Farouk El Hamzawi discusses OpenAI’s UAE growth priorities, ChatGPT Work, local data infrastructure and the secure deployment of AI across regulated sectors.
Dubai —The UAE’s national AI ambitions, expanding digital infrastructure and focus on data sovereignty are accelerating enterprise adoption across government, banking, energy, aviation and education. Organisations are increasingly exploring how AI can move beyond isolated pilots to become embedded within workflows, operating models and public services.
Farouk El Hamzawi, Head of Enterprise, OpenAI MENA, spoke to Tahawultech.com about OpenAI’s growth priorities for the UAE, the role of ChatGPT Work in improving productivity and decision-making, and the importance of local data and inference residency. Hamzawi also discussed the leadership, governance and security measures required to deploy AI responsibly across regulated organisations.
Interview excerpts
What are OpenAI’s key enterprise priorities and growth plans for the UAE?
The UAE stands out globally for the ambition and commitment of its government and enterprises under national strategies like the UAE National AI Strategy 2031. Our priority right now is to help translate that vision into some of the world’s first truly AI-native institutions, where AI is not simply an additional tool, but a foundational part of how people work, how organisations operate and how new services are created. With key foundations like UAE Data Residency and UAE Inference Residency now live, we are actively unlocking opportunities with a broad set of highly regulated entities in banking, energy, and the public sector. From here, our focus is to deepen these partnerships and expand access to our most advanced capabilities, and help make the UAE a global reference point for how AI can drive economic growth, institutional transformation and better services for citizens and customers.
Which UAE industries are currently demonstrating the strongest adoption of ChatGPT and other OpenAI solutions?
Government entities across the UAE are taking an AI-native approach, with a clear commitment to deploying AI at scale across public services and municipal infrastructure. Beyond government, we see strong appetite and real-world execution across banking, energy, aviation, and education. Cybersecurity is also a massive driver of this momentum across every sector. According to the UAE Cyber Security Council, the country faces more than 800,000 cyberattacks daily and significant talent shortages.
AI has become an essential capability multiplier to help defensive security teams keep pace with evolving threats.
How can ChatGPT Work help UAE organisations improve productivity, collaboration and decision-making?
ChatGPT Work helps UAE organisations move beyond asking AI questions to improving the business outcomes that matter most, from faster execution and stronger collaboration to better-informed decisions. It works alongside employees to bring together relevant information from approved workplace tools, files and business systems, apply advanced reasoning, and help turn a goal into finished, reviewable work. This means less time spent searching for information, coordinating handoffs and preparing first drafts, and more time for expert judgement, customer relationships and innovation. By connecting relevant knowledge across existing tools and processes from Outlook, SharePoint and Teams, ChatGPT Work helps teams develop a clearer, shared understanding of their work and collaborate more effectively across functions. For example, a finance team could explore different scenarios and prepare a board-ready recommendation; a government department could coordinate inputs across teams to deliver a public-service initiative; an energy company could turn technical documents and project updates into a clear action plan; and a commercial team could combine customer insights to build a stronger proposal. Crucially, employees remain in full control throughout the process, reviewing outputs, redirecting the agent’s approach, and approving consequential actions.
What challenges do enterprises face when moving from AI experimentation to organisation-wide deployment?
A key challenge has been meeting strict local data governance standards in regulated sectors. For many organisations, scaling sensitive workloads required UAE Inference Residency to ensure model inference runs on GPUs inside the country rather than relying solely on local data storage. Another challenge is that enterprises often get stuck running long pilots that fail to keep up with the pace of model development. As general-purpose models evolve rapidly, highly specific or static pilots can become obsolete quickly. The most mature organisations avoid waiting for a perfect pilot; instead, they deploy agents directly into production, scale them quickly, and learn continuously from real usage. Finally, scaling requires strong leadership alignment.
While widespread employee familiarity with ChatGPT creates natural bottom-up demand, true enterprise transformation requires executive commitment to change management, upskilling, and embedding AI into operating models.
How is OpenAI helping UAE businesses adopt AI securely while protecting sensitive corporate data?
We approach security through a balance of enterprise-grade controls, transparent safeguards, and localised infrastructure, while ensuring business data is never used to train our models by default. Through iterative deployment and frameworks like our Preparedness Framework and Model Spec, we rigorously evaluate frontier models for risks, including cybersecurity, biological misuse, and autonomy, before release. For sensitive operational and cyber defensive workloads, we provide specialised mechanisms like Trusted Access for Cyber, which offers verified defenders’ identity-backed access to advanced capabilities paired with strict usage monitoring. Crucially, we offer both UAE Data Residency and UAE Inference Residency. This ensures that prompt processing and GPU execution run on dedicated engines within the UAE, creating a closed regional loop that allows institutions to deploy agentic workloads while maintaining strict data sovereignty and security.
Source: Tahawul Tech