FAB Opens Invitation-Only AI Governance Series in Abu Dhabi
The first session of The Exchange brought about 30 practitioners, researchers and regulators together to discuss where AI decision-making ends and human judgement begins.
Nadia Mansour Nadia Mansour covers fintech across the UAE and MENA for Anecdoted -- digital banking, payments licences and the startups building around them. nadia@anecdoted.com
FAB has launched The Exchange, a session series built around responsible AI. The first meeting, held at the bank's Abu Dhabi headquarters under the theme "AI Decision Making and Governance," was hosted by the FAB AI Innovation Hub.
Attendance was by invitation and numbered about 30 people. They came from industry, academia and regulation: senior AI practitioners, technology and data leaders, researchers, business heads and governance specialists.
The talks centered on how firms embed AI into their decision-making, and on where human judgement has to stay in the loop. That balance ran through the day. Attendees argued that clear accountability and sound governance do more than satisfy a compliance box — together they underpin responsible use and measurable business value at the same time.
Discussion moved from principle to deployment: how AI spreads across an entire firm, and which decisions can be handed to a model and which cannot. Participants examined what it takes for newer tools to get past the pilot stage and start producing results that can be measured. Trust, and readiness for regulation, were treated as conditions that help adoption scale rather than as drags on it.
Each session in the series is designed around practitioners describing how they use, govern and scale AI inside their own organizations. The opening one set perspectives from FAB, NYU Abu Dhabi and the ADGM Registration Authority side by side, placing business, research and regulation in the same conversation.
FAB says AI is a core part of its strategy, and frames responsible AI as the way to scale the technology rather than a limit on it. The bank measures AI's worth by the quality of the decisions and outcomes it produces.
Through the series, FAB aims to build a community of AI practitioners and to pull the private sector, academia and regulators closer together. It also positions the effort as support for Abu Dhabi's and the UAE's broader AI goals.
The format is deliberately small. Thirty people in a room is not a conference, and an invitation-only list puts the emphasis on who is present rather than on how many. Governance questions tend to stall while banks, researchers and regulators work them out separately, each holding a different view of where accountability lands once a model is making the call. Getting the three into one room at the point where deployment decisions are actually taken is a narrower and harder exercise than publishing principles.
