Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026: Microsoft, VDURA, IFS to show AI at work

Microsoft, VDURA and IFS will present working AI applications for government, research and heavy industry at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026, which runs on 6-7 October at the ADNEC Centre.

Their examples include Microsoft 365 Copilot being rolled out to 35,000 Abu Dhabi Government employees, a university rebuilding its data infrastructure to support research from water science to aerospace, and a single AI agent that one company projects will save US$3 million a year.

The event is organised by inD and hosted by the Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi (DGE), with Solutions+, a Mubadala company, as Global Partner. Organisers say it will bring together more than 400 AI-first companies and over 180 speakers, along with policymakers, investors and executives from more than 70 countries. They describe it as the world's largest AI-first expo and summit.

The Copilot rollout is part of Abu Dhabi's push to become the world's first AI-native government by 2027. Microsoft says the programme is meant to help employees make better-informed decisions, streamline processes and spend more time on public service. It is underpinned, the company says, by security, responsible AI and in-country data residency.

"The biggest shift we are seeing is from AI as a tool to AI as a teammate," said Amr Kamel, Managing Director of Microsoft UAE. He said people will increasingly work alongside AI agents that can "reason, plan and act across workflows, while human judgement and accountability remain at the centre".

Microsoft calls this model the Frontier Firm, in which people work alongside AI and agents. At the event, it will show Copilot experiences, Azure AI, cybersecurity tools and innovations from its partners.

VDURA, which makes high-performance data storage for AI factories and neoclouds, will bring its Data Platform V12 to the Middle East for the first time. The platform automatically places data on the appropriate storage, which the company says helps operators keep costly computing capacity productive. V12 was recently named AI Data Management Solution of the Year in the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards.

One of VDURA's customers is New Mexico State University (NMSU), a Carnegie R1 institution. Its researchers in agriculture, aerospace and biomedicine needed to run large-scale simulations and AI model training on one platform, without separate systems competing for resources. The university has more than US$141 million in annual research spending.

The deployment, live since August 2026, combines NVMe flash storage and high-capacity hard drives in a single system. VDURA says it gives flash-level responsiveness for active research data while holding larger datasets at a fraction of the cost of an all-flash system.

"The center of gravity is shifting from training to inference at scale, and that shift changes what storage has to do," said Ken Claffey, CEO of VDURA.

IFS, an industrial AI software provider, will focus on asset-heavy sectors including ports, utilities, aerospace and defense, oil and gas, manufacturing and energy. The company says spotting an at-risk asset is not enough, because someone still has to arrange the repair, find the part and schedule the crew. It sees that gap between warning and repair as where industrial AI can help most.

"Ports, rail, utilities, data centres, aviation, and defence sustainment are all commissioning assets faster than they are building the systems to run them," said Suliman Gaouda, Regional Vice President, IFS AI, Asia Pacific, Japan, Middle East and Africa. "The biggest opportunity is capturing the asset register and the maintenance regime at handover, not retrofitting it three years later at several times the cost."

IFS points to Kodiak Gas Services, where it projects annual savings of US$3 million and 90,000 technician hours through its Material Replenisher agent.

It will run three live demonstrations. IFS Loops Digital Workers will show AI carrying out tasks across business systems. IFS Nexus Black Resolve will show faults captured with images and voice before AI provides a diagnosis and guided repair steps. IFS Operational Intelligence will show how degrading equipment can be spotted and a work request raised.

The New Intelligence Summit will bring together ministers, senior government leaders and industry executives to discuss how education, skills and organisational readiness can support AI adoption.

Mariam Al Musharrekh, Director General of the Department of Government Enablement, will speak on Abu Dhabi's experience building an AI-ready government workforce. Prof. Ebrahim Al Hajri, President of Khalifa University of Science and Technology, will discuss how learning must change to work alongside intelligent systems while keeping human judgement and intuition central.

Sean Spicer, SVP Digital Technology at ADNOC, will join a panel on "Frontier AI Enterprise" on the impact of agentic AI across one of the world's largest energy facilities. He will be joined by Nickson Dicson, Head of Data & AI MENAT at AWS, and Simon Al Khaled, VP of Public Sector, ECEMEA, and UAE Country Lead and Managing Director at Oracle.

ADNOC's ENERGYai, described as the world's first agentic AI solution for the energy sector, was built by AIQ, the Abu Dhabi venture formed by Presight and ADNOC Group. AIQ CEO Dennis Jol will join Dr. Amal Abdulrahim, Assistant Undersecretary and Chief AI & Innovation Officer at the Ministry of Climate Change & Environment, to discuss how energy producers are reinventing their businesses through AI.