Corporate AI Training in the UAE: Why 59% Say AI Added to Their Tasks
Zeta42 · 29 September 2026
Korn Ferry finds UAE staff are optimistic about AI, but 59% say it has added to their tasks. Corporate AI training has to change shape.
Corporate AI training in the UAE has a new problem to solve. Staff are not short of enthusiasm for AI, and many say it already makes them faster. What they are short of is time, because the tools are adding work as quickly as they save it. That is the picture from Korn Ferry's Workforce 2026 Global Insights Report, as reported by Khaleej Times.
Summary
- 76 per cent of UAE professionals feel excited and positive about how AI will change their work, against 81 per cent in Saudi Arabia.
- 68 per cent in the UAE report efficiency gains from AI, above the global average of 63 per cent.
- 59 per cent in the UAE say AI tools have increased the number of tasks expected of them, against 52 per cent worldwide.
- 53 per cent in the UAE feel stretched beyond their capabilities at work, compared with 44 per cent globally.
- The lesson for training teams: teaching tools is not enough. Programmes have to change how the work itself is done.
What Korn Ferry found
Korn Ferry surveyed more than 16,000 professionals across 11 global markets, from individual contributors to CEOs, including 500 respondents each in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Khaleej Times notes that the Gulf's upbeat mood stands apart from warnings by some of the world's best known technology leaders, including Bill Gates and the chief executives of Anthropic and OpenAI.
The headline is optimism. The detail underneath it is more mixed.
Efficiency is up, but impact is not
Half of UAE respondents, 50 per cent, say they are too busy to deliver meaningful results. The global figure is 45 per cent. So the UAE workforce is both more likely than average to say AI makes it efficient and more likely to say it cannot get the important work done.
The reason is in the next number. When 59 per cent say AI has increased the tasks expected of them, the time saved is being spent on more tasks, not better ones. The article also cites an August survey by recruitment firm Robert Walters, which found that 79 per cent of UAE professionals said their roles had unofficially expanded and 49 per cent were working longer hours. Only 17 per cent had discussed the extra workload with their managers.
Jonathan Holmes, managing director, Middle East Turkey and Africa, Korn Ferry, put it directly: "But efficiency alone won't deliver growth." He added that the organisations better positioned to grow "are those that redesign roles, rethink how work gets done with AI and enable people to see the impact of their work".
Why corporate AI training in the UAE has to change shape
Most AI training still teaches features, such as how to write a prompt or summarise a document. That is useful, but it treats AI as a personal productivity trick. The Korn Ferry numbers suggest that this approach, on its own, produces exactly what the survey found: people who are faster and busier at the same time.
Training that sticks starts from the team's real work. Which reports could disappear, and which tasks should a person stop doing once AI is in place? Those are management decisions as much as skills, which is why leaders need to be in the room.
What a better programme looks like
At Zeta42 we run executive AI briefings from one day, so leaders can decide where AI should change the work before staff are asked to adopt it. For teams, we run department cohorts of four to six weeks, built around the team's own tools and files, on the client's premises or in Abu Dhabi. Our "AI at Work" track ends with a working change to a real process.
That last point matters most in light of this survey. If a programme ends with the same process plus an AI tool, workload tends to grow. If it ends with a redesigned process, the time saved has somewhere useful to go.
Questions for HR and learning leaders
- Do you know which tasks AI has added to your teams this year, as well as which ones it has sped up?
- Does your AI training include managers deciding what work to stop?
- Is there a named owner for each process that AI is meant to change?
- Is success measured by course completions, or by a process that now runs differently?
UAE professionals are ready for AI, and the survey shows it. The job for employers now is to make sure that readiness turns into better work rather than simply more of it.
Source: khaleejtimes.com