DUBAI, 13th October, 2026 (WAM) — In the presence of H.H. Sheikh Mansoor bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, President of the UAE Olympic Committee, the Mohammed bin Rashid Center for Leadership Development (MBRCLD) launched the Dubai Leadership Coach initiative, the first-of-its-kind AI-powered government leadership coaching project designed to reach Dubai Government employees.
The initiative marks a step towards transforming leadership knowledge into an interactive experience accessible to employees wherever they are and whenever they need it.
The project draws inspiration from the leadership and government management philosophy and approach of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. This approach is founded on ambition, swift execution, creating opportunities, empowering people, turning challenges into drivers of development, and actively shaping the future rather than waiting for it.
The launch took place during the Mohammed bin Rashid Leadership Forum, the premier annual gathering dedicated to management and leadership, organised by MBRCLD. The Forum brought together 1,000 of Dubai’s key government and private sectors leaders to discuss the future transformation of management and leadership, establish best practices, and realise the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to reinforce Dubai’s global standing as a capital of excellence and innovation and maintain its leading position across all fields.
Dubai Leadership Coach aims to bring this approach closer to government employees in their daily work, enabling them to raise and directly discuss situations they face, such as managing a team, making a difficult decision, addressing an organisational challenge, or improving their ability to communicate and influence others. Through a coaching session, employees can explore different perspectives and reach decisions with greater awareness and confidence.
The project introduces a new concept that makes leadership knowledge readily available when employees need it through a web browser, without the need to download special software or use dedicated devices.
The experience has been designed to resemble a human coaching session rather than a conventional question-and-answer system. The coach listens to users, understands the context of their conversations, asks questions, responds to their answers, accommodates interruptions, and then continues the dialogue naturally. It is not intended to replace coaches or leadership development programmes, but rather to extend their reach and provide additional, continuous support between programmes and in-person sessions.
The strength of Dubai Leadership Coach extends beyond its technical capabilities. The coach’s knowledge base draws on the insights of approximately 50,000 books on leadership and management, as well as nearly 100,000 biographies of leaders and prominent figures from around the world. This enables it to examine situations from diverse perspectives and draw on experiences, decisions and lessons accumulated throughout history.
The coach bases its responses on carefully selected, reliable leadership content, retrieving the knowledge most relevant to each question before providing guidance. This helps reduce generic responses and grounds the dialogue in clear leadership principles and practices, while ensuring proper attribution of ideas to their sources, and controlled use of content.
Its conversational approach has also been trained using methodologies developed by leadership coaching experts and aligned with the standards of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), one of the most established, widely recognised and internationally respected professional bodies in the field. As a result, rather than simply providing employees with ready-made answers, the coach asks questions, listens, challenges assumptions, and helps users understand their options and arrive at their own decisions.
The platform uses a new generation of realistic digital avatar technologies, enabling an approved photograph of a person to be transformed into an animated avatar that speaks and interacts through voice and video. The technology accurately synchronises facial expressions and lip movements with speech in a high-definition video stream, giving the coach a natural appearance that closely resembles human presence.
The creation of digital characters and voices is subject to clear safeguards designed to protect identity and usage rights, ensuring that a person’s image and voice are used only within the authorised scope while maintaining trust and responsibility in delivering the experience.
During development, the platform underwent testing and direct comparisons involving more than 20 international and local AI models. These assessments evaluated the platform’s reasoning quality, response speed, and conversational naturalness.
The comparisons included models with up to 120 billion parameters, before the adoption of an operating system built around an advanced global sovereign AI model in the approximately 30-billion-parameter category.
Parameters are the numerical units through which a model learns patterns and context. This scale therefore reflects an advanced capacity to understand lengthy conversations and connect their different elements.
The platform also relies on a hybrid computing architecture combining local sovereign capabilities with trusted cloud services, using the latest generations of computing chips to deliver rapid responses and support large-scale use.
To enhance quality and safety, the platform was tested through adversarial scenarios, complex questions and attempts to identify weaknesses, alongside live comparisons of responses generated by different models before the final experience was approved. Safeguards were also established to protect the identities of digital characters, ensure accurate content attribution and maintain the quality of the knowledge underpinning the coach.
The project represents a shift in the concept of leadership development, expanding its reach from programmes that accommodate limited numbers of participants in each cohort to an experience capable of reaching Dubai Government employees. This brings leadership and critical-thinking tools closer to employees across different job levels and gives every employee an opportunity to benefit from coaching when facing a real situation at work.
The project also reflects Dubai’s broader direction towards moving beyond the use of AI as a technological tool to deploying it directly to develop people’s skills and enhance their capabilities. In Dubai Leadership Coach, technology is not an end in itself, but a means of making the leadership approach that shaped Dubai’s experience accessible, transforming knowledge from content that is read or taught at specific times into an experience that employees can apply, engage with through dialogue, and benefit from continuously.
The project thus brings together three elements in a single experience: Mohammed bin Rashid’s leadership approach, extensive global leadership knowledge, and the latest AI capabilities. By targeting Dubai Government employees, the impact of leadership development extends beyond a select group in a training room to an entire government ecosystem, making leadership learning part of the working day and turning everyday situations into continuous opportunities to develop better leaders.
Source: Emirates News Agency