AI is how ambitious places catch up — and get ahead

Every era has a technology that resets what counts as ambitious. Railways did it. Electricity did it. The internet did it within living memory. Artificial intelligence is doing it now, and the honest way to describe the change is not “automation” but compression — of research, of learning, of the distance between deciding to do something and doing it.

Consider what has quietly happened to research. Work that once took a strategy team weeks — market sizing, regulatory mapping, precedent analysis across a dozen jurisdictions — now takes a well-directed afternoon. The judgment still has to be human; knowing which questions matter is still the scarce skill. But the cost of finding out has collapsed. For a business developer, that means more opportunities examined, more scenarios stress-tested, more deals evaluated properly rather than on instinct alone. You simply do more, and go further.

The same compression applies to learning itself, and this is where the societal stakes rise. A society's growth rate is, at bottom, the rate at which its people learn. AI is the first technology that tutors — patiently, individually, in any language, at any hour. For countries with young populations and national visions measured in decades, as ours are, the ability to accelerate human capital formation may matter more than any single industrial policy.

The physical world follows the digital one. Today's AI is the foundation on which useful robotics is being built — and construction, the industry at the heart of every Gulf development plan, is a prime beneficiary. Design optimisation, project sequencing, safety monitoring, and eventually automated building itself all point the same direction: infrastructure delivered faster, safer, and closer to budget. Combine that with the social infrastructure this region must build — hospitals, schools, care systems — and AI stops being a technology story and becomes a development story.

There will be adjustment costs, and the sceptics are right that adoption is harder than the demonstrations suggest. But the strategic logic for our region is unusually clean: economies seeking to diversify, leadership willing to move quickly, capital available to deploy, and a generation fluent in the tools. Regions that industrialised late spent a century catching up. AI is the rare technology that lets the ambitious skip steps.

The opportunity is not to use AI to do yesterday's work with fewer people. It is to attempt what was previously out of reach — and to reach it sooner than anyone planned.