UAE staff lead on AI use while 67% fear it could take their jobs

Eighty-five percent of UAE employees already use AI in their professional work. Sixty-seven percent worry the technology could take their jobs. Both figures come from the same research programme, and the distance between them captures the mood of a workforce that has picked up the tools faster than it has been told what they will mean for its future.

The Oliver Wyman Forum's 300,000 Voices – UAE Edition asked residents about their working lives, their personal finances, how they make healthcare decisions and how they relate to brands. It sits inside a five-year international programme that has gathered close to 300,000 respondents across 20 markets. The UAE edition drew on 5,285 participants questioned over several waves, supplemented by an additional poll of 503 people in April 2026. Most of the findings highlighted from it date from 2025, which means individual results reflect different survey periods and different groups of respondents rather than one clean snapshot.

Security and success, both weighted heavily

Seventy percent of UAE respondents said feeling safe and protected was important to them, against 57% globally. Ambition runs just as hot. Fifty-nine percent put achievement and success first, compared with 40% elsewhere, and 54% said they wanted to own a business — close to double the global figure of 28%.

Those two instincts are not in conflict so much as stacked. The same population wants a floor under it and a ladder above it, and expects both from the same economy.

Satisfied, but not fulfilled

Comfort at work is high by international standards. Seventy-five percent of UAE employees described themselves as satisfied with their jobs, against 66% globally. Fulfilment is a separate measure, and it lands far lower: only 25% said they felt fulfilled.

The youngest workers are the least inclined to wait. Among Gen Z employees, 60% said career acceleration and financial freedom should take priority over work-life balance. Seventy-three percent expressed confidence in their companies' futures. They also placed more importance than older colleagues on face-to-face access to managers and senior leaders, a preference that cuts against the assumption that younger staff want every conversation filtered through a screen.

Job security still comes first

The PwC Middle East Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025 found that 85% of regional respondents rated job security highly when assessing a new role, against 79% globally. The same survey found that 69% of Middle East respondents had learned new skills in the previous year, well ahead of the 56% recorded worldwide. Workers here are not waiting to be retrained. Many are doing it themselves, on their own time, while also saying they want more stability rather than less.

Adoption is running ahead of the plan

AI use is close to universal. Eighty-five percent of those surveyed had used it for professional tasks, 56% said it had improved their productivity, and 54% said it had improved their work-life balance.

Confidence is far less evenly distributed inside companies. Twenty-six percent of executives agreed their organisation had a clear AI vision and communicated progress on it effectively. Among frontline employees, that figure was 6%.

Global data points the same way. The PwC Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2026, published in September, found 64% of workers worldwide had used AI at work during the previous year, with daily generative AI use climbing from 14% to 22%. It also documented wide differences in who gets access to AI tools, to training and to career opportunities. Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index identified organisational culture, supportive managers and room to experiment as the conditions that let employees extract real value from the technology.

Dr. Mona Hammami, who was Partner and Head of the UAE at Oliver Wyman, said employers needed to be more transparent about career progression, about AI's impact on jobs and about the skills workers would need. That is the practical form of the vision problem. The 26% and the 6% are not describing different technologies. They are describing different amounts of information.

The pattern across these numbers is that capability is arriving faster than the structures meant to direct it. An employee who opens an AI tool every morning, fears for their role and hears nothing from leadership about the plan has good reason to feel productive and exposed at once. The 25% fulfilment figure belongs to the same story: being satisfied with a job and sensing progress inside it are different things, and the second is much harder to buy with salary alone.

Investing, and the pressure to be seen to earn

Financial behaviour diverges from global norms as well. Forty-eight percent of lower-income UAE respondents had put money into the stock market, against 28% globally. AI is part of how they decide: 64% of lower-income respondents used it to inform investment decisions, almost level with the 65% of higher-income respondents who did the same. The tools have spread across income brackets more evenly than the money has. Forty percent of UAE respondents said they felt pressure to make money in order to be considered successful, against 33% globally.

Health advice, and who acts on it

Eighty percent of UAE respondents had used AI for healthcare-related purposes, compared with 65% globally. Exercise habits split sharply by income: 66% of higher-income respondents worked out regularly, against 49% of lower-income respondents, a gap of 17 percentage points. Access to information, in other words, is levelling faster than the time and circumstances needed to act on it.

Brands get less patience

Loyalty is thinner than the market sometimes assumes. Thirty-five percent of UAE consumers expected to keep buying from a brand over the long term, against 47% globally. A single poor experience would be enough to push 65% of them to switch. Seventy-one percent expected brands to remember their preferences and previous purchases. Seventy-eight percent had used AI to discover and buy products.

Hammami said consistent customer experiences matter more as consumers grow quicker to switch.

The number worth watching is not the 85% adoption rate. It is the 6% of frontline employees who believe their employer has told them where any of this is heading.