Leaders Dubai

In the Gulf, the AI conversation has moved past curiosity. Boardrooms talk about productivity, governments talk about national strategy, and founders talk about speed. But the real bottleneck is rarely compute. It is people. Tan Ting (Grace) Tang has built her work around that gap, with a simple provocation at the center: the region will not win the AI era by waiting for more engineers. It will win by expanding the definition of who belongs in building, deploying, and governi

When artificial intelligence starts moving from demos to deployment, the hardest work is rarely the model. It is alignment. Who gets access. Who sets guardrails. And who translates policy into practice. In Dubai, Gowri Shankar Sivabala has focused his energy on the connective tissue that makes adoption possible: a community designed to bring AI talent, founders, and policymakers into the same room, with shared language and shared responsibility.

His Excellency Omar Sultan Al Olama was appointed as the Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence in October 2017. In July 2020, he was also appointed as the Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Applications. His responsibilities include enhancing the government performance levels by investing in the latest technologies and tools of artificial intelligence and applying them in various sectors.