Everyone I meet building a business across this region tells me some version of the same sentence: "we're moving fast." I believe them. I just don't think most of them have clocked what moving that fast, on this particular technology, actually sets up.
The speed is real, and it's not an exaggeration
In 2017, the UAE became the first country in the world to appoint a dedicated state minister for artificial intelligence. That wasn't a symbolic gesture — it was the opening move of the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031, a strategy that ties AI adoption directly to the country's broader Centennial 2071 vision and puts a real number on the ambition: roughly AED 335 billion in additional economic growth, targeted through AI deployment across government services and priority industries. Saudi Arabia has been moving in close parallel, folding AI into Vision 2030's economic diversification push across healthcare, government services, and smart-city infrastructure, backed by its own dedicated data and AI authority. Regional forecasts I've come across repeatedly in researching this put the UAE on track for some of the fastest AI-adoption growth anywhere in the world over the coming years — trailing only the US and China globally.
I'm not bringing this up to be impressed by the numbers, although I am, a little, in the way I'm impressed by anything genuinely ambitious and actually followed through on rather than just announced and left sitting at the press-release stage. I'm bringing it up because speed of adoption and maturity of governance are two completely different clocks, and right now, in Dubai and Riyadh specifically, one of them is running much faster than the other.
Why national strategy doesn't automatically become business practice
Here's the gap I don't think enough people are naming. A national AI strategy is aimed, correctly, at government services, infrastructure, and headline industries — healthcare diagnostics, smart-city systems, large-scale enterprise deployment. It is not, and was never designed to be, a governance layer for the thousands of small and mid-sized businesses across Dubai and Riyadh that are adopting the exact same category of tools — customer service chatbots, AI-drafted marketing, automated sales conversations — with none of the oversight infrastructure a national strategy builds for its own flagship projects.
This is the same structural mismatch I wrote about with Sports Illustrated and Air Canada, except regional and, I'd argue, sharper here specifically because of the sequencing. In slower-moving markets, AI adoption crept into brand touchpoints gradually enough that some businesses stumbled into ad hoc oversight by accident, through trial and error, before the tools got genuinely good. Here, the tools arrived already good, adoption is being actively encouraged from the top down as a marker of ambition and modernity, and a huge number of businesses are plugging AI into customer-facing brand touchpoints for the first time with no prior "we learned this the hard way" scar tissue to draw on.
The part that makes it worse: no PR department to catch it
Sports Illustrated's fabricated-byline scandal eventually surfaced because an outside journalist went looking. Air Canada's chatbot problem surfaced because a grieving customer took it to a tribunal. Both of those companies, for all their failures, had the institutional weight to survive the exposure — a legacy media brand, a national airline. Most of the businesses I talk to in Dubai and Riyadh are wellness studios, EdTech startups, boutique consultancies, and fast-growing D2C brands — exactly the profile of business with the least institutional padding to absorb a drift scandal once it's finally spotted, and, not coincidentally, the least likely to have anyone internally whose job is specifically to watch for it.
Everyone assumes AI governance is a big-enterprise problem, something for a national AI champion or a ministry to think about, not a twelve-person team in a Dubai coworking space. I'd argue it's exactly backwards. The smaller, faster-moving business is where drift compounds fastest, precisely because there's no PR department, no legal review, no dashboard — just a founder who assumed the tool would represent the brand correctly because it was fluent, and moved on to the next task.
What makes this region a genuinely useful place to study, not just a cautionary one
I don't want this piece to read as a scolding, because that's not actually how I feel about what's happening here. This is part of why my own research treats the UAE and Saudi Arabia as central cases rather than a footnote — not because AI adoption is uniquely dramatic here in some abstract sense, but because the specific combination of variables is unusually visible and unusually fast-moving: aggressive, top-down AI adoption; a business ecosystem scaling brand output through automation in real time; and a governance culture around that specific gap that's still being written, in real time, largely by the businesses experiencing the gap firsthand rather than by any playbook they can borrow. That combination makes this region an unusually clear place to actually observe Brand Drift forming, rather than reconstructing it after the fact from a scandal that already happened somewhere else, months or years later, in a market with a completely different trust economy.
There's also a version of this that's genuinely encouraging, if you sit with it. A region moving this fast on adoption is also a region that hasn't yet locked itself into bad governance habits the way slower-moving markets sometimes have, purely through accumulated inertia. The gap I'm describing is closeable, cheaply, by businesses that are still young enough and small enough to build the habit in from the start rather than retrofitting it onto a decade of undocumented process.
What this looks like in the specific businesses I talk to
The pattern shows up almost identically across categories, even though the businesses themselves look nothing alike. A wellness studio automating its intake and follow-up messaging so a client feels personally cared for, using a tool that has no idea what "personally cared for" is supposed to mean for that specific studio beyond a generic warm tone. An EdTech founder scaling parent communications through an AI assistant that's never been checked against the actual promises made in the enrollment brochure. A boutique consultancy — and I'll admit some of what I'm describing here is uncomfortably close to home — using AI to draft client-facing research summaries faster than anyone has time to read every one back against the standard of rigor the consultancy's own reputation depends on. None of these are hypothetical dangers. They're descriptions of ordinary Tuesdays across this region right now, at exactly the pace the national strategies are actively encouraging.
Why "wait for regulation" isn't a real plan
I'd also push back gently on the instinct to treat this as something that will eventually get solved once formal AI governance regulation catches up regionally. Regulation, when it arrives, will be built for the same altitude as the national strategies themselves — safety, fairness, and systemic risk across an economy, not whether your specific chatbot still sounds like your specific brand. Waiting for that layer to arrive and solve your particular governance gap is a bit like waiting for national road-safety law to tell you personally when to change your car's oil. The law will do its job. It was never going to do yours.
What I'd ask a founder here, specifically
If you're building a brand in Dubai or Riyadh right now and reading this feeling slightly seen, here's the honest question: are you moving as fast on knowing what your brand's automated output actually says as you are on adopting the tools that produce it? Ambition on the adoption side isn't the problem — it's exactly the right instinct for this moment, in this region, at this pace. The problem is when ambition on adoption isn't matched by equal seriousness on the governance side, because that's precisely the gap that turns "we're moving fast" into "we didn't notice we'd stopped sounding like ourselves," and by the time an outsider notices for you, the story is no longer about how fast you moved. It's about what you let slip while you were moving. That's a fixable problem, and one of the cheapest ones in this entire piece to close — it just has to be closed on purpose, on the same timeline you're already using to adopt the tools in the first place, rather than left for later.
Building or scaling a brand across the Gulf and want a second set of eyes on the gap between how fast you're adopting AI and how closely you're governing it? Get Your Free Brand Audit →
References
Artificial Intelligence Office, UAE. (n.d.). Strategy. Government of the United Arab Emirates.
EGIC. (2025). AI and the UAE's National Strategy 2031.
Emircom. (2025). UAE and Saudi Arabia's strategic investment in artificial intelligence.
Introl. (2025). UAE & Saudi Arabia: $100B+ AI infrastructure plans.
UAE Government. (2017). National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031. ai.gov.ae.