In conversation with Rima Semaan, Data & AI Lead, Microsoft UAE, as she discusses Microsoft’s GITEX 2024 showcase, its AI innovations and recent launches, AI skilling and opportunities in the region
Tell us about your GITEX Global 2024 showcase, what innovations were on display?
I think our Microsoft showcase in GITEX is reinforcing our focus on AI. It is a powerful force that is transforming every industry, every organization, every business function, every individual, every student and every nation at scale. And as part of our global mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, we brought the latest and greatest technologies to GITEX to showcase the power of AI across all industries.
One of our most important showcases is “Sawa” (meaning together in Arabic), and it reflects the UAE’s ambition of the welfare, health and happiness of its residents. It is a kind of a citizen companion, where it helps you on navigate, on your journey, on your health, on your government services. It assists you by having an aspect of giving back to communities. So if you want to report on any issues, you can report on those issues accordingly in a smart and intelligent way, using AI. The other most important thing that we’re focusing on is to reduce the big gap on skilling with our AI National Skilling initiative.
To start with, we’ve announced the skilling of 100,000 government employees from Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. So whether you’re a manager, whether you’re an employee, whether you’re a developer, we have specific skilling paths for you to help meet the UAE’s national ambitions to become a global AI leader. But it doesn’t stop here – It’s a skilling initiative that empowers everyone! To achieve this, we have launched the AI Skills Navigator, a platform where you start and build your AI journey on skilling, depending on your role, your ambitions, and your skill set. We tap into more than 200 Microsoft AI learning courses, whether from Microsoft learn or LinkedIn or GitHub, and we build that path for you for free. What’s also interesting is that you can become an AI trainer, so as part of our giving back to the community, you become a trainer and teach communities accordingly. So we have a very big ambition with the AI national skilling initiative, because there is no AI without proper AI fluency, and we’re doubling down on that.
The Tech Landscape in the ME is rapidly evolving, how do you plan to optimize opportunities in this region?
We’re seeing a big skills gap for employers, and we’re seeing also a big demand from employees that they need re-skilling in order to be more relevant in their jobs and the jobs of the future. So, Microsoft is focused on AI skilling from every student to every employee and worker, and soon, you’ll even hear a lot more about skilling for senior citizens. According to Microsoft’s most recent Work Trend Index, 66% of business leaders say they won’t hire employees without AI skills; 71% say they would hire a less experienced candidate for AI skills over a more experienced one. And 76% of employees think that they need AI skills to remain relevant in the job market. Hence, with our national AI skilling initiative, we’re focusing on AI fluency to bridge the gap and take the nation to the next level.
Sustainability is a key focus for tech companies worldwide, can you share your sustainability approach?
We have very big ambitions, and we’re doing very serious analysis to enable our sustainability journey. We are working towards our commitment to become carbon negative, water positive and waste neutral by 2030. Our operations will function on renewable energy, and by doing more water replenishments, we will become water positive in the future. We’re also incorporating a recyclable journey of waste management. By 2050, we will remove all the carbon footprint that was generated since the inception of Microsoft in 1975.
How are you integrating AI in your offerings and helping companies with their AI adoption goals?
We’re seeing impressive AI adoption in scale across the UAE in different sectors. According to a recent report, 91% of UAE consumers are aware of Generative AI and 34% are already using it, and this is phenomenal. In the public sector, DEWA has successfully adopted Microsoft Copilot to enhance productivity with AI. Also, ENBD has adopted GitHub Copilot, which is designed for developers, and they’ve seen a 20% improvement in their coding efficiency, which is super amazing. We’re also helping many other private sector companies in their Copilot journeys. Last year, Microsoft helped develop an AI Tutor for students that can be customized to their individual learning journey.
Our commitment to this country is represented in what we’re doing. We’re bringing the latest and greatest AI technologies in order to serve this nation, for everybody to use, and we’re super focused on Responsible AI. I think it’s super important for us to make sure that every use of the latest AI is responsible by nature. So our design is build up on AI principles – from transparency to accountability to inclusiveness to safety and security accordingly. We think it takes multi-tier commitments from industry leaders like ourselves, from our customers, from our partners, and from global policymakers to ensure a responsible approach to AI development. So we’ve been working locally with policymakers on what we advocate or what they advocate around positive policy, on responsible AI, and to bring our feedback around that. So it’s multiple things together in order to remove the fears and basically ensure trust in technology in a more safe and responsible way.
How was the response from visitors & industry peers at GITEX 2024, any new announcement or launches you are excited about?
I think there are many interesting new launches coming in. Our recent launch of the Microsoft Copilot+ PCs, the fastest most intelligent Windows AI PCs, were received very enthusiastically. We also launched Wave 2 of Microsoft 365 Copilot innovation which builds on the success of our Copilot suite based on the feedback we have been receiving from users around the world. Azure OpenAI Service, which is our trademark on AI, has been phenomenally adopted in UAE with so many customers and innovations around that. We are also investing big time with our partners in the UAE, like G42.
We have been working with them for a long time, first on AI by building large language models, and then building what we call a sovereign cloud together. This sovereign cloud acts as a bridge to enable all the regulated industries to leverage the superpower of the cloud, in order to accelerate their AI use cases accordingly at scale. Through this partnership, we will also open two AI research centers in Abu Dhabi, dedicated to the best global practices in Responsible AI. The response to these new launches and innovations has been amazing. The ambitions of this nation are progressing with the embracement of such technology, not only to become a leader in AI innovation, but also to attract top talent from all around the world to further advance AI transformation.
