TikTok’s UAE Forward Forum highlights platform’s AED 1.1 billion economic contribution

TikTok convened its flagship UAE Forward Forum at the Museum of the Future in Dubai, bringing together C-suite executives, government regulators, digital creators, and business leaders. The forum was structured to evaluate the direct trajectory of the UAE’s digital economy, focusing on the role of interactive short-form video platforms in accelerating entrepreneurship, creator-led innovation, and digital trust mapped directly to the long-term goals of We the UAE 2031 and the UAE Centennial 2071.

The forum revisited the core economic indicators outlined in The TikTok Effect: Enabling the UAE’s Dynamic Digital Economy report, compiled alongside Redseer Strategy Consultants. The data confirms that TikTok serves as a vital conversion driver for local small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Today, over 70,000 active SMBs run ad campaigns on TikTok across the Emirates. Crucially, more than 10,000 local entrepreneurs—comprising 3,500 women-led businesses and 1,400 Emirati nationals—attribute the creation and launch of their enterprises directly to the platform’s distribution mechanics. In total, TikTok generated AED 1.1 billion in gross value added (GVA) for the UAE economy, while sustaining approximately 7,000 jobs across marketing, logistics, and content creation pipelines.

A core thematic block during the forum emphasized that a sustainable digital economy requires uncompromised platform safety and digital wellbeing. TikTok detailed its ongoing engineering investments, highlighting over 50 preset security, privacy, and safety controls configured explicitly for teen accounts.

To assist parents and guardians, TikTok showcased its expanded Family Pairing suite. The system permits adults to bind their profiles to their teenagers’ accounts to customize privacy protocols, manage daily screen time parameters, activate screen-free intervals via the “Time Away” module, and audit active follower lists to encourage healthy digital habits.

H.E. Abdulaziz Al Nuaimi, Assistant Undersecretary of Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Economy and Tourism, highlighted this paradigm shift: “For four centuries, selling to the world required the scale of an empire — fleets, warehouses, an army of employees. Today it requires a phone, courage, and a country that clears the way. This report documents more than 10,000 UAE businesses that were distributed into existence. That is not just a digital platform story. It is a story of how entrepreneurship is being reinvented, and the UAE intends to lead the economy of the future.”