The UAE rebuilds its national AI award around agentic adoption
All five categories of the third edition are agent-centric, from government services to public-private partnerships. A national government just made autonomous agents the unit of service delivery.
- The UAE Council for Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain launched the third edition of the UAE AI Award on July 13 with every category rebuilt around agentic AI, from government services to scientific research.
- The program explicitly supports the government's next transformation phase: integrating agentic AI across 50 percent of government sectors, services, and operations.
- Eligibility spans federal and local government, semi-government entities, private companies, academia, and individuals, and a dedicated category rewards government-private agentic AI partnerships.
The UAE Council for Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain launched the third edition of the UAE AI Award on July 13, and the redesign is the story: all five categories are now built around agentic AI, per the government announcement. The categories cover excellence in agentic AI-powered services, agentic AI solutions developed in the UAE, the best government-private partnership in agentic AI, agentic AI scientific research, and an individual AI Leader award.
An award wired to a 50 percent target
The program is not ceremonial. The release ties the award directly to the next phase of the UAE's government transformation: integrating agentic AI across 50 percent of government sectors, services, and operations, a target earlier reporting attached to a 2028 deadline. Omar Sultan Al Olama, the UAE's Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, said the country has taken "a comprehensive approach to expanding Agentic AI across government and society." Applications are open at ai.gov.ae to federal and local government bodies, semi-government entities, private companies, academic institutions, and individuals; the first two editions drew more than 540 applications, per the announcement.
Procurement by prize
For agentic AI vendors, the partnership category is the part to read twice. A national award for the best government-private agentic AI collaboration is effectively a standing invitation into government deal flow, in a country that has already put sovereign agents into its Copilot estate. The UAE's bet rhymes with what the biggest integrators are building commercially, from TCS's forward-deployed engineer corps to Microsoft's Frontier Company unit: the scarce skill is not training models, it is landing them inside institutions. Here the institution is the state itself, and the government is publicly grading its own adoption rate.