Kelsey’s view
The bots are officially coming for jobs in the UAE.
Abu Dhabi AI firm G42 said this week that it will start “recruiting” AI agents. The move comes as US fintech firm Block announced plans to slash 40% of its 10,000-person staff, with AI tools picking up the slack. In the US, Block’s decision is spooking tech workers and rewarding Wall Street investors. The UAE has a different perspective.
With only around 1.3 million citizens — and 10 million foreigners — the Emirates have long seen the potential of automation. Augmenting human labor is not simply a question of generating shareholder value but a means of survival. Defense group EDGE has invested for years in drones and autonomous system development out of strategic necessity, given the country’s population disadvantage. G42, which is aggressively expanding its global AI infrastructure business, is pushing that logic into its operations.
Demographics aren’t the only driver. AI agents will function as a kind of outside contractor, with their developers compensated based on performance. That will allow G42 to tap global talent without having to pay for the visas, recruitment, and relocation costs required to bring humans to work in the country.
G42’s chief augmented human capital officer (yes, that’s an actual title) describes the future of work as a reimagining of the “relationship between human talent and intelligent systems.”
The company’s human staff may yet find their new coded colleagues just as useful or frustrating as other flesh-and-blood workers; for Abu Dhabi, it’s an early test of its AI-first vision of the future.
Notable
- Accenture employees, under pressure to adopt AI or risk being fired, have called some of the tools “broken slop generators,” the Financial Times reported.