Abu Dhabi's Department of Government Enablement has struck a partnership with OpenAI to embed frontier AI models across government operations, part of a Dhs13 billion ($3.5 billion) digital strategy aimed at making the emirate the world's first AI-native government by the end of 2027.

Faisal Al Hawi, director of the AI Factory at the Department of Government Enablement, said the impact is already visible at Abu Dhabi's Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, where complex food-import cases that previously took anywhere from a few days to a week are now resolved in what he described as "literally minutes".

Under the arrangement, government and citizen data continues to be processed inside the UAE, with computing infrastructure hosted locally, and Abu Dhabi retains full intellectual property ownership of the systems built under the partnership.

Roughly 1,200 Department of Government Enablement employees are being equipped with dedicated AI agents to support research, data analysis, document drafting and software development; officials say the coding agents alone produce output equivalent to roughly 30 human developers a day.

The partnership was formally announced on November 3, coinciding with a meeting between Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, though officials say the practical collaboration between the two sides had already been under way since early 2026.

The deal is the latest in a string of AI tie-ups between Abu Dhabi entities and leading US technology firms, as the emirate pushes to position itself as a global hub for applied artificial intelligence in both the public and private sectors.