Abu Dhabi — Abu Dhabi Government has announced the rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot across Abu Dhabi’s public sector, equipping tens of thousands of government employees with generative AI in their daily tools as the emirate advances its bid to become the world’s first AI-native government by 2027.
Through the Frontier Employee Programme, Abu Dhabi Government has recently deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot to 26,000 civil servants across 27 government entities, building on 9,000 existing licences to reach a total of 35,000. The initiative standardises Microsoft 365 Copilot as the AI productivity platform for Abu Dhabi Government, embedding generative AI capabilities into daily operations and public service delivery. Faster, AI-assisted decision-making across the government will translate into quicker, more responsive services for Abu Dhabi’s citizens, residents, and businesses.
All licences are provisioned with Advanced Data Residency (ADR), ensuring that all AI processing takes place within UAE borders, a model of sovereign AI deployment that is attracting growing interest from governments abroad. The rollout also includes AI training and certification programmes, ensuring employees can use these tools responsibly, securely, and to maximum effect.
His Excellency Wesam Lootah, Director General of GovDigital at Department of Government Enablement (DGE), said: “Abu Dhabi is building a government that is AI-native by design, where technology elevates how government entities operate, collaborate, and serve the community. The rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot across government marks a significant step in equipping our workforce with advanced AI capabilities, whilst ensuring adoption is governed, secure, and built to last.”
“Through the Frontier Employee Programme, we are empowering government employees with the tools and skills to shape the future of public sector innovation.”
Amr Kamel, General Manager, Microsoft UAE, said: “The UAE’s national direction toward Agentic AI reflects a distinctive approach to government transformation, one built on a clear vision and decisive leadership. The Frontier Employee Programme is an extension of that same approach: empowering 35,000 government employees across Abu Dhabi and scaling agentic AI to drive faster outcomes and more efficient processes across government. At Microsoft, our role is to provide the secure, sovereign foundations that enable transformation of this kind, and we are proud to support DGE’s leadership in bringing it to life.”
The programme is supported by an AI Adoption and Enablement framework, covering structured rollout, change management, and user enablement to drive safe, governed, and high-impact adoption across entities. The deployment is underpinned by rigorous security, data governance, and readiness assessments to ensure alignment with government compliance and data protection standards.
The Copilot rollout builds on a longstanding and deepening strategic collaboration between DGE and Microsoft spanning government cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity operations, AI-driven services, and modern workplace technologies.
In March 2025, DGE signed an agreement with Microsoft and Core42 to implement a sovereign cloud environment capable of processing more than 11 million daily digital interactions between Abu Dhabi Government entities, citizens, residents, and businesses – a unified, high-performance foundation for the government’s AI-native ambitions.
TAMM, Abu Dhabi’s AI-powered government services app, also leverages Microsoft technologies including Dynamics 365, Power BI, and Azure to deliver more than 1,150 public and private services on a single platform.
Microsoft and DGE have also evolved their relationship into a strategic cybersecurity partnership, jointly safeguarding Abu Dhabi’s digital government through global threat intelligence, mission-critical response, and sovereign resilience capabilities. This includes DGE’s central Government Security Operations Centre (GSOC), built on Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR, which supports approximately 60,000 users and tens of thousands of workloads across Abu Dhabi Government.
An AI Factory capability is also being established across government to enable the development and scaling of AI use cases, solutions, and agents – with a target of hundreds of use cases and more than 1,000 agents across the public sector – empowering employees to automate workflows. These agents will span functions from document processing and constituent query handling to policy analysis – accelerating Abu Dhabi’s target of becoming an AI-native government.
Source: Tahawul Tech