UAE surges in AI investing race

UAE investors are moving faster than their peers almost anywhere in the world to bring artificial intelligence into investment decision-making, with a new global study by wealth-tech firm BridgeWise placing the country second overall in its AI optimism rankings and first on “momentum”, a measure of how strongly investors intend to replace traditional research methods with AI tools over the next year. The report says investors in the country showed the strongest declared shift among all markets surveyed towards using AI in place of more manual forms of investment analysis.

That finding lands at a time when the UAE is already being held up as one of the world’s most active adopters of artificial intelligence more broadly. Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute said in January that the UAE ranked first globally for AI adoption among the working-age population at the end of 2025, with 64% using AI, underscoring how quickly the technology has moved from experimentation into everyday commercial use. The BridgeWise study, focused specifically on investing and wealth management, suggests that broad national openness to AI is now feeding directly into financial behaviour.

BridgeWise said its “State of AI for Wealth in 2026” study was based on 2,100 respondents across 19 countries, covering employed adults aged 18 to 75 with active bank accounts. It built a Global Wealth AI Optimism Index around four pillars: adoption, confidence, edge and momentum. On that measure, the Middle East ranked first among regions, ahead of Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE driving the performance. Globally, 78.3% of respondents said they already use AI for investment information, while 65.1% said they plan to replace at least part of their manual research process with AI tools within a year.

For the UAE, the significance lies not only in ranking but in the type of ranking. Being first on momentum points to an appetite for behavioural change, not just curiosity about technology. Wealth managers, brokerage platforms and banks have spent the past two years rolling out AI-assisted research, portfolio prompts, automated alerts and multilingual investment summaries. The BridgeWise findings indicate that many investors in the UAE are no longer treating such tools as add-ons, but as a core part of how they expect to assess markets and manage risk.

That shift also reflects the country’s wider positioning as an AI hub. Abu Dhabi and Dubai have pushed hard to attract data-centre investment, advanced computing infrastructure and AI-focused capital, while state-backed and private institutions have stepped up exposure to the sector. Reuters reported this month that Mubadala’s assets under management rose to $385 billion in 2025 and that the fund has been increasing investment in technology, particularly artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors and AI infrastructure. Separate Reuters reporting last year also highlighted a planned 10-square-mile AI campus in Abu Dhabi with 5 gigawatts of power capacity for data centres, tied to deeper technology links with the United States.

BridgeWise itself has been building a larger presence in the market. The company announced in April 2025 that it had secured a Dubai International Financial Centre licence and received strategic backing from Emirates NBD as part of its regional expansion. That matters because the strongest growth in AI-led investing is likely to come not from stand-alone apps but from integration into mainstream banking and brokerage systems, where investors already hold accounts and execute trades. The more deeply such tools are embedded inside familiar financial platforms, the lower the barrier to changing habits.

Still, the headline numbers should be treated with care. BridgeWise is a commercial provider of AI investment tools, and the study promotes a market trend that aligns closely with its business model. Survey-based measures of “intent” can overstate how quickly behaviour will change in practice, especially in a regulated field where trust, explainability and accountability remain sensitive issues. Investors may say they are ready to replace traditional research, but financial institutions and regulators will still need to weigh questions around model accuracy, bias, suitability and the danger of over-reliance on machine-generated signals. The same BridgeWise index includes “confidence” and perceived “edge” as core pillars, which shows that trust and competitive advantage are central to adoption, not settled questions.