On the sidelines of the 56th Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the United Arab Emirates launched a ground-breaking white paper titled “The UAE: Shaping the Future of Regulatory Intelligence, from a static rulebook to a living, AI-powered regulatory ecosystem”, led by the General Secretariat of the Cabinet, in knowledge and implementation partnership with Presight (G42) and PwC. This step reflects the UAE’s commitment to adopting innovative regulatory models that anticipate the future and keep pace with the rapid transformations driven by artificial intelligence.

This paper is not a “technical implementation plan” as much as it is a conceptual and design reference that outlines the “end state” of legislation in the age of intelligence, in terms of design principles, institutional structures, and operational logic that may guide future legislation, operating models, and technology investments in regulatory intelligence comprehensively.

It covers not only legislation but also executive regulations, public policies, compliance and governance mechanisms, and the dynamic interaction between regulatory authorities and technology.

In other words, the white paper presents a comprehensive vision to transform regulation in its broadest sense from a document to be read into a system to be managed, tested, learned from, and to generate actionable ideas and insights, anticipating gaps and how to address them before any practical issues arise.

Why has the “regulatory system cycle” become the real challenge?

Global pressure on governments is no longer limited to “enacting new laws” but extends to enacting laws faster and more consistently with rapid technological, economic, and societal shifts.

Here, the common issue of traditional systems emerges: “regulate-and-forget,” meaning legislation is drafted with a fixed mindset while reality moves dynamically. The white paper clearly summarizes, via PwC, that what is required is the integration of data, AI, and governance throughout the entire regulatory cycle—from drafting, through implementation, to monitoring and review—to ensure continuous regulatory relevance aligned with constant change.

At the international level, the World Economic Forum offers a complementary and crucial idea: regulation in its broadest sense now represents an “infrastructure” for the digital economy, as impactful as roads or energy, because it determines what can scale, where trust is formed, and how competition is built.

AI-generated illustrative image

The nature of “regulatory intelligence” according to the UAE vision

The United Arab Emirates presents a comprehensive vision that treats regulatory intelligence as an institutional practice (not merely a technology platform). This vision combines:

• High-quality regulatory data

• Digital modeling of rules and obligations

• AI-supported decision-making

• Rigorous governance that keeps humans in a leading role

During the launch announcement, the UAE’s General Secretariat of the Cabinet emphasized that the goal is to move from static systems to a flexible ecosystem that continuously adapts to the demands of the data, AI, and technology era—enhancing quality of life, competitiveness, and enabling a global dialogue on a model scalable internationally.

From “Legal Text” to the “Unified Regulatory Digital Twin (URDT)” as a Turning Point in Regulatory Adaptation

One of the paper’s most distinctive features is the concept of the Unified Regulatory Digital Twin (URDT), which represents a living digital twin of the regulatory system as previously described. It functions as a “real-time virtual mirror” that integrates the country’s various laws and regulations, including relevant legislative provisions, parliamentary or legislative council discussions, in a machine-readable format. This enables continuous and automated dynamic interaction. Practically, this allows regulatory administrators, legislators, or policymakers to:

1. Run “what-if” scenarios to identify the most relevant texts and predict the impact of implementation and regulatory solutions, whether for a single system or multiple regulatory tools.

2. Study interactions between existing rules and proposed changes.

3. Detect gaps, conflicts, regulatory redundancies, or repeated interventions that are difficult to identify using traditional methods.

4. Assist in drafting preliminary amendments or new texts within human-provided context, ensuring continuous oversight and disciplined governance.

Thus, this is not merely legal automation but an enhancement of the state’s ability for foresight, consistency, and deliberate speed.

Sovereign governance in the decision-making cycle: Human leader… AI assistant

The white paper ensures that AI acts as an assistant, not a replacement for legislators, by introducing the Sovereign Governance-in-the-Loop (SGiL) framework. This keeps the final decision in the hands of an “authorized” human at every critical point or risk area throughout the data-to-decision cycle.

From a compliance and risk perspective, this practically introduces clear operational requirements such as role-based authorities, kill switches, audit trails, ethical reviews, risk forecasting, privacy protection, and cybersecurity controls. Legal analysis confirmed these as essential elements to “enhance smart governance” rather than weaken it.

How can the system evolve without losing control

The white paper introduces the concept of the Regulatory Intelligence Innovation Loop as an operational mechanism to ensure that AI applications do not enter public implementation without testing or review. The idea is based on proposing use cases, evaluating them, conducting governed pilots, then deploying, scaling, and continuously improving them. Here, the value of “governance by design” emerges—not only preventing risks but creating an institutional pathway that makes innovation itself auditable, reviewable, and learnable.

What does this mean for business and legal professions? 

If the continuous living system model is realized, experts predict that business rules could change at a faster pace, with closer and faster oversight and more data-driven transformations.

This requires companies to enhance their readiness in regulatory responsiveness, data governance, and institutional capacity to handle AI-driven supervision.

For lawyers and legal professionals, the equation shifts from merely “interpreting the text after it is issued” to “participating in designing consistency and pre-testing impacts” through this living system for managing regulatory intelligence. It allows them to understand how models are built, their limitations, and how their outputs are reviewed.

What does this model add globally? The white paper does not only present a local model—it proposes a shared dictionary and concepts to establish a “working language” between legislation and technology.

It also aligns with the global trend described by the World Economic Forum, which states that effective regulation must be iterative, open, interoperable, and comprehensive, as flexible regulatory capacity has become part of national competitiveness, trust, and investment attraction.

In this sense, regulatory intelligence is not a technological luxury but a sovereign advantage, encompassing sovereignty over data, standards, and public decision-making mechanisms—a focus area in 2026.

Regulation learns… without abandoning justice

At its core, the white paper’s message is that regulation is no longer a “static text” but a learning, adaptable system. It uses AI to support decision-making, not replace human judgment, protecting sovereignty, trust, and accountability while accelerating innovation and increasing clarity, consistency, and flexibility of rules.

Through this article, we extend our appreciation to all those involved in preparing this interactive white paper and setting a new standard for what can be called future-ready smart governance.

We conclude with this question: Will regulatory intelligence become a decisive condition for national competitiveness and public trust in the coming decade, just as cybersecurity became an undisputed requirement over the past decade?

Legal and social consultant, international law expert, researcher in AI technologies and cybersecurity.