UAE Business AI Adoption Climbs to 72% as AWS Extends $5.47bn Cloud Commitment

Seventy-two percent of UAE businesses now use artificial intelligence, up from 53 percent twelve months earlier. The 19-percentage-point gain works out to roughly 36 percent growth in the adoption rate year on year.

The figures come from a study of the country's AI uptake prepared by the consultancy Strand Partners for Amazon Web Services and the UAE Artificial Intelligence Office, and released to coincide with the AWS Summit Dubai on September 30.

Among companies already using the technology, 85 percent said it had sped up their digital transformation, and more expect that effect to grow as deployments widen.

Dr. Abdelrahman Al Mahmoud, a director at the UAE Artificial Intelligence Office, said the numbers show national AI ambitions turning into use inside individual companies. The aim, he said, is to build conditions where organizations can experiment, scale new tools and turn AI into measurable economic and social results.

Depth, not just uptake

Chris Erasmus, AWS general manager for the UAE and the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, said firms have stopped asking whether they can use AI and started asking how to scale it responsibly. That shift matters. Running one AI application is a different task from threading the technology through business processes, data systems, products and decisions.

A separate AWS dataset, published earlier this year, puts 44 percent of UAE organizations at the advanced, embedded stage of AI maturity, which AWS describes as the highest level in the GCC. That figure is not a subset of the 72 percent; the two come from different surveys.

Earlier AWS and IDC research across the UAE and Saudi Arabia found 98 percent of organizations expected AI to transform their businesses profoundly, and 88 percent of those that had already invested reported better performance. At the time of that survey, 28 percent were investing and another 50 percent planned to.

Cloud spending behind the shift

Scaling requires computing capacity, storage, security and access to better models. AWS plans to put as much as AED20.1 billion ($5.47 billion) into its Middle East (UAE) Region through 2037, and estimates the spending will add about AED41 billion ($11.16 billion) to the local economy while supporting an average of roughly 6,000 full-time jobs a year at outside vendors.

The region opened in 2022 with three Availability Zones, after earlier CloudFront edge and Direct Connect sites and the arrival of AWS Outposts. AWS reckons wider cloud use could unlock $181 billion in extra economic value in the UAE by 2033. It puts the country's cloud market at about $4.1 billion in 2024, rising to a potential $23 billion by 2032.

With e& enterprise, AWS also runs the UAE Sovereign Launchpad, a locally hosted environment endorsed by the UAE Cybersecurity Council and sold to government bodies and regulated industries with data-residency, security, governance and compliance controls built in. Companies named in the new study as users of AWS cloud and generative AI include Property Finder, Virgin Mobile UAE, The ENTERTAINER and Careem.

Skills and funding gaps

The research flags four areas that will decide whether adoption turns into real transformation: secure cloud access, regulation that leaves room to innovate, shortages of specialist AI expertise, and funding for startups and small and medium-sized businesses. It also argues that companies lean too heavily on AI for incremental efficiency gains and need bigger changes in how the technology fits into operations.

Skills are the sharper constraint. Earlier AWS and IDC work found 46 percent of UAE organizations citing a lack of AI skills as a barrier to faster adoption. AWS and e& are trying to close that gap with the AI Nation – Afaaq Program, which aims to give 30,000 people free AI and cloud training, including 25,000 AWS AI Practitioner certification places, 5,000 advanced machine-learning engineering places, more than 600 digital courses and expert coaching.

AWS says its training reached 101,010 learners in the UAE between 2017 and 2026. It also collaborates with Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence on research, technical capability and startups, and runs Qudwatech, a mentorship program for Emirati women in technology.

The AWS and e& relationship extends beyond the Launchpad: the two signed an agreement worth more than $1 billion in 2024, running six years, covering cloud, networking, cybersecurity, AI and machine learning.