Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, Alibaba Cloud Sign Agentic AI Agreement

Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy has signed a memorandum of understanding with Alibaba Cloud to speed the adoption of agentic artificial intelligence among private-sector companies in the emirate. The document was signed in Shenzhen during the Dubai Business Forum – China, which Dubai Chambers organised.

The chamber is one of three that sit under Dubai Chambers. Its Vice President, Saeed Al Gergawi, signed the MoU with Feifei Li, who holds the chief technology officer title at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and also leads its international business. Alibaba Cloud is the cloud and artificial intelligence business of Alibaba Group.

Agentic AI, in the sense the agreement uses it, means software that completes multi-step work with little human prompting. The chamber has made its spread through the private sector a priority, and the MoU is built around three areas: skills and capabilities, startup support, and the testing and implementation of such tools inside businesses.

The three strands are meant to reach different parts of the market at once: employees who need training, founders who need infrastructure, and managers who need a working deployment.

Training, certification and trainers of trainers

Dubai Chambers Academy will carry the first strand: AI training content, certification tracks, technical workshops and sessions led by specialists. The agreement also covers train-the-trainer programmes and educational resources, so material on integrating agentic AI into operations can be passed on rather than delivered once.

For startups: mentorship, credits, compute and licences

Young companies are handled separately. The partnership provides technical mentorship, technology credits, computing resources and software licences, and a selected group of startups will get opportunities to enter Alibaba Cloud's own programmes and its business network.

Bundling the strands matters because training without tools rarely spreads, and tools without training rarely get used. The agreement couples classroom material with credits, licences and a route to deployment.

Testing and deploying inside enterprises

The third strand is aimed at established businesses moving from trial to deployment. It bundles technical expertise and implementation support, and gives applications a showcase through Alibaba Cloud Marketplace, a platform that handles discovery, testing, purchasing and deployment of third-party software, data and cloud services.

Al Gergawi said the chamber is committed to strengthening international partnerships in agentic AI. Such partnerships, he said, enable knowledge exchange and widen access to specialised technologies and expertise. Closer cooperation is intended to help Dubai-based companies build capabilities and then put them to work.

The outcome he described is operational rather than symbolic: businesses that run better, and new solutions and business models that feed digital economy growth and Dubai's standing as a global hub for advanced technology.

Eric Wan, General Manager for the Middle East, Turkey and Central Asia at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said agentic AI is moving away from experimentation and into everyday business use, and that the companies which move first will set the pace for Dubai's digital economy. Alibaba Cloud has served customers in the UAE since 2016, he said, and the aim is to put technology, training and startup programmes within reach of the chamber's community so that local businesses can build the skills and confidence to run AI agents in their operations.

The initiative aligns with directives from Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, and Chairman of The Executive Council of Dubai, to accelerate agentic AI adoption across the private sector.

For Alibaba Cloud, the arrangement extends a UAE presence that began in 2016 and now includes two data centres serving private companies and public institutions.

Local infrastructure shapes what is practical for a firm deciding where its AI workloads should sit, and the training and credit components speak to two constraints smaller companies tend to hit first: thin specialist skills and the cost of trying something unproven.

The MoU forms part of a wider push by Dubai Chambers to help the private sector move toward agentic AI, widening access to technical expertise, training resources and tools intended to change how work is done and how much of it gets done.