In The UAE, Government Adoption Is Setting The Terms For Agentic Marketing

In the UAE, a government decision set the terms for agentic marketing. The state committed to running half its public services on AI agents, and every private-sector move since has followed from that mandate. When the government leads, brand discovery orients around it, and marketing feels the pull first.

Adel Miran has watched that play out from inside two AI markets, and only one of them moves at the speed he describes. He works as Director of Facilities Management & Administration at Dubai Holding Real Estate, sits on the expert board of The Universal Consulting Group, and has spent the last several years researching AI governance and excellence strategy across the Gulf. To Miran, the Gulf model runs top-down: the mandate comes from the state, and the pilots, the vendors, and the marketing spend fall in behind it. That sequence shapes everything downstream, including which brands an AI system surfaces to buyers.

The state sets the pace, and everyone else falls in behind it

The UAE has committed to delivering half of its government services through agentic AI within two years, and to training 80,000 federal employees to run them. Miran puts the training number a little lower in conversation, but the direction he describes is exact: a state that has decided AI is not optional and is moving faster than the companies watching it.

That top-down signal is what he sees rippling into marketing. "From the government side, they are focusing," he says, "and most of the companies are semi-government. Even my company, Dubai Holding, they are noticing how the government is focusing on it." Semi-government firms are owned by the state; they outsource to private agencies, and the marketing spend follows the mandate down the chain. The campaign volume on LinkedIn and Instagram that Miran describes as "massive" is downstream of a policy decision, not a market trend that happened to catch on. For many firms, agentic marketing has stopped being optional.

Reputation is the product, and the name does the selling

In a market this concentrated, Miran argues, the strongest marketing asset a company holds is the name attached to it. "In Dubai they are looking into the name," he says. "Before any project happens here, the name is the credit for a company." A verified association with a government initiative, or with a marquee technology partner, functions as the credential that opens the next contract.

This is where the connection matters as much as the capability. Miran is direct that relationships route work in his market, and small firms chase even minor agentic AI contracts because a single government-adjacent project becomes a reference that distributes their name. A name that clears one government project wins the next one, which is why Miran tells clients to build the reputation now, while humans are still the ones reading it. Soon the reader is an AI system deciding what to recommend, and it weighs the same signals. The same pressure is turning reputation into a search discipline.

The data centers say more than the campaigns do

Ask Miran where the money should go, and he skips past software to the data centers and the talent. Abu Dhabi is building the largest AI campus outside the United States, a data center project he expects will let the country sell sovereign AI capacity to other nations. "You're going to spend on talent," he says. "You're going to also spend on infrastructure." He expects the UAE to sell AI capacity the way it sells oil, tourism, and trade.

Miran dates the strategy to 2017. The UAE named the world's first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence that year, and Miran reads the last nine years as a single compounding strategy rather than a series of announcements. The recent consolidation of AI, data, and digital government oversight into one federal authority fits that pattern: a state building the governance foundation before scaling the applications, on the theory that most failed AI projects fail on bad data and absent governance, not bad technology.

The holdout is trust, and it runs from the boardroom to the buyer

For all the speed, Miran keeps circling back to trust. Plenty of executives still do not trust AI to make decisions, and he hears the fear openly, including from a business transformation director inside his own company who wanted a defined problem in each department before applying AI. Miran's counter was to start from the foundation instead, building governance and clean data first. "You need to build your governance AI," he says. "The failing of AI is also related to the data."

Miran puts the private sector's hesitation on cautious leadership waiting for someone above them to force the move. The government mandate may be doing exactly that, giving cautious firms the cover to follow. He estimates the government's lead accounts for most of what pulls companies forward, which puts education and trust-building near the top of what marketing has to solve, since a customer who does not trust the agent will not trust what the agent recommends.

The firms moving fastest run AI as the operating layer

The firms Miran sees moving fastest build from governance and clean data up. They set the reputation signals humans and machines both read, and they commit before the mandate forces the choice. As agents take a larger role in discovery, that readiness is what makes a brand agent-ready enough to reach buyers. The ones falling behind are waiting for permission, or for a single department to prove the case.

Miran does not treat any of this as temporary. "We cannot live without electricity," he says. "It's the era that we are in, it's coming and coming." The marketing leaders who internalize that, in his view, are the ones building brand trust as infrastructure now, so it holds when the entity doing the evaluating is an agent rather than a person.

The car that parks itself and steers on its own is how Miran ends the argument, offered as the whole thing in miniature. The technology is already the layer everything else runs through. "Either you want it or not, this is the reality." In his market, the government decided that first. Everyone else is catching up.