There is a story unfolding in this region right now that I want to mark.

The dominant question in the global AI conversation is sovereignty: who controls AI, how nations build capacity, how data and decisions stay within borders. It is the right question. At the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week this year, H.E. Dr. Sultan Al Jaber described AI as "the operating system of our industrial strategy." Who runs that operating system is not separate from sovereignty. It is sovereignty.

In a region putting that question to a test, sovereignty over what exactly, if not the people who will run these systems?

A sovereign AI without a sovereign workforce is not sovereignty. It is a hardware contract.

The Workforce Is Where Sovereignty Actually Lives

Nations like Singapore, China and India already treat sovereignty and workforce as inseparable. The Gulf is now charting its own course with a distinctive approach: the marriage of sovereign wealth with a multi-generational national project.

Omanization, Saudization, and Emiratization were this region's first successful efforts at securing its own workforce. Our leadership in AI represents the second.

Oman has just established the Artificial Intelligence Special Zone in Muscat, anchoring AI within Vision 2040. UAE was the first country in the world to appoint a minister for it. Saudi Arabia trained more than 1.1 million of its citizens in AI last year.

Public capital, state coordination, patient time, all directed at the layer where sovereignty actually lives: the citizens who will use, govern, and shape these systems for decades after the hardware is replaced.

What This Means for Hind Bahwan Group

This is the story of a region I have spent my career inside. At Hind Bahwan Group, the question we keep returning to is not whether this region will build it. It is how fast, and at what depth.

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