PARIS/LJUBLJANA, Slovenia – This year, the United Arab Emirates announced a plan to have half of its government services run on agentic AI within the next two years.
Under the program, AI is supposed to serve as an “executive partner” that “analyzes, decides, executes and improves in real time” without human intervention. Having spent our careers at the intersection of entrepreneurship, research and digital policy, we can confidently pronounce this plan reckless. And because the UAE presents itself as a global digital model, other governments will feel pressure to follow suit.
That is a danger we must not ignore. We already know what happens when governments delegate decision-making to algorithms. In 2021, a self-learning system in the Netherlands wrongly accused roughly 35,000 families of child care benefit fraud. Parents were ordered to repay tens of thousands of euros they never owed; homes were lost; and more than 2,000 children were taken into state care.