OPEX
First UAE’27
Agentic AI. Where the National Mandate meets Operational Reality.
The most ambitious public sector performance target in the world.
The UAE has set the most ambitious public sector performance target in the world. Within two years, 50% of government sectors, services and operations will run on Agentic AI and federal entities are assessing how quickly they redesign processes to get there.
This is not a technology upgrade. It is a national instruction to rethink how work is done.
OPEX First UAE 2027 is scheduled on 20 January 2027 and is built for the people who now have to deliver against these mandates, who make it real through process mining, process intelligence and intelligent automation. The methods that made it work. The sequence that gets you from ambition to measurable impact, before the clock runs out.
“Automate a broken process and you get a faster broken process.
The lesson the UAE has already learned is the one most organizations skip: bureaucracy should not be digitized, it should first be questioned, simplified and, where possible, eliminated.
Facts & figures
of UAE government sectors, services and operations to run on Agentic AI within two years, under the directives of the UAE President
federal employees to be trained under the Agentic AI programme
specialized AI advisors launched in the Cabinet AI Advisor system (approved 2 September 2026)
unnecessary procedures, requirements, documents and process steps eliminated since the Zero Government Bureaucracy Programme launched in 2023
procedures removed and 1,600 requirements simplified in the programme’s first cycle alone
customer hours saved, equivalent to AED 1.12 billion in economic value
reduction in work-permit processing time at MoHRE under the AI driven Zero Bureaucracy phase
total savings from Dubai’s Services 360 Policy
Dubai government services redesigned across 28 entities
reduction in waiting times
fewer required visits · fewer service requirements · shorter processing time
committed to Abu Dhabi’s Digital Strategy 2025 - 2027
AI use cases deployed across 40+ Abu Dhabi government entities
applications to the Sheikh Khalifa Excellence Award’s 22nd cycle, over 80% growth year on year
the Middle East & Africa share of the global process mining market, signalling significant headroom for adoption
We are a CPD Certified Event.
OPEX First UAE 2027 is certified by the CPD Certification Service. Attendees receive a CPD certificate after attending the event.
Earn up to 7 hours of CPD points.
Register Now→
Approved ProviderThe organisations that have backed OPEX First across the series.
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
Market drivers
A hard national deadline with no precedent
50% of UAE government sectors, services and operations must run on Agentic AI within two years. Announced April 2026 under the directives of the UAE President. This converts operational excellence from a voluntary improvement agenda into a delivery obligation with a date attached, and the UAE has positioned itself as the first government globally to attempt it at this scale.
2027 Strategic Focus Areas
Reframing AI progress: outcomes over adoption counts
Agents deployed and percentage-of-processes-touched are activity metrics, not results. Building scorecards on decision quality, cycle time and cost to serve that leadership and assessors will accept in place of deployment tallies. This is the intellectual spine of the whole event.
AI as enabler, not the fix
Permits cut by 95%, a visa journey from three weeks to five days. In both, the gain came from fixing the process and governance first, with AI on top. Separating the two contributions is the single most useful thing an attendee can take home.
Is it a technology problem or a governance problem?
The diagnostic question both entities kept returning to. How to tell the difference before procurement, and why misdiagnosis is the most expensive mistake in the cycle.
Adoption is the real bottleneck
Named by practitioners as the biggest challenge: the tools are live, the behaviour hasn’t changed. What drives usage past the pilot cohort, how to spot adoption theatre, and what to do when licences are paid for and unused.
Zero Bureaucracy: resilience before removal, and never finished
Are processes, controls and culture strong enough to survive the governance steps you’re about to delete? Plus the expectation-setting that matters most, this is a permanent operating discipline, not a project with an end date.
Interrogating the 50% target
Realistic or aspirational? What a credible entity roadmap to 2028 contains, where the honest constraints sit, and what happens to the metric if adoption plateaus after deployment. The session that earns the event its credibility.
The accountability gap in machine decisions
Who verifies an AI decision was better than human judgement would have been? Counterfactual baselines, who owns the review, and how it’s evidenced to auditors and award assessors. Includes the human-versus-machine decision line.
Budget doesn’t equal execution
AED 13 billion and sovereign-fund channels committed, no clear picture of how it lands operationally. What an integrated strategy across process, people and culture looks like, and why delivery partners aren’t yet being asked how they’ll hit the dates.
Bridging Lean and Six Sigma with AI-era transformation
Not a clean break. Where classical improvement disciplines still outperform, where they need reinvention, and how process mining and agent design fit alongside DMAIC rigour rather than replacing it. This is what makes it an operational excellence event, not an AI event.
Sovereignty in principle, public cloud in practice
Sovereign models as the stated mitigation, while identity-related workloads still run on public cloud and control systems are still being formalised. A live, unresolved tension and the compliance and privacy questions that come with it as models move to production.
Program overview
- 09:00 – 09:20Keynote
Opening Keynote
- 09:20 – 10:10Panel
Half the Government in Two Years: Ambition, Arithmetic and What Happens If We Miss
- What does a defensible entity roadmap to 2028 look like and what are the honest constraints?
- Adoption counts versus outcomes.
- What would you put on a scorecard instead: decision quality, cycle time, cost to serve?
- AED 13 billion committed across Abu Dhabi’s digital strategy, plus sovereign-fund channels elsewhere. How does that money translate into operational change, and who is accountable for the translation?
- 10:10 – 10:30Presentation
Making the Invisible Process Visible: Process Mining as the Foundation for Agentic AI
- 10:50 – 11:35Panel
Technology Problem or Governance Problem? Diagnosing Before You Procure
- How do you actually tell the difference before a business case is written? What does the diagnostic look like in practice?
- Permits cut 95%: how much of each gain came from process and governance redesign, and how much from AI? Can we separate them?
- Before you delete a governance step, how do you test whether the process, controls and culture survive without it?
- Where has simplification created risk and how did you rebuild the control without rebuilding the bureaucracy?
- 11:35 – 12:00Presentation
Designing Processes for Agents, Not Just for People
- 12:45 – 13:30Panel
The Licences Are Live and Nothing Changed: Adoption as the Real Bottleneck
- AI literacy from informal pseudo-mandate to tracked man-hours and levels. What does trained actually mean, and how do you avoid certificates without competence?
- Where do Lean and Six Sigma still outperform an AI-first approach? Where do they genuinely need reinvention?
- How do process mining and agent design sit alongside rather than replacing it?
- What do you do when the licence is paid for and the behaviour hasn’t shifted?
- 13:30 – 13:55Presentation
Integration Without Rebuilding: Data Foundations for Cross-Entity Services
- 13:55 – 14:40Panel
Who Checks the Machine? Accountability, Sovereignty and Trust at Production Scale
- Drawing the line: which decisions may a machine execute, which stay human-led, and who decides the classification?
- Sovereign models are the stated mitigation, yet identity-related workloads still run on public cloud and control systems are still being formalised. How are you managing that in the meantime?
- Compliance and data privacy as models scale: what’s settled, what genuinely isn’t, and how do you build for a framework still in motion?
- What is the first real test case going to look like and would your current controls survive it?
- 14:40 – 15:00Keynote
Closing Keynote: Low-Code, Workflow and the Long Tail of Small Processes
Who should attend
Leadership
- Directors General, Assistant Undersecretaries, Executive Directors
- Chief Operating Officers, Chief Transformation Officers
Excellence & performance
- Heads of Government Excellence, Institutional Excellence, Corporate Excellence
- Heads of Strategy, Performance Management and Institutional Development
- VPs / Directors of Operational Excellence, Continuous Improvement, Business Excellence
- Heads of Quality, Lean / Six Sigma, Productivity and Performance
Process & automation
- Heads of Process Excellence, Process Mining, Process Intelligence and BPM
- Heads of Automation, RPA, Intelligent Automation and AI
Data & technology
- Chief AI Officers, Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Officers
- ERP, Enterprise Architecture and Digital Transformation leaders
2027 Award Categories
Join us as we celebrate the OPEX First 2027 Awards, honoring those who demonstrate outstanding excellence and innovation in operational practices. We’ll shine a spotlight on the visionaries and organizations leading the way in technological advancements.
- 01Operational Excellence Organisation of the Year (Government)
- 02Operational Excellence Organisation of the Year (Private Sector)
- 03Excellence in Process Mining & Process Intelligence
- 04Best Intelligent Automation or Agentic AI Deployment
- 05Operational Excellence Leader of the Year
Put a team forward.
Nominations are reviewed by the OPEX First programme committee. You can nominate your own organization or another.
The room, in practice.
Two editions of OPEX First are already on the record — Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. The films, the delegates’ own verdicts, and the rooms they were filmed in.
Highlight films
2In their words
8Photographs
7
Agentic AI. Where the National Mandate meets Operational Reality.
CPD Certified Event · earn up to 7 CPD points.Become a Summit Sponsor
Put your brand in the room with top decision-makers worldwide. Sponsorship packages are designed for maximum visibility and qualified lead generation.
Trusted by 80+ sponsors across 6+ global markets
Your information is kept confidential. We'll only use it to respond to your inquiry.
Speaking and sponsorship.
