Your Weekly AI Briefing for Leaders
Welcome to your weekly AI Tech Circle briefing – highlighting what matters in Generative AI for business!
I’m thrilled to be building and implementing AI solutions, and I can’t wait to share everything I learn with you!
Check out the updates from this week! Please take a moment to share them with a friend or colleague who might benefit from these valuable insights!
Feeling overwhelmed by the constant stream of AI news? I’ve got you covered! I filter it all so you can focus on what’s important.
Today at a Glance:
- Building Generative AI Maturity Model Part 1
- Generative AI Use case: 15 Use cases taken by the various Dubai Government departments
- AI Weekly news and updates covering newly released LLMs
- Courses and events to attend
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Outcomes of Dubai AI Week 2025
Dubai AI Week 2025 marked a significant acceleration of the AI ambitions, gathering over 30,000 participants, 700+ speakers, and 250+ sessions. Key highlights included announcing a AED 2 billion hyperscale data center by du and Microsoft, launching Dubai’s first PhD program in AI, awarding the first Dubai AI Seals, and releasing Dubai’s official AI Policy for government entities.
Strategic moves like the launch of the Dubai AI Academy and the Dubai State of AI Report demonstrate Dubai’s commitment to embedding AI across education, government, and industry. Dubai Health unveiled the UAE’s first AI Literacy Framework, and RTA launched its AI Strategy 2030, which targets significant operational efficiencies.
With 75 government AI pilots executed, a clear focus on AI literacy, and a series of international partnerships, Dubai positioned itself as a fast adopter and a leading builder of an AI-powered economy.
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Generative AI Adoption Maturity Model
We have a few articles on the maturity model, like Where Are You on the Generative AI Maturity Curve? and Generative AI Maturity Framework for Structured Guidance. Based on your feedback and my discussion during a few meetings, the customer requires a framework for the AI maturity assessment based on agentic AI.
Therefore, from today onward, during the next few weeks, we will develop a Gen AI Maturity Model or framework. It will be a joint effort with a few colleagues, friends, and leadership teams of a few organizations.
Let’s start today with the fundamentals, the question I received this week at the conference.
Why Maturity Matters?
Generative AI now carries a reality. McKinsey estimates the technology could unlock USD 2.6 trillion to 4.4 trillion in annual productivity gains.
A structured maturity model matters because it channels investment toward repeatable value while cutting the risk that proofs-of-concept stall or expose the organization to uncontrolled data and compliance threats.
Early agentic platforms show pay-back in under two weeks and 30–50 percent cycle-time cuts, but only when deployed inside disciplined operating environments.
We will be going to focus on below six levels of Generative AI Maturity.
Generative AI Maturity Model Levels
This model defines six sequential levels.
- Level 0 (Aware) is ad-hoc experimentation with public LLMs.
- Level 1 (Exploring) funds small proofs-of-concept and starts basic data hygiene.
- Level 2 (Operational) sees the first production workload inside one function under an MLOps pipeline.
- Level 3 (Integrated) scales Gen AI across functions under unified governance and ethics review.
- Level 4 (Autonomous) introduces an agent mesh that executes multi-step workflows with monitored human oversight.
- Level 5 (Transformative) positions AI as the organising principle: self-optimizing models, continuous reinvention, and AI-first products.
Each level is complete only when technical capabilities and operating practices align with the stated state.
Progress is scored across six assessment dimensions:
- Strategy & Leadership,
- Data & Infrastructure,
- Use-Case Portfolio,
- Talent & Culture,
- Governance & Risk, and
- Agentic Capability.
A 0-to-5 rating on each dimension highlights the weakest areas to fix first; overall maturity equals the average, but advancement requires lifting the lowest score.
Next week, we will continue to work on the remaining sections of the Generative AI Maturity Model and the final goal is to have a Model and pilot it in few organizations.
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In the News – This Week’s Key AI Developments:
Top Story of the Week:
Anthropic has released a report ‘Detecting and Countering Malicious Uses of Claude’, and they have highlighted a few of the very innovative approaches to misuse LLM, a few to mention are:
- An influence-as-a-service network used Claude to automate activities and interact with tens of thousands of real social media accounts across various countries and languages.
- One actor employed Claude to strengthen systems that identify and process exposed usernames and passwords linked to security cameras while gathering information on publicly accessible targets to test these credentials. Claude has not verified whether these operations achieved success.
- A recruitment fraud campaign utilized Claude to improve the quality of scam content aimed at job seekers in Eastern Europe. Claude has not confirmed whether these scams were successfully deployed.
Why it matters: These cases highlight a critical shift in how LLMs like Claude are being used not just for misinformation but also for credential harvesting and targeted fraud at scale. Even without confirmed success, the growing use of Gen AI in malicious operations shows why businesses and governments must rethink security models.
The Cloud: the backbone of the AI revolution
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Generative AI Use Case of the Week:
The Dubai Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DCAI) worked with 33 government entities to identify key operational and strategic challenges, resulting in 183
potential Generative AI use cases. DCAI launched a three-month innovation sandbox to test these ideas, where leading AI partners collaborated directly with government teams under a flexible regulatory setup. This partnership led to the successful execution of 75 pilot projects.
This report highlights 15 of the most impactful use cases.
- AI in Customer Services, Enhancing Government-Citizen Interactions in Dubai
- Personalised Healthcare, How AI is Shaping Personalized Medicine in Dubai, Enhancing Patient Care?
- Empowering Inclusion: How AI is Elevating Government Services for People of Determination in Dubai?
- Transforming Information Access, How AI is Personalising Learning and Research in Dubai
- Smart Urbanism: How AI Can Enhance Item Recovery in Dubai?
- Transforming Lost & Found
- AI Text Recognition for Ancient Manuscripts, Preserving History Through Advanced Technology in Dubai
- AI in Real Estate, Shaping the Future of Property Markets in Dubai
- AI in Logistics and Customs Security, Strengthening Dubai’s Trade Hub through Intelligent Monitoring
- AI-Powered Workforce Management, Optimising and Finding the Right Talent and Productivity in Dubai’s Government Sector
- AI-Powered Investment Tools, Transforming Investment Strategies in Dubai’s Financial Sector
- AI for Spend Management, Enhancing Financial Discipline in Dubai’s Government Operations
- AI in Advertising, Revolutionising Dubai’s Media Strategy through Automated Creativity
- AI for Digital Historical Reconstructions, Preserving Dubai’s Heritage Through Technology
- AI Chatbots for Government transactions, Streamlining Citizen Services in Dubai
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Favorite Tip Of The Week:
Dubai Health announces the launch of the Artificial Intelligence Literacy Framework (ALiF), the first comprehensive framework developed in the UAE to advance AI literacy in professional environments.
It’s a short course covering fundamentals and an ALif framework to continue your AI Journey.
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Potential of AI:
Rethinking Education in the Age of AI Reasoning Tools
A recent report from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) ‘Transforming Education and Training in the Age of Advanced AI Reasoning Tools’ highlights how advanced AI reasoning tools transform education and training. The report emphasizes shifting from traditional rote memorization to fostering critical thinking and adaptability.
It advocates for integrating AI literacy into curricula, enabling students to collaborate effectively with AI systems. This approach prepares students for a future where human-AI collaboration is integral to problem-solving and innovation. However, current efforts to bring these AI Models into the education sector are very dependent on individual universities and institutions, and there is no coherent approach.
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Things to Know…
- Autonomous agents that plan, execute, and learn from multi-step tasks are moving from lab demos into real-world pilots. Keep an eye on tools that let you orchestrate chains of AI agents in workflows.
- RAG architectures are becoming the default for organizational chatbots. Expect more turnkey RAG platforms and best practices, including indexing, vector stores, prompt templates, an example OCI Gen AI Agent, and many more, to emerge this quarter.
- Beyond text, leading models now handle vision, audio, and code in a single API call. Embed4 (Cohere), GPT-4o, and Meta’s multimodal Llama 4 are worth tracking.
- Techniques like QAT are lowering resource barriers. Models such as Google’s Gemma 3 and Meta’s QLoRA-fine-tuned variants run premium AI on desktop GPUs.
- New enterprise standards (NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework 2.0, ISO/IEC 42001) are coming. Early adopters will embed policy-as-code and audit trails directly into their ML pipelines.
- The debate continues about end-task fine-tuning versus relying on retrieval and prompting. Hybrid approaches, which combine small-scale fine-tuning with RAG, are gaining traction as the sweet spot for cost and performance.
- TinyML and on-device inference frameworks (TensorFlow Lite, OpenAI’s Whisper on mobile) enable low-latency, offline AI features in customer apps; look for more SDKs this year.
- AI code assistants (Copilot, Tabnine) and AI IDEs (Cursor, Windsurf) are evolving into full dev-ops copilots that automate testing, documentation, and deployment. Early pilots report 2× faster release cycles.
- Tools for bias detection, fairness dashboards, and synthetic data generation (Mostly AI, Hazy) are maturing. Organizations that adopt these proactively will mitigate risk and build trust.
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Pick one GenAI pilot this week and map it to your maturity curve. Identify its current stage, set a single objective to advance it one level in four weeks, then track progress. This focused sprint creates a repeatable playbook for scaling AI across the organization.
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The Opportunity…
Podcast:
- This week’s Open Tech Talks episode 153 is “Tips for Adopting AI and LLMs in Business: Lessons from Michael Vandi.” he is the CEO of Addy AI
Apple | Amazon Music
Courses to attend:
Events:
- World AI Technology Expo UAE 2025, May 14-15, Dubai, UAE.
- European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, October 25-30, 2025, Bologna, Italy.
- The AI Summit London, June 11-12 2025, Tobacco Dock, London
Tech and Tools…
- Hyprnote: Records and transcribes your meetings and Generates summaries with AI from your raw meeting notes. The good thing about this can work offline with Whisper & Llama models.
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The Investment in AI…
- AI DataCenter in UAE with the investment of AED2 billion will be developed and operated by telecom operator du, in collaboration with Microsoft. This will play an integral role in the adoption of AI in the Dubai public sector and spanning it to wider organizational use.
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19 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2025.
- SandboxAQ’s closed $450 million series E having Large Quantitative Models (LQMs)
- Runway close $308 million Series D having AI models for production
- Nexthope AI closes $110 million Series A for an AI Infrastructure
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And that’s a wrap for this week! Thank you for reading.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, simply hit reply to share feedback or let me know which section was most useful to you.
If you enjoyed this issue, consider sharing it on LinkedIn or forwarding to a colleague, friend who’d benefit. Your support helps grow our AI community.
Until next Saturday,
Kashif
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The opinions expressed here are solely my conjecture based on experience, practice, and observation. They do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans, or strategies of my current or previous employers or their clients/customers. The objective of this newsletter is to share and learn with the community.
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