, and make video calls during lockdown. The responsibility of upskilling those who were not digitally native fell on their families and friends, or simply by self-learning through watching YouTube videos. The transition in Dubai and the UAE, in general, was smoother than in other countries. Given the predominant role of the young working population, employers—from small shops in Deira, to multinational conglomerates and government agencies—facilitated the change.

This new modus operandi was achievable thanks to the excellent infrastructure set up in Dubai and the UAE. It also proved to be an opportunity for Dubai to accelerate the process of both talent and business attraction to the Emirate. People from all corners of the world, including many advanced economies, opted to call Dubai a place to live and work remotely, while for organizations, the opportunity to introduce remote work allowed them to somewhat manage the rising cost of doing business as well.

Related: Here's How We Can Create A Future Where Artificial Intelligence Is A Force For Good

THE UAE'S AI DOMINO EFFECT

The UAE's appointment of H.E. Omar Sultan Al Olama as the Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in October 2017—the first country in the world to do so—offers an indication of the country's recognition of how significant and transformative AI technology could be.

Plus, the UAE's approach to ownership and investment in power generation, server and cooling capabilities, digital connectivity and network availability, a well-defined and achievable AI strategy and legal framework, educational initiatives, and establishing long term partnerships with hyper-scalers are all decisions and investments that need to be made by forward thinking governments.

Equally, in a digital world, nations need to remember that this infrastructure is not built as it was historically done in a physical manner—there needs to be an ongoing commitment to investment and renewals as new technologies evolve. Many countries will find themselves on the wrong side of the AI divide if they aren't capable of delivering on all these fronts at speed.

The UAE government has also placed a strong priority on building local capabilities. It has already started deploying AI to redefine their public services to increase the quality of citizen experiences, optimize energy efficiency, and reduce waste, amongst other critical services, with the aim to be at the forefront of AI adoption. This is all underpinned by the ambitious UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031 that was published in 2017.

This strategy hasa also led to the creation and growth of other entities like AI71, Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), G42, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), and Technology Innovation Institute (TII), which developed the successful open-source large language model (LLM), Falcon. The Dubai Future District Fund was also established to invest in innovative startups with a strong focus on AI. The government also recently opened the Dubai AI Campus in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) with a mission to innovate within the financial sector and upskill civil servants.

After establishing many wholly backed government entities, the next iteration of capability is being established through public-private partnerships and strategic alliances to bridge the lack of extensive experience in GenAI. This is further reflected in the recent memorandum of understanding inked between the Dubai government, Mastercard, and PwC to open a center of AI and cyber security to further grow talent in the region. Equally, G42 has recently established an AI-focused partnership with Microsoft and has already signed new projects in Africa. Plus, to further drive its commitment to AI, and with foresight that's ahead of most corporate board structures, the Dubai government announced in June the appointment of 22 Chief AI Officers across different government entities to drive the development of the future framework for AI-enabled government operations.

GETTING READY FOR GENAI

All businesses face constraints across talent and capabilities, and tools like GenAI is set to become central to any organization's operating model, and they shall play a significant role in determining its future success. As such, how countries and companies alike foster a culture to develop talent and create AI solutions is critical.

A public-private partnership model for both adoption of GenAI and upskilling citizens is proving to be a successful model for those countries currently at the forefront of innovation. Building countrywide expertise and talent in both government and companies is critical for all countries. Protecting one's sovereignty also requires new domestic capabilities to be able to build white box models using proprietary data, so that they are not wholly reliant on black box solutions developed by companies in other countries.

Hyperscale platforms such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft form the backbone of the cloud, and they have such critical size globally that no company—and few countries—could currently compete with their level of investment in research and development (R&D), volumes, and breadth of data and ability to partition global data to be legally compliant, as well as their technical infrastructure. After all, platforms are able to remain at the forefront of technological change, and enable much faster adoption of new technologies.

Keeping this in mind, any attempts by over-ambitious Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) to reinvent such platforms will not be viable from either a cost or remaining relevant perspective, rendering inhouse solutions defunct before they're even built. Ask the board of any company established before 2010 how they are getting along with extracting themselves from their legacy physical IT infrastructures which they invested heavily in, and which now prove to be a hindrance to business innovation and adaptability.

At the same time, data strategies of organizations will need to be redesigned, evolving from simply storing numerical data, to harnessing the power of GenAI with domain-specific unstructured text, image, sound, and video data, which can be leveraged to inform business decisions and create new insights, products and services. This shall bring compliance challenges, as multinational companies have to comply with the ever-evolving laws about data protection and sovereignty.

For instance, the European Artificial Intelligence Act, which became effective from June 2024, mandates a legal requirement for companies to train all employees who build or use AI technologies within their business. These standards and safety guardrails are still in their infancy, but they will develop and impact how AI can be scaled, and companies must be adeptly prepared with internal talent.

ALL EYES ON THE FUTURE

All C-suite, like most people, have now heard of ChatGPT, and they've been asking consultants and system integrators to build GenAI solutions for their businesses, so that they can understand the impact they can have on their enterprises, while also demonstrating innovation and efficiency to their shareholders. While these have typically focused on text-based GenAI solutions, there are many businesses that would benefit from exploiting multiple use cases using multiple different foundation models.

Each model (current and future) has different latencies, accuracies, and costs associated with scaling them, and hence, for each business use case, there will be an optimal model. Relying on one model for multiple use cases may be easier and quicker to deploy, but it is highly unlikely to deliver optimal business outcomes. For example, the financial business case to scale a GenAI solution may not be viable for some large language models, yet with alternative smaller models, which may provide less accuracy and a greater latency at a lower cost, then the business case could be viable.

Of course, only through testing with a proof-of-concept pilot will this become apparent. This is before we even factor in approaches to fine-tune these models with a company's private data or for use cases, which shall require regular model updates or optimization using retrieval-augmented generation techniques (RAG). A further consideration is with the increased global focus on ESG targets. There will be many models with lower environmental impacts than those currently in popular use if companies must start reporting their AI environmental impact.

It is therefore paramount that companies adopt a flexible architecture to ensure that they have access to multiple current and future foundation models, and are able to deliver the best GenAI solutions for their businesses. Amazon Bedrock is an example of a flexible managed solution that enables companies to not only have access to deploy and scale a wide range of the latest foundation models, but also to a broader set of essential capabilities such as security, privacy, and responsible AI.

It's worth noting here how organizations have matured in their adoption of cloud technologies. Many have recognized business fragility and potential single points of failure by relying on a single cloud solution provider, and hence have adopted a multi-cloud solution (multiple cloud providers). Similarly, as organizations embrace GenAI in production, they will recognize the need to move to a multi-GenAI model approach.

In embracing GenAI, companies in the UAE can benefit from enhanced productivity, innovative solutions, and access to new markets. By recognizing and integrating the government's AI strategies into their own business models, leaders can ensure they are prepared for the future, positioning their enterprises for sustainable growth and success. The UAE exemplifies how visionary governance, coupled with robust technological adoption, can create a prosperous and resilient future for businesses and their leaders.

Related: Here's Why Dubai Is Primed To Lead The Global Race In Artificial Intelligence