Dubai, UAE — UAE’s Minister of State for AI Omar Sultan Al Olama has said that the country has an agent control tower that every AI agent needs to plug into for better oversight of these systems.
Speaking at a session titled “Trust Test for Agentic AI” at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of Global Future Leaders, he said: “Maybe this was not publicly said before; we have an agent control tower on the UAE government side that every agent needs to plug into, and every action and every specific thought the agent thinks of or action it takes is logged so that there is oversight to ensure we understand what agents are doing, what actions they are taking, so there is a continuous audit of what is being done. There is an audit of what is done by agents, and there is an audit of what is done by humans to ensure this doesn’t go haywire in any way, shape, or manner.”
“And we are constantly assessing their value. Most people look at their value in productivity terms, how much productivity they have increased. Certain other geographies are looking at economic effects, how much savings we have had and how much income we got in. We are looking at neither. The direction we got from our Prime Minister is that we need to look into the quality of life improvement.”
On the subject of trust, Al Olama said that “it is going to be extremely easy for us to lose trust but very hard to gain trust when it comes to agentic AI”.
He said there are areas where AI agents can be trusted, but in some cases that trust will take time to take root.
“At this point in time, you can’t trust AI agents to make decisions that affect livelihoods. There has to be a really long way to go for us to prove that these agents can be trusted.”
The UAE government plans to move 50% of government services, sectors, and operations toward autonomous AI systems within the next two years.
The initiative was announced by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who described the transformation as part of a broader vision to position the UAE among the world’s leading nations in AI-powered operations and services.
Speaking at the session, Yalda Aoukar, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Bracket Capital, Qatar, said that “we have a narrow window of opportunity to make sure that the architecture of this evolutionary technology is the right architecture that inspires trust”.
Mark-Alexandre Doumba, Minister of Digital Economy, Digitization and Innovation, Gabon, said the institutions are evolving more slowly than AI agents, but eventually people will trust them once safeguards are built into these agents.
