AI is moving deeper into the operations of governments, universities and critical infrastructure, with applications ranging from digital workers generating millions of dollars in annual savings to AI tools being deployed across thousands of public-sector employees.
Those applications will feature at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026, the AI-first Expo and Summit taking place from 6-7 October at ADNEC Centre.
Organised by inD and hosted by the Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi (DGE), with Solutions+, a Mubadala company, as Global Partner, the event will bring together more than 400 AI-first companies and over 180 speakers from more than 70 countries, alongside policymakers, investors and business executives.
Microsoft Takes AI Into Government
Microsoft will use the event to highlight its approach to what it calls the “Frontier Firm”, where employees work alongside AI and agents to transform workflows and decision-making.
In Abu Dhabi, Microsoft 365 Copilot is being rolled out to 35,000 government employees through the company’s partnership with the Abu Dhabi Government. The programme supports the emirate’s ambition to become the world’s first AI-native government by 2027.
The deployment is intended to streamline processes, support decision-making and allow employees to focus on higher-value public services, with security, responsible AI and in-country data residency forming part of the programme.
“The biggest shift we are seeing is from AI as a tool to AI as a teammate,” said Amr Kamel, Managing Director, Microsoft UAE. “We are entering a new era where people work alongside AI agents that can reason, plan and act across workflows, while human judgement and accountability remain at the centre.”
Microsoft’s showcase will include Copilot, Azure AI, cybersecurity and partner technologies, with a focus on moving AI from experimentation into operational use.
“The UAE has established one of the world’s clearest ambitions for AI, and the next chapter is about turning that ambition into impact at scale,” Kamel added.
Data Infrastructure Becomes Critical to AI
For VDURA, the focus is on the infrastructure underpinning AI systems.
The company will bring its Data Platform V12 to the Middle East for the first time at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi. Designed for GPU clouds and AI factories, the platform automatically places data across appropriate storage infrastructure and was recently named AI Data Management Solution of the Year at the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards.
VDURA is also working with New Mexico State University (NMSU), a Carnegie R1 research institution with more than US$141M in annual research spending.
Researchers across agriculture, aerospace and biomedicine needed infrastructure capable of supporting large-scale simulations and AI model training without separate systems competing for resources.
The university’s VDURA deployment went live in August 2026, combining NVMe flash storage with high-capacity hard drives. VDURA says the system provides flash-level responsiveness for active research data while reducing the cost of storing larger datasets.
“The centre of gravity is shifting from training to inference at scale, and that shift changes what storage has to do,” said Ken Claffey, CEO of VDURA. “As agentic AI and long-context applications become standard, systems need to keep persistent context and petabyte-scale RAG corpora available.”
Industrial AI Targets the Prediction and Action Gap
IFS will focus on AI applications across asset-intensive sectors including ports, utilities, aerospace and defence, oil and gas, manufacturing and energy.
The company’s proposition centres on the gap between identifying an asset at risk and actually carrying out the repair.
“Ports, rail, utilities, data centres, aviation, and defence sustainment are all commissioning assets faster than they are building the systems to run them,” said Suliman Gaouda, Regional Vice President, IFS AI, Asia Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa.
IFS points to Kodiak Gas Services as one example, with its Material Replenisher agent projected to deliver US$3M in annual savings and 90,000 technician hours saved.
At the event, IFS will demonstrate its Loops Digital Workers platform, Nexus Black Resolve and Operational Intelligence, covering automated workflows, image and voice-based fault diagnosis, guided repairs and predictive maintenance.
AI Moves Into National Infrastructure
The New Intelligence Summit will bring together ministers, government leaders and industry executives to examine AI adoption across government, education and national infrastructure.
H.E. Mariam Al Musharrekh, Director General at the Department of Government Enablement, will discuss Abu Dhabi’s experience developing an AI-ready government workforce.
H.E. Prof. Ebrahim Al Hajri, President of Khalifa University of Science and Technology, will examine how education needs to evolve as intelligent systems become more embedded in professional life.
ADNOC will also feature prominently, with Sean Spicer, SVP Digital Technology at ADNOC, joining AWS and Oracle executives to discuss frontier AI in the enterprise.
ADNOC’s deployment of ENERGYai, described as the world’s first agentic AI solution for the energy sector, provides another example of AI being integrated into critical infrastructure. Developed by AIQ, the Abu Dhabi-based venture jointly formed by Presight and ADNOC Group, the platform will form part of a discussion involving Dennis Jol, CEO of AIQ, and H.E. Dr. Amal Abdulrahim, Assistant Undersecretary & Chief AI & Innovation Officer at the Ministry of Climate Change & Environment.
As AI moves from pilots into government services, research infrastructure and industrial operations, the focus is increasingly shifting from what the technology can do to how effectively it can be deployed at scale.
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