The rapid rise in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), in ways that directly impact our daily lives, is nothing less than extraordinary. The potential upsides are immense. And many nations are racing to realise these potential gains for the health and wealth of their people and industries. But a major stumbling block is AI literacy.
With the 2017 launch of a UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, the onus is on us all to understand this rapidly evolving technology.
Analysts at PwC estimate that while the Middle East will only capture around two percent of the global benefits of AI by 2030, the UAE is set to see the largest share of that impact, with the technology accounting for around 13.6 percent of GDP ($96 billion) by 2030.
It’s important to understand that AI is merely a technology—a tool for humans to master and use. Behind most applications still sit smart human beings. And while AI already serves a vital function, the technology remains largely more a promise than a commodity.
The current pitch for AI is that we can employ it across a range of sectors to help provide speed, clarity and better real-time information. Using data to establish patterns, or to drive the development of medicines that can find signs of illness long before humans can.
For all these reasons AI can play a vital role. Its ability to recognise patterns, for example, is remarkable, as is its ability to sort through piles of data within minutes. Something that would take a human many years to sort out, can now be done by AI in just minutes.
This is why we recently launched an Executive Programme at MBZUAI. An immersive 12-week course that is designed to help public and private sector leaders better comprehend AI’s business, ethical, and policymaking dimensions.
The programme helps leaders identify opportunities for AI in their sector and gives them greater visibility of where AI implementation might help overcome the challenges they face.
Helping national priorities
AI lends itself to supporting the delivery of the UAE’s national priorities, which include ensuring the best use of state-of-the-art IT solutions. For example, AI will enable the UAE to build a healthcare system based on patterns, medical science, genetics, and patients’ environmental and lifestyle factors to provide personalised care.
Not only that, but with today’s ubiquitous connectivity and smart devices such as smart watches and wearables, we can use AI to help individuals make better life choices and augment their care by providing an abundance of useful data. This data is often only useful if it can be analysed quickly and accurately to inform treatment decisions – something AI can easily do.
This potential can make a huge difference to public health, and it has an enormous capacity for improvement through the use of AI-powered technologies. Critical decisions such as when to open and close a certain service, and when to mandate mask wearing and COVID-19 testing for example, can all be made easier when using AI to make optimal suggestions and inform decisions before taking action.
Another fantastic example of how AI is being utilised to deliver positive human benefit is the Emirati Genome Programme. This utilises advanced AI technologies for genome analysis, creating an Emirati reference genome to identify the genetic causes of diseases and predict patient susceptibility to these.
AI also holds great promise for the energy sector. Ongoing technological advances have led to new oil and gas resources being identified faster than ever before and exploration activity such as seismic surveys are now informed by data which can be speedily analysed and acted upon, optimising the discovery process and reducing the exploration to production cycle.
There are also countless other exciting areas impacted by AI with emerging autonomous mobility systems, smart cities and student-centered education systems to name just a few.
AI is undoubtedly a technical field, however the new Executive Programme offered at MBZUAI involves a more profound level of information sharing on the potential of AI technologies and the benefits they can bring to the nation. The programme revolves around developing a set of relationships that can help solve challenges. It is about putting global AI experts in a room with senior executives to help inform optimal solutions to the kinds of issues that ministries, agencies, and private industries face.
These experts include a teaching body consisting of some of the world’s leading AI scientists curated explicitly for the programme, complementing our world-class faculty. We wanted to provide Executive Programme participants with access to an exclusive community of senior leaders and AI experts both from the region and abroad.
With our graduates working in different fields and functions, forging lasting personal and professional connections they can turn to when a second or third opinion is required is essential to producing breakthroughs. From working on numerous projects, we know that rarely can one person single-handedly propel a solution; we thrive when we work together to solve individual and shared challenges.
In the programme sessions, participants choose a national challenge to solve using artificial intelligence applications. This is one of the university’s contributions to increasing AI awareness and addressing fundamental challenges in line with the UAE’s long-term objectives.
When decision-makers are trained, they can move forward with implementing technologies specific to their sector, with university faculty as expert consultants. MBZUAI is in an ideal position to help translate the complex challenges leaders may face into topics for research and development.
Local business leaders must now ask themselves if they want to be a part of the AI-driven technological disruption or get left behind.
