The United Arab Emirates has emerged as a global AI hub, thanks to its sovereign investments in AI infrastructure, forward-looking regulations and successful public-private collaboration. The country is rapidly embedding AI into its core economic strategies and across industries: A recent study revealed that 81 percent of UAE businesses operate with a clear, shared vision for AI’s role in their enterprises, and 60 percent have appointed dedicated AI leaders to oversee these initiatives. 

As digital technologies, including AI, become increasingly prevalent, marketing – like other business functions – is changing rapidly in the UAE. Marketers now find themselves at a major inflection point. This shift raises many questions: What opportunities and challenges do marketers face? Are they ready for change? Will they be able to adapt to this new landscape? Which resources and skills must they acquire, and how can they attract new talent? 

The UAE’s AI-native landscape

In 2017, the UAE appointed the world’s first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence. This was followed by the launch of its national AI strategy aimed at positioning the country among the world’s top AI nations. Thanks to flexible data protection laws and agile regulations, AI has rapidly penetrated key sectors.

AI will soon be taught in the UAE’s public schools, from kindergarten through the 12th grade. The curriculum includes ethical awareness, foundational concepts and real-world applications. Additionally, the country launched the world’s first university dedicated entirely to AI in 2019. 

In the realm of corporate governance, Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Company created Aiden Insight, an AI-powered board observer. It analyses decades of business data, financial information, market trends and global economic indicators, helping boards formulate strategies for resource management and advanced risk management. In the government sector, the UAE recently announced the world’s first AI-powered legislative system, which will use AI to draft new laws and revise existing ones.

Then there’s G42, a UAE-born AI conglomerate that delivers AI solutions across a wide range of sectors and has partnerships with the likes of NVIDIA, Oracle and OpenAI. Just last year, AIQ, a G42 portfolio company, launched the world’s first agentic AI solution for the energy sector in collaboration with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and Microsoft.

As the UAE shifts from nationwide AI adoption to AI-native design across all sectors, the marketing function must evolve, too. Given the level of mass digitisation, top-tier talent and high-quality data, organisations must look beyond campaigns and channels to real-time agentic ecosystems that think, act and optimise autonomously, with the role of humans shifting from just marketers to creative and technical architects of this intelligence.

Based on first-hand insights from marketing experts and practitioners, we distill how these changes will shape the resources, competencies and skills needed for sustainable business growth. We envision the future of marketing organisations in an AI-native environment like the UAE, highlighting emerging roles, new audience dynamics and ethical considerations.

From human-to-human to AI-to-AI marketing

At the heart of marketing lies the notion of an exchange between parties, typically a buyer and a seller. In this dyadic perspective, marketing creates a bridge between two humans. AI brings a triadic perspective to the table, where AI agents can independently take actions and make decisions in real-time, with no or minimal human supervision. In other words, AI agents will increasingly become autonomous decision-makers alongside humans.

This transition from a dyadic to a triadic perspective has a tremendous impact on audiences and messaging, as illustrated in the figure below.

This framework can help them recognise where they stand and identify new approaches to address their specific marketing needs.

An AI-first marketing ecosystem

Marketing will increasingly move from siloed departments operating in stable, predictable environments to cross-functional, fully integrated teams embedded in company-wide decision-making with shared KPIs. As AI assumes a greater role in marketing functions, one may infer that human roles would shift towards strategy-setting, technical orchestration and governance. Human input will be required in the areas of emotional intelligence, ethical judgment and creative vision, while AI will increasingly handle analysis and execution.

Future marketing organisations will feature two layers: a network of AI agents and a core team of people with a unique skillset of deep technical and industry expertise. The agentic AI network will consist of individual AI agents autonomously generating customer insights, gathering competitive intelligence, developing content, managing channels and ensuring a personalised customer experience. Legacy roles of campaign managers, channel specialists, large creative teams and traditional marketing researchers will gradually disappear, while new roles will emerge, including:

• Chief Marketing Architect: A native technologist leading the vision of the brand, product positioning and creating and enforcing ethical guidelines. Together with the rest of the team, they apply marketing principles to oversee agentic AI network operations.
• AI Systems Architect: Responsible for designing the overall AI network and integration points, both within and beyond the company.
• Human-AI-Human Interface Specialist: Tasked with making the interactions between both groups more effective inside the team and within the market.
• Emotional Intelligence Specialist: In charge of creating moments of emotional connection, validating creative insight and feeding this information into the training of AI agents.
• AI Performance Specialist: Handles agent training programmes to ensure their functional performance within an established ethical governance framework, aimed at meeting the assigned KPIs.
• AI Ethics Specialist: Acts as the ultimate judge for all ethical, legal and brand considerations, including “grey zone” issues (e.g. auditing and mediation).

This structure will increasingly allow marketers to function like board members, guiding AI agents and intervening only when AI encounters situations requiring human judgment.

What lies ahead for marketers

As AI’s role in marketing expands, and given the growing level of automation and autonomy AI agents will be capable of, marketers may not only face heightened brand safety concerns but also deep ethical and legal questions. These include how to craft AI guidelines, determining AI’s scope, how to audit AI compliance and who should be held accountable when things go wrong. 

Although it's still too early for definitive answers, marketers must start pondering these implications today. Compliance, transparency and fairness guidelines and clear algorithmic accountability will be key to guiding AI-first marketing organisations. Guidelines around ethical AI may not look too different from traditional brand safety guidelines that marketers use today.

The UAE has built a unique blueprint for integrating AI into day-to-day life. This transition to a symbiotic AI-human collective implies a profound shift for marketing structures and processes, talent and skills, audience engagement and ethical frameworks. But many marketing organisations are not ready for this transformation. Organisational silos, insufficient technologies and tools, and resistance to change are just some examples of major hurdles to overcome. 

Tackling these challenges will require new AI competencies and skills and steering a culture change, which can help set up marketers for future success.