Omar Sultan Al Olama

Omar Sultan Al Olama (born 1990) made history in October 2017 when the United Arab Emirates named him the world’s first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence — at 27, a cabinet post no other country had thought to create. The appointment was the announcement: the UAE intended to treat AI not as a tech-policy niche but as the organizing principle of its post-oil future.

The 2031 strategy

Al Olama is the architect of the UAE National AI Strategy 2031, which aims to make the Emirates a global AI leader and embed the technology across government services, education, energy and logistics. Under his tenure the country built AI-dedicated institutions at speed — a graduate AI university (MBZUAI), AI training programs for officials, and a regulatory posture he describes as deliberately “frictionless.” He has argued that every future UAE company must be “AI-first,” and framed the UAE ethos at Dubai’s AI Retreat bluntly as acceleration.

He pairs the boosterism with selective caution — warning that AI should not become “tyrannical,” noting that governments that banned technologies they did not understand “have backtracked,” and defending the UAE’s balancing act between Washington and Beijing as US-aligned deals like Microsoft’s $1.5 billion stake in G42 reshape the region’s AI landscape. Critics counter that an absolute monarchy’s enthusiasm for AI governance elides questions of surveillance and speech that “frictionless” adoption never has to answer.