AI and GenAI are having an increasingly pervasive impact on government — across missions, use cases, processes, and systems — in the Middle East and beyond. The disruptive impact of these technologies, compounded by geopolitical volatility, technical debt, digital sovereignty concerns, elevated citizen expectations, and regulatory changes, will require government leaders to approach innovation holistically. The acquisition and implementation of new technologies will not be enough. Realizing the benefits of AI, cloud, and industry platforms will require revisiting governance, risk management, culture, and the building of competencies to accelerate innovation.

Realizing the Value of AI at Scale in the MEA Region

The advent of GenAI prompted a surge of experimentation. Governments piloted GenAI for task automation, such as summarizing meeting minutes, drafting RFI and RFP documents for public tenders, creating job requisitions, synthesizing information to respond to freedom of information requests, and conducting research for the preparation of policy briefs. As pilot projects empowered them to evaluate benefits and risks, national governments and smart cities started to invest in scaling both traditional AI/ML and GenAI systems to address more complex industry-specific scenarios, such as service and benefits personalization, clinical care, and traffic safety. AI-enabled digital assistants started to help citizens interact with systems through conversational interfaces, instead of having to scroll through screens and fill out forms. Employee digital assistants started to help expert government case managers review, validate, and respond to citizen requests in a more holistic and personalized manner.

AI-powered governments will need to rethink their strategies, governance, people, and technologies to effectively adopt AI. This radical transformation will require governments to establish senior leadership roles that can build organizational capacities and competencies; design and enforce governance policies, structures, and processes; and deploy data and AI infrastructure, platforms, and application capabilities that align with strategic mission goals — all while complying with regulation. The MEA region is leading the charge; for instance, the Dubai government appointed 22 chief artificial intelligence officers (CAIOs) in 2024.

To achieve this level of automation, CAIOs need to work with line-of-mission and program leaders to re-engineer processes and systems so they can apply algorithms that recognize changes in their constituents’ circumstances, identify the root causes, and trigger operational workflows or dynamically reconfigure services and programs to meet constituents’ evolving needs and preferences.

From an architectural standpoint, this level of end-to-end process automation will require a combination of agents that will provide multimodal capabilities to process text, rules, and images, and will be orchestrated to deliver intended outcomes across end-to-end workflows.