Dubai’s business leaders say the agentic AI programme is about readiness. What an owner-run company in Dubai should take from it.
The Emirates News Agency has carried the statement Dubai Chambers published on 11 October 2026 in which nine chairs and board members of its Business Groups and Business Councils say that Dubai’s programme to transition the private sector to agentic AI strengthens companies’ readiness for the opportunities ahead. We wrote on the statement the day it was published. This note is about the word in the headline, readiness, and one further thing an owner-run company in Dubai can do to have some.
What was said
The Emirates News Agency carries the statement under the headline that the programme strengthens readiness to capitalise on future opportunities. The leaders chair or sit on the boards of Business Groups and Business Councils under Dubai Chamber of Commerce, and the programme is the one launched by Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, to transition Dubai’s private sector towards agentic AI.
On the training tracks Dubai Chambers has recently launched under the programme, which aim to enable and train 14,000 companies to adopt agentic AI across their administrative and operational activities, the statement says they will support companies in moving beyond using data as a source of information towards applying it to make faster and more accurate decisions.
Six of the nine were not quoted in our earlier note. Evelien Johnston, Board Member of the New Zealand Business Council, says it is essential to involve employees in the journey. Dr Palat Krishna Menon, Board Member of the Dubai MedTech Business Group, says his company uses agentic AI and generative AI extensively to develop its standard operating procedures and protocols, and to respond to client enquiries quickly. Omar Khaled Hamaoui, Chairman of the Brazilian Business Council UAE, says agentic AI can encourage management teams to critically review systems and procedures across their companies. Stuart Clarke of the Dubai Construction Industry Business Group, Nabeel Saad Alkharabsheh of the Postal and Courier Services Business Group and Mohammad Ayyob of the Dubai Business Group for Bullion and Gold Refinery, all chairmen, commend the Chambers for bringing the sectors together.
That is the whole of what the statement says. It gives no dates or venues for the tracks, no registration route and no count of companies trained, and the agency’s copy adds nothing to the Chambers’ own. We are not going to guess at any of that here.
Where it sits in the agenda
Put in one sentence: Dubai’s Agentic AI private sector transformation programme is the two-year programme launched by the Crown Prince of Dubai in May 2026 to move the emirate’s private sector to agentic AI, delivered in part through Dubai Chambers training tracks that aim to train 14,000 companies to adopt agentic AI across their administrative and operational activities, alongside incubators for agentic AI companies and support for the companies that build agentic AI solutions. The agenda page sets out the two halves of the transition in Dubai, the public half government delivers itself and the private half built inside companies.
Training is a first step and where and how to implement is the main challenge, which we took up in the earlier note. The other thing the nine say is in Dr Menon’s and Mr Hamaoui’s remarks: the company described as using agentic AI in its daily work is one whose procedures are written down and kept current, and what agentic AI prompts management to do is review those procedures. That is the nearest the statement comes to describing readiness in practice, and it is a property of the company, not of whoever attends a track.
The one implication for an owner-run company in Dubai
The implication is this. Before attending a track, the owner should take the one job that happens most often, say a new enquiry arriving, and write down the procedure as it actually runs, not as it should: each step, which tool it happens in, and who decides at each step. One page is enough. In most owner-run companies it shows three steps happening in WhatsApp, the record living in two or three places, and every decision being the owner’s.
That page is readiness in the sense the statement uses. A procedure that exists outside one person can be taught to a new hire, reviewed in the way Mr Hamaoui describes, and carried by a system; one that lives only in the owner’s head cannot be handed to anything. Writing it with the people who do the steps is also the plainest way to do what Ms Johnston asks. The earlier note asked for one activity measured in hours; this one asks for its procedure, and the method page describes how we take both into the room.
What that produces, in our builds, is the operating system the business runs on: one record of the pipeline, the work, the money and the people, with one AI executive on it that carries the written procedure as a standing job, has no authority of its own, and escalates to a named person. The column on the page that says who decides is where that named person comes from. The system runs on infrastructure the company controls and the data stays on hardware it controls. The agentic AI page says what that is in plain terms, and the systems running that way are under work in production.
What it does not mean
It does not mean anything new has been announced, because the statement the agency carries is the one Dubai Chambers published on 11 October. It does not mean 14,000 companies have been trained, because the figure is the aim. And it does not mean that using agentic AI in a company’s work is the same as the business running on it; the adoption is not transformation note says why the two differ. The useful thing an owner can take from the headline is a page: one procedure, as it runs, with a name against each decision.
Written by the founder of Symbaiotic, Dubai. See who we are, and more writing.