UAE AI NEWS
Stories
Every UAE AI event, once. Each story gathers every outlet that covered it, summarised in plain words with the original links underneath.
Jais 3 brings open Arabic AI models with speech and agent features
MBZUAI’s Institute of Foundation Models and Inception42 released Jais 3 on 15 October 2026. It’s a family of six open Arabic language models, from 900 million to 375 billion parameters, plus Jais Speech, which turns spoken Arabic and its dialects into text. The performance claims come from the developers’ own evaluations, so independent tests will show how well they hold up.
UAE still leads Microsoft’s AI adoption ranking, now at 73.3%
Several outlets reported in October 2026 that the UAE leads the world in AI adoption at 70.1%. That’s Microsoft’s figure for the first quarter of 2026. Microsoft’s newer report, published on 21 September, puts the UAE at 73.3% of its working-age population in the second quarter, still first in the world. Both numbers measure how many people have used a generative AI tool, not how deeply they use it.
TII launches Falcon-Emirati and two Arabic models for speech and documents
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) launched three AI models on 7 October 2026 at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi. Falcon-Emirati understands the Emirati dialect, Falcon-ASR turns speech in six languages into text, and Falcon-OCR-Arabic reads Arabic text from images and documents. TII’s performance claims come from its own tests.
AWS and UAE AI Office report finds 72% of UAE businesses now use AI
A report by AWS and the UAE Artificial Intelligence Office, released on 30 September 2026, found that 72% of UAE businesses have adopted AI, up from 53% a year earlier. Only 31% of those adopters use what the report calls advanced AI. Research firm Strand Partners carried out the study for AWS, which sells AI and cloud services.