Dubai Government to Examine Which Workforce Decisions AI Can Own and Which Must Stay Human

The Dubai Government Human Resources Department will host the first forum of DGHR Multaqa 2026 under the title HR in the Agentic Age, convening government leaders, policymakers, technology experts and human capital executives to examine one of the most consequential questions facing public sector organisations globally: as AI evolves from a support tool into systems capable of acting autonomously across workflows, which decisions must remain under human authority and which can legitimately be delegated to machines.

The forum is organised under the theme Agents at Work, Humans in Charge, Policy as Guide, a framing that captures the governance challenge with notable precision. Dubai's government is not asking whether to adopt agentic AI. That direction is established. It is asking how to govern it, specifically how to ensure that the speed and scale advantages of autonomous AI systems do not come at the cost of accountability, transparency and public trust. Abdullah Ali bin Zayed Al Falasi, Director General of the Dubai Government Human Resources Department, framed the issue directly: technology can enhance the way we work, but human judgement, accountability and public value must remain at the centre of decision-making.

The DGHR Multaqa forum represents a practical response to a structural shift already underway. The UAE has committed to transitioning a significant proportion of government services to autonomous, agentic AI models within the next two years, a timeline that compresses what might otherwise be a managed decade-long transformation into an immediate operational design challenge for HR departments, technology teams, and legal and compliance functions simultaneously. The DGHR forum addresses the human capital dimension of that transition specifically: how government workforce structures are redesigned when AI agents take on tasks previously done by people, what skills the remaining human workforce needs to develop, and how government entities maintain meaningful human oversight in operational environments where AI is making or executing decisions in real time.

The governance question at the centre of the forum, which workforce decisions must remain human-led, maps directly onto the finding in the Board Intelligence research published last week that 58 percent of Middle East boards are already reviewing the human versus AI decision boundary. What is notable about the DGHR forum is that it brings this question into the public sector and the human resources function specifically, where the decisions in question include hiring, performance evaluation, disciplinary action, promotion, and workforce restructuring, areas where algorithmic decision-making carries distinct legal and ethical weight that corporate AI governance frameworks do not fully address.

The forum also surfaces the workforce readiness dimension that sits beneath the governance conversation. Between public sector entities now using AI tools and those preparing to deploy agentic systems capable of autonomous action, there is a skills gap in understanding how to supervise, audit, and override AI-generated decisions. Discussions will cover workforce transformation, job redesign, upskilling, responsible AI governance, employee readiness, accessibility and inclusion, areas that reflect a recognition that deploying agentic AI in government without preparing the human workforce to supervise it creates accountability gaps rather than closing them. The workload intensification that AI adoption is generating across Gulf enterprises makes the design of human-AI collaboration models in government operations a more urgent question than it might appear, since poorly designed transitions tend to increase rather than reduce the burden on the staff who remain.