Abu Dhabi Government partners with Microsoft for Frontier Employee Program
Abu Dhabi Government has announced the expansion of Microsoft 365 Copilot across its public sector through the Frontier Employee Program, increasing deployment to 35,000 government employees across 27 government entities. According to the government, the initiative supports its goal of becoming an AI-native government by 2027.
The latest rollout adds Microsoft 365 Copilot to 26,000 civil servants, building on 9,000 existing licenses. The government said the program standardizes Microsoft 365 Copilot as its AI productivity platform, integrating generative AI capabilities into employees’ daily workflows and public service delivery.
According to the government, all licenses are provisioned with Advanced Data Residency (ADR), ensuring AI processing takes place within the UAE. The rollout also includes AI training and certification programmes intended to help employees use the technology securely, responsibly, and effectively.
His Excellency Wesam Lootah, Director General of GovDigital at the Department of Government Enablement (DGE), said the rollout represents a step toward building a government designed around AI capabilities while supporting secure and governed adoption across government entities. He added that the Frontier Employee Programme provides employees with the tools and skills to support innovation in the public sector.
Amr Kamel, General Manager of Microsoft UAE, said the programme reflects the UAE’s approach to government transformation through agentic AI. He added that Microsoft is providing secure and sovereign technology foundations to support the initiative and DGE’s implementation.
The program is supported by an AI Adoption and Enablement framework that includes structured deployment, change management, and user enablement. According to the government, the deployment is also backed by security, data governance, and readiness assessments to align with government compliance and data protection requirements.
The rollout builds on an ongoing collaboration between DGE and Microsoft covering government cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, AI services, and workplace technologies.
DGE, Microsoft, and Core42 signed an agreement in March 2025 to establish a sovereign cloud environment designed to process more than 11 million daily digital interactions between government entities, citizens, residents, and businesses.
The government also said its AI-powered services platform, TAMM, uses Microsoft technologies including Dynamics 365, Power BI, and Azure to provide more than 1,150 public and private services through a single platform.
Microsoft and DGE have also expanded their cybersecurity collaboration through the Government Security Operations Centre (GSOC), which is built on Microsoft Sentinel and Defender XDR. According to the company, the platform supports approximately 60,000 users and tens of thousands of workloads across Abu Dhabi Government.
The government also noted that it is establishing an AI Factory capability to develop and scale AI applications and agents across government, targeting hundreds of AI use cases and more than 1,000 agents to support workflow automation, document processing, constituent query handling, and policy analysis
