Lebanon and the UAE’s million-person AI bet

As artificial intelligence moves rapidly into everyday use, Lebanon is preparing for one of its largest experiments in mass AI training yet.

Under a new partnership announced with the United Arab Emirates, the UAE will make its artificial-intelligence training programme available free of charge to as many as one million Lebanese.

The initiative will focus on generative AI and prompt engineering, building on a level of adoption in Lebanon that is already relatively high. According to Microsoft’s September 2026 AI Diffusion Report, 27.7 percent of Lebanon’s working-age population used generative AI in the second quarter of the year, up from 27.3 percent in the first quarter and well above the global rate of 18.8 percent. The UAE, meanwhile, recorded the highest adoption rate of any country measured, at 73.3 percent.

The programme, announced by Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan in New York on September 25, is expected to begin within weeks. The training will be fully online, take approximately four hours to complete and be accessed through the ministry’s NUMŪ portal, Nour Fayad, who oversees the flagship programme, told The Beiruter.

“We want to give people a foundation from which they can continue learning and developing more advanced skills through NUMŪ,” Fayad said.

The broader objective is to make practical AI literacy accessible to the widest possible segment of the Lebanese population.

How the partnership took form

While ambitious in scale, the million-person initiative is the culmination of a relationship between Lebanon and the UAE on technology and digital government that has been developing since 2025.

Speaking to The Beiruter, Minister of State for Technology and Artificial Intelligence Kamal Shehadi said Emirati officials approached the newly established Ministry of State for Technology and Artificial Intelligence (MITAI) early in its work, offering support and subsequently participating in several of its conferences and activities.

In November 2025, an Emirati delegation attending a conference in Lebanon told officials that the UAE government intended to expand its mass AI-prompting initiative to several countries, Shehadi said.

The discussions advanced in September 2026, when a 24-person Lebanese delegation travelled to the UAE as part of the Emirates’ Government Experience Exchange Programme and was briefed on digital transformation and artificial intelligence. The partnership was formally announced later that month in New York.

“From the first day when the Ministry of State for Technology and AI was established, I’ve been approached by the UAE counterpart, offering to help,” Shehadi told The Beiruter.

The AI training initiative came about as part of an engagement from the UAE to support Lebanon’s digital transformation at the government level, but also to attract more investment to the country.

At its core, however, the initiative is intended to provide relatively basic AI skills at an unusually large scale.

The four-session UAE-developed course focuses on prompt engineering, teaching participants how to interact more effectively with generative AI systems. Those who complete it will receive a form of certification.

“The training is about prompting. It is not about coding or designing AI solutions,” Shehadi said.

It is about teaching people to use AI in day-to-day life.

Reaching the next million

The UAE has proposed reaching one million participants within two years, according to Shehadi. He suggested Lebanon may ultimately need somewhat longer, depending on how quickly the partnerships needed to reach participants across the country can be established.

“Our current usage of 27 percent represents a little over one million people,” Shehadi said.

Getting that additional one million will take additional time. It’s more complicated.

To recruit at scale, Fayad said the ministry will work through schools and universities, municipalities, employers, community organizations, ministries, syndicates and professional associations.syndicates and professional associations, each drawing participants from its existing networks.

“A university can mobilize its students and alumni. A company can engage its employees. A municipality can reach families and communities,” Fayad said. 

The idea is to build a national movement around AI literacy, with each institution acting as a multiplier within its own community or sector.

The ministry also intends to target people who can fall outside conventional digital-skills programmes, including those later in their careers and retirees.

A larger digital bet

The UAE programme is large, but it is not a standalone turn toward artificial intelligence. It sits inside an agenda Lebanon has been assembling since creating a ministerial portfolio for technology and AI.

The ministry’s strategy, updated in March 2026, spans governance, digital and AI infrastructure, talent, and investment and innovation. It envisages a unified National Digital Infrastructure combining cloud services, government data, digital identity and cybersecurity.

Skills are one piece of that architecture. NUMŪ is intended to take participants from basic AI literacy toward more advanced training and professional certifications, with the UAE course serving as an entry point into that system, Fayad said.

At the same time, Lebanon is trying to build the government infrastructure on which more ambitious digital services would depend. MITAI’s 2026 priorities include a national digital platform for government services, a digital identity system and a unified government payments gateway.

That digital push has also attracted international financing. In January, the World Bank approved a $150 million Lebanon Digital Acceleration Project as part of a $350 million financing package, supporting government data infrastructure, cybersecurity, digital platforms and public services.

From adoption to capability

Widespread use of generative AI does not by itself tell a country much about what people are doing with the technology, how effectively they are using it or what economic value that use is creating.

Fayad argued that Lebanon’s existing strengths could provide a foundation for expanding AI use well beyond the technology sector.

“Lebanon has always had a major asset: its human capital,” she said.

That combination of education, adaptability, entrepreneurship and openness to the world creates a strong foundation for large-scale AI adoption.

The UN Development Programme’s July 2026 report Reading AI Readiness Backwards, based on assessments conducted in 26 countries between 2024 and 2026, argues that once AI adoption begins, readiness becomes a question of what governments can actually do with it. Infrastructure, procurement, institutional capacity, data systems and governance become constraints alongside technical skills. The report cautions against treating adoption itself as evidence that a country is prepared to capture AI’s benefits.

Lebanon’s strategy is attempting to work on several of those constraints at once. Its immediate agenda ranges from teaching citizens to use generative AI to establish the digital identity and data systems needed to put more government services online

For the one-million-person programme, Fayad said the ministry intends to look beyond the headline enrollment figure. Registration, participation and completion will be tracked alongside the programme’s reach across different regions, age groups, professions and communities. Longer term, the ministry wants to know whether participants continue using AI and progress into more advanced training.

“One million participants is an important ambition, but the number alone will not define success,” Fayad said.

The programme is ultimately intended to make AI literacy a much more ordinary skill in Lebanon, rather than one concentrated among technologists. If it approaches its target, the more revealing measure will come after the four hours of training are over, in how many participants continue using those skills in their work and daily lives.