A new study by Yango Group and INSEAD examines how the UAE has moved beyond AI pilots to treat artificial intelligence as public infrastructure — and distills transferable lessons for policymakers worldwide.
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 18 May 2026 – Governments that treat artificial intelligence as part of their core operating infrastructure — rather than a collection of standalone projects — are better positioned to scale AI sustainably across public services, according to new research published by Yango Group and INSEAD.
The paper, AI as Public Infrastructure: Lessons from the UAE for Government Transformation, argues that AI in government has reached a structural inflection point. Across jurisdictions, many public sectors report an accumulation of pilots without scale, fragmented ownership across agencies, and persistent uncertainty over how to govern AI systems at an institutional level. The central question, the research concludes, is no longer whether AI can be deployed — but how it is designed, governed, and institutionalised to deliver sustained public value.
It is against this backdrop that the UAE emerges as a particularly instructive case. Over the past decade, the country has moved beyond experimentation toward integrating AI into core government functions — grappling in practice with questions of leadership, procurement, sovereignty, and organisational redesign that many governments are only beginning to confront. The research finds that the UAE’s progress stems less from access to advanced AI models than from three reinforcing institutional choices: concentrated and continuous leadership commitment; domain-level redesign of public-sector processes; and procurement and partnerships used as strategic levers rather than administrative functions.
The paper examines this through concrete examples: the National AI Strategy 2031 as a coordination framework rather than a technology roadmap; the TAMM platform, which has evolved into an AI-enabled system hosting over a thousand government services; Dubai’s AI acceleration initiative, which narrowed 183 candidate use cases to 15 high-impact deployments spanning mobility, healthcare, logistics, and urban infrastructure; and Abu Dhabi’s infrastructure-first approach, anchored in sovereign cloud capacity and a stated ambition to become an “AI-native government.”
The study also draws on a structured review of global approaches — including the UK, Singapore, the United States, the EU, and China — to show that governments with similar technological tools experience markedly different outcomes depending on how AI initiatives are governed, procured, and evaluated. Across all cases, execution failures rarely stem from model performance. They arise from data fragmentation, talent gaps at the intersection of policy and technology and governance frameworks that lag behind deployment realities.
The research, led by INSEAD Professor Peter Zemsky, was developed through interviews with senior government officials and AI leaders across the UAE, with contributors including representatives from the Dubai Future Foundation, Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi, Mubadala, Core42, and Inception. Yango Group, which deploys AI-powered technologies across mobility, logistics, mapping, and digital platforms in international markets, contributed operational perspectives on governing and scaling AI systems in complex, real-world environments.
Islam Abdul Karim, Regional head, Yango Group Middle East, said: “The question is no longer whether governments adopt AI, but how institutions organise governance, operations, and public infrastructure to support AI at scale. The UAE experience demonstrates how AI is increasingly becoming part of long-term institutional and operational systems.”
Mark Mortensen, Associate Dean of the INSEAD Middle East Campus, added: “AI is often framed as a technological breakthrough, but this research highlights that scaling AI successfully is also an institutional challenge. By treating AI as part of public infrastructure rather than a series of isolated pilots, the UAE offers valuable lessons for governments around the world seeking to translate AI ambition into sustained public value.”