Talent squeeze and ‘death by pilot’ – UAE’s big AI challenges

Talent shortages and slow adoption are the main constraints on the UAE’s AI ambitions, an industry leader has told AGBI, rather than a lack of hardware or data centres.

Ashish Koshy, chief executive of AI company Inception, which is part of Abu Dhabi’s tech holding company G42, said neither access to compute nor chip shortages were major obstacles for most UAE businesses seeking to use AI.

”If you have a high compute use case, obviously there is a supply and demand [gap], but if you want to run an enterprise use case or use agentic AI, you don’t need the top level of chips,” said Koshy.

The launch of the UAE’s Stargate data centre project later this year is expected to deliver 200 megawatts of the planned 1 gigawatt AI infrastructure, providing enough compute capacity “not just for the UAE, but for the Global South too”, he said.

Koshy warned, however, that the number of specialised workers coming to the country has slowed because of the Iran war. This, combined with fears over job displacement, risks slowing deployment of AI across industries.

Death by pilot

He also said that while founders and CEOs of companies invest heavily in AI projects, the majority fail to reach production or generate any measurable return on investment.

“There’s something called ‘death by pilot’… where people want to kill [AI projects] because they feel this is going to take their job,” said Koshy.

The phenomenon highlights a growing disconnect between boardroom enthusiasm for AI and resistance from employees concerned about automation.

Koshy said companies that are replacing human jobs with AI misunderstand the opportunities, adding that G42’s thesis remains “AI-native, human-led”.

“Those human-led opportunities are still not defined, but it will come.”

AI sovereignty and buyer’s choice

The UAE has increasingly backed domestic alternatives to US and Chinese AI large language models, systems trained on huge amounts of text so they can understand and generate human-like language.

K2 Think, developed by Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and G42, has been promoted as a lower-cost, more energy-efficient open-source AI reasoning model. Jais, also developed by G42 and the university, is one of the region’s flagship Arabic-language AI models.

But, according to Koshy, this should not necessarily be about fast-tracking the journey towards AI sovereignty – something that governments everywhere are pushing for.

Instead of relying only on domestic systems, he argues countries should ensure businesses have access to a range of AI tools, platforms and providers.

“Eventually models will become a commodity,” he said. “Organisations are focused on the outcome and not concerned about which models are generating that outcome.”

As organisations develop, he said, countries too will need to become “agnostic” about the models and hardware.

Watch the video for more on the future of AI in the UAE

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