Microsoft, VDURA and IFS bring practical applications to the world’s largest AI-first Expo and Summit, as government and industry leaders examine how new intelligence accelerates industry transformation
By : Mohamed Essam
A single digital worker saving US$ 3 million a year, AI tools empowering 35,000 government employees, and a university rebuilding its data infrastructure to support new research, from water science to aerospace. These are glimpses of how AI is now taking on a greater role in boosting key sectors, with the companies behind these applications coming together at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026, the world’s largest AI-first Expo and Summit from 6-7 October at ADNEC Centre.
Organised by inD, and hosted by the Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi (DGE), with Solutions+, a Mubadala company, as Global Partner, Ai Everything Abu Dhabi unites more than 400 AI-first companies and over 180 speakers alongside policymakers, investors, and business executives, where the scale of global AI ambition will be matched only by the real-life use-cases running on it.
Microsoft brings frontier intelligence into public services
For Microsoft, the opportunity with AI goes far beyond making organisations more efficient. It is about reimagining how they operate, make decisions and deliver value. Microsoft describes this emerging model as the Frontier Firm, where people work alongside AI and agents to transform workflows and achieve better outcomes.
That transformation is already taking shape across Abu Dhabi Government. Through its partnership with Microsoft, Microsoft 365 Copilot is being rolled out to 35,000 government employees, embedding AI into everyday work and public-service delivery as Abu Dhabi advances towards its ambition of becoming the world’s first AI-native government by 2027. The programme is designed to help employees make better-informed decisions, streamline processes and dedicate more time to higher-value public service, underpinned by security, responsible AI and in-country data residency.
Amr Kamel, Managing Director, Microsoft UAE, said: “The biggest shift we are seeing is from AI as a tool to AI as a teammate. We are entering a new era where people work alongside AI agents that can reason, plan and act across workflows, while human judgement and accountability remain at the centre.”
That shift will shape Microsoft’s presence at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi. The showcase will bring together Copilot experiences, Azure AI, cybersecurity and innovations from Microsoft’s partner ecosystem to demonstrate how organisations can move from experimenting with AI to applying it securely and responsibly at scale.
Visitors will see practical examples of how AI can help employees save time, improve decisions, strengthen security and redesign processes, connecting advances in cloud and AI with tangible outcomes for organisations and the people they serve.
“The UAE has established one of the world’s clearest ambitions for AI, and the next chapter is about turning that ambition into impact at scale,” Kamel added. “Microsoft is proud to help enable that journey by bringing together trusted cloud and AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, Copilot and AI agents, alongside the skills and responsible AI foundations needed to transform how organisations work and how services are delivered.”
VDURA’s award-winning data solution makes Middle East debut in Abu Dhabi
Even the most capable AI model needs a dependable supply of data. VDURA, a high-performance data storage infrastructure for AI factories and neoclouds, will bring its Data Platform V12 to the Middle East market for the first time since availability at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi. Built for GPU clouds and AI factories, the platform automatically places data on the appropriate storage, helping operators keep expensive computing capacity productive. V12 was recently named AI Data Management Solution of the Year in the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards.
VDURA is working with customers such as New Mexico State University (NMSU) a Carnegie R1 institution. Researchers at the university working across agriculture, aerospace and biomedicine faced a shared challenge: how to run large-scale simulations and AI model training on one reliable platform, without separate systems competing for resources. With over US$ 141 million in annual research spending on the line, the university needed infrastructure that could keep pace with its scientific ambitions.
VDURA’s deployment, live since August 2026, brings NVMe flash storage and high-capacity hard drives into a single system. The company says it delivers flash-level responsiveness for active research data while holding larger datasets at a fraction of the cost of an all-flash system.
That addresses a major constraint on research: providing speed where it matters without paying premium storage costs for every piece of data. Ken Claffey, CEO of VDURA, said: “The center of gravity is shifting from training to inference at scale, and that shift changes what storage has to do. As agentic AI and long-context applications become standard, systems need to keep persistent context and petabyte-scale RAG corpora available, that’s where our persistent KV cache and automated tiering are aimed.”
IFS brings AI-powered industrial transformation across critical infrastructure
IFS, the world-leading provider of Industrial AI software, will showcase how AI can deliver measurable outcomes across asset-intensive industries at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026.
With asset-intensive industries from ports and utilities to aerospace & defense, oil & gas, manufacturing, and energy, knowing an asset is at risk does not prevent failure; acting at the right moment does. Someone still has to arrange the repair, find the part and schedule the crew. For IFS, that gap between warning and repair is where industrial AI can make its most valuable contribution.
Suliman Gaouda, Regional Vice President, IFS AI, Asia Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa, said: “Ports, rail, utilities, data centres, aviation, and defence sustainment are all commissioning assets faster than they are building the systems to run them. The biggest opportunity is capturing the asset register and the maintenance regime at handover, not retrofitting it three years later at several times the cost.”
The financial implications are already visible in IFS’s use-case of Kodiak Gas Services, where the company projects US$3 million in annual savings and 90,000 technician hours saved through its Material Replenisher agent.
At Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, IFS will present working demonstrations of its Industrial AI capabilities, including IFS Loops Digital Workers platform which will showcase how AI can execute tasks across business systems, IFS Nexus Black Resolve will highlight how faults can be captured with images and voice before AI can provide a diagnosis and guided repair steps. While the IFS Operational Intelligence will demonstrate how degrading equipment can be spotted and raise a resulting work request.
New Intelligence Summit: Ministers and government leaders explore the future of public sector, education and national infrastructure in an AI-enabled world
The Summit brings together ministers, senior government leaders and industry executives to discuss how education, skills development and organisational readiness can support AI adoption across key sectors.
H.E. Mariam Al Musharrekh, Director General, Department of Government Enablement, will share perspectives on Abu Dhabi’s experience in developing an AI-ready government workforce, and how these capabilities can support public services and national competitiveness globally.
H.E. Prof. Ebrahim Al Hajri, President of Khalifa University of Science and Technology, dives into the key aspect of how learning must evolve to thrive alongside intelligent systems while keeping human judgement and intuition at its centre.
Discussing the impact of frontier AI and agentic systems across one of the world’s largest energy facilities, Sean Spicer, SVP Digital Technology at ADNOC, joins a panel on ‘Frontier AI Enterprise’ alongside Nickson Dicson, Head of Data & AI MENAT, AWS, and Simon Al Khaled, VP of Public Sector, ECEMEA and UAE Country Lead and Managing Director, Oracle.
ADNOC’s deployment of ENERGYai, the world’s first agentic AI solution for the energy sector, offers a concrete illustration of that potential. Built by AIQ, the Abu Dhabi-based venture jointly formed by Presight and ADNOC Group, it places the relationship between energy and AI in sharp focus. Dennis Jol, CEO of AIQ, will join H.E. Dr. Amal Abdulrahim, Assistant Undersecretary & Chief AI & Innovation Officer, Ministry of Climate Change & Environment, to examine how energy producers are reinventing their businesses through AI, and what this growing interdependence means for the sector’s future.
As intelligence becomes part of how public services, universities and essential industries operate, its value will be judged in enhanced citizen services, productive manpower and greater research capabilities. Ai Everything Abu Dhabi brings those measures into focus, giving the world a closer look at what it takes to turn AI capability into economic and human impact.
