Across UAE institutions, agentic AI systems are already embedded in systems that route ambulances in emergencies and support a range of critical services
Every time an ambulance is dispatched in Abu Dhabi, a decision has to be made about where it should go. That decision is no longer made by the operator alone.
Before the vehicle moves, systems running behind the dispatch interface can connect patient records, hospital capacity, available specialists, operating theatre availability, and medicine inventory to support where the patient should be taken.
“I pick you up, I take your EID, I know exactly what your allergies are, and I can prescribe post-trauma care immediately,” said Thomas Pramotedham, CEO of Presight AI. “I don’t send you to a hospital with no operating theatre available. Understanding this dynamic routing, this data-centric algorithm before the dispatch instruction, is what saves the life.”
Most residents will never know that system exists.
“AI has become invisible in government because you don’t feel it,” Pramotedham told media. “But you live in an efficient, well-taken-care-of community. That is the point.”
The UAE’s directive to deploy agentic AI across 50 per cent of government sectors, services, and operations within two years has prompted debate about what that future looks like. Across UAE institutions, parts of it are not the future. They are already operational, embedded quietly in systems that route ambulances, model legislation before it passes, and hold national crisis response together under pressure.
The question Presight, the UAE’s flagship applied intelligence company, now faces is not whether AI-native government is possible. It is what it takes to scale what UAE institutions have already built and tested.
“It is an expansion of what we are already doing,” Pramotedham said. “The UAE committed to an AI-native government. Sheikh Mohammed now extends this across all federal sectors. We are already supporting the Ministry of Foreign Trade to build the first AI-native platform for whole-of-government.”
The ambulance platform is the most human-facing example of a wider architecture. In January, Presight worked with the General Secretariat of the Cabinet and PwC to launch the UAE’s Regulatory Intelligence Ecosystem at the World Economic Forum in Davos: a digital twin of UAE legislation that models the economic and social impact of proposed laws before they are enacted.
In energy, Presight’s joint venture with ADNOC, AIQ, signed a $340 million contract to deploy ENERGYai across ADNOC’s upstream operations, compressing essential business processes from months to days.
The resilience of these systems was tested before any mandate required it. When regional conflict created pressure on national infrastructure earlier this year, Presight’s platforms did not miss a day.
“Our government didn’t take a day off crisis management,” Pramotedham said. “It was business as usual, hands on deck. This is not a platform you put out there theoretically. This is one that has been serving us. That is where the rubber hits the road.”
That track record is what foreign governments come to the UAE to study. Presight’s second accelerator cohort drew 376 applications from 62 countries. Companies from Southeast Asia arrive, build connections here, and leave with contracts in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, or Vietnam. The UAE is not just running these systems. It is becoming the bridge through which other countries access them.
“They applied to Presight to be part of the programme, but the underlying current is they applied to the UAE because this is where AI hits the road,” Pramotedham said. “We bring them to the Department of Health, show them integrated systems working in real time, and say, ‘Would you like the system that powers the UAE?'”
The federal mandate sits inside a broader diffusion push. When UAE leadership was briefed on higher education AI programmes, the response was, ‘What about the seven-year-old and the seventy-year-old?’ That question drove the AI curriculum mandate now being embedded into the national K-12 system. The directive to convert government services is one layer of a larger design.
The change is reaching inside companies too. Pramotedham says the past six months of AI coding tools have forced him and his engineers to rethink how software is built entirely. The programming languages his team spent years mastering to communicate with machines are being overtaken by systems that translate a human idea directly into working code.
“What we got out of it is we got to the outcome a lot faster,” he said. “You can spend more time designing the application and less time decoding a missing colon in a script. Where the impact hits the road is so much faster,” Pramotedham says.
The same principle governs every deployment. AI does not give the perfect answer. It gives the best available answer in the shortest possible time.
“If we decide to just go to an AI and expect it to make all the decisions, we are not amplifying our collective intelligence,” Pramotedham said. “We are abdicating it to a machine. The best outcome is when we collaborate with AI, because we get the fastest possible answer. In an emergency, that answer saves a life.”
For Presight, the federal mandate is not a request to imagine AI-native government from scratch. It is a request to scale systems the UAE has already been running for years.
