# Monday Musings: The Keynote I Never Gave: Five Perspectives on the Future of the UAE
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In September 2024, I received one of the more unusual and intriguing speaking inquiries of my career. It came directly from an advisor in the Office of the UAE’s Minister of State for Government Development and the Future, on behalf of the team organizing the UAE Government Annual Meetings. In other words, from the Office of the Prime Minister of the UAE, for an event in Abu Dhabi. Pretty cool! The event was described to me as the premier gathering of UAE leadership and senior government officials from all 7 Emirates, a highly prestigious closed meeting for which attendance was by invitation only. The assignment was equally specific. I was being asked to deliver a 30 to 40 minute keynote exploring five perspectives on what the future might hold for the UAE: the economy, technology, sustainability, government and society. In the room? Some 700 of the most senior officials from across all levels of government in the UAE. How did they find me? I'd previously been booked by the Office of the Prime Minister to present at the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2018. I was told I had been selected this time because of the insight I'd shared at that event, but also because of my particular style of delivery. That eventually became a presentation titled The Future in 5 Perspectives, built around precisely those five themes: economy, technology, environment, society and government. You can find the slide deck here. It's the presentation that was never delivered. Read on! What followed was not simply a case of someone booking a speaker and waiting for him to show up. There was a substantial development process. Like, substantial with a lot of back and forth while I worked on the content. We had meetings and discussions about the content, the positioning and the needs of the audience. Slides were exchanged, simplified and refined. The team explained that the presentation would undergo a rigorous review by senior leadership, with very high expectations that every message be clear, crisp, immediate and appropriate for an audience at the highest levels of government. One of the organizers wrote to me that the slides needed to work almost instantly, without excessive explanation. They had already gone through considerable effort to streamline anything that felt too text-heavy or where the central message was not immediately obvious. That was entirely reasonable. When you are speaking to some of the most senior government leaders in a country, there is no room for muddled thinking. By late October, the presentation was essentially taking shape. The designers were beginning their work. The content was moving through the leadership review process. The event itself was only days away. And the slide deck was magical. An Abrupt Cancellation Then, on October 30, the day I was scheduled to travel to Abu Dhabi, an email arrived from the Prime Minister's Office. The session was cancelled. The official explanation was that unforeseen circumstances had resulted in significant changes to the event's content, agenda, direction and scheduling. They acknowledged how late the change had come, thanked me for the time and effort already invested, and indicated that they hoped to continue the relationship with another major event being planned for early 2025. They forfeited the fee. It was a BIG fee. I went golfing instead, all the while realizing that I was earning some big bucks while out on the course. What happened? One individual followed up separately almost immediately, making it clear that the change had just come down and was beyond the control of the team I had been working with. Subsequently, I was told off the record that the Prime Minister wanted this particular perspective on the future to come from someone local. Someone from the Emirates. Fair enough. There was no dispute over the engagement. The contractual arrangements were honoured despite the cancellation. The people I had worked with throughout the process had been thoughtful, professional and extraordinarily engaged. In fact, the correspondence makes clear that they hoped to bring me back for another event a few months later. But I never gave the keynote. And I always thought that was a shame, because underneath the slides was a question that went far beyond a single conference or a single country: What does a nation need to do to remain fit for a future that is arriving faster than expected? Looking back at the presentation now, I realize that although it was organized around five perspectives, there was really one argument beneath all of them. The future increasingly belongs to those who are fast. Not reckless. Not careless. Fast at learning, adapting, experimenting, developing people, understanding new technologies, abandoning assumptions that no longer work and converting uncertainty into opportunity. That was the keynote I never gave. Here is what I was going to tell them. Start With Velocity The presentation actually began before the five perspectives. I wanted to establish the context in which every one of them was unfolding. Velocity. The opening sequence was designed to be deliberately provocative. The deck cited the idea that 65% of children would eventually work in jobs that did not yet exist, that 50% of what is learned in the first year of college could be obsolete by graduation, and that many technologies were operating on an 18-month obsolescence cycle. Then came the conclusion: “The future belongs to those who are fast!” I use this opening in most keynotes - it's powerful, it's effective, it sets the tone. And whether any one of those numbers ultimately proves exact was not the point. The message was that the shelf life of knowledge, skills, technologies and assumptions was collapsing. That has profound implications for government. Every government in the world was built around some assumption as to how fast the world moves. Legislation takes time. Procurement takes time. Infrastructure takes time. Education reform takes time. Budget cycles take time. Policy development takes time. Organizational change takes time. But the technologies, industries and social expectations that governments are being asked to manage do not necessarily move at government speed. That creates what I have long described as an acceleration gap, the distance between the speed of external change and the speed at which an organization, institution or government can respond to it. And eventually, an acceleration gap becomes a competitiveness gap. I used the space industry to make the point. What was once almost entirely the domain of national governments and a relatively small number of aerospace contractors had exploded into what I called Space Inc. The deck identified an ecosystem involving 12,000 companies, 5,000 investors, hundreds of R&D hubs and associations, 140 government organizations, and a potential value measured in trillions of dollars. That led directly to one of the most important statements in the entire presentation: Companies that do not yet exist will build products not yet conceived using ideas not yet in existence with methodologies yet to be defined. Think about the implications of that statement for government. You are trying to prepare an education system for careers that have not been named. You are trying to build infrastructure for industries that have not been invented. You are trying to regulate business models that do not yet exist. You are trying to write policy for technologies whose ultimate capabilities are still unknown. The deck then identified eight megatrends running toward 2035: the Era of Acceleration, Gen-Connect, megacities, smart machines, accelerated science, knowledge exponentiation, a life-expectancy mismatch and relentless volatility. The important idea was not any single trend. It was their collision. When artificial intelligence accelerates at the same time as energy technology, demographics, urbanization, advanced science and new business models, change does not arrive in neat little compartments. One trend accelerates another. That was the context for the five perspectives. 1. The Economy: Volatility Is the New Normal The first perspective began with four words: “Volatility is the new normal!” Governments and businesses love forecasts because forecasts provide comfort. Economic growth will be X. Oil will average Y. Inflation will settle at Z. Demand will increase by a certain percentage. A particular industry will grow at a particular rate. But forecasts become dangerous when they turn into certainty. I used a few deliberately awkward reminders of this. In 2008, Goldman Sachs predicted that oil might reach $200 a barrel. Instead, the global financial crisis sent it from more than $140 to under $40 by the end of that year. The point wasn't to ridicule anyone for getting a forecast wrong. Futurists get forecasts wrong too. Everyone does. The lesson is that the ability to respond to volatility is more valuable than the ability to pretend volatility can be precisely predicted. I then moved to a particularly important piece of research about what happens to organizations during economic downturns. The deck showed a historical pattern in which about 60% barely survived, 30% died, and 10% emerged as breakthrough performers. That 10% is fascinating. What did they do differently? The next slides contrasted two mindsets. The defensive organizations lost quality talent, scaled back R&D, cut costs broadly and waited to see what happened. The offensive organizations continued digital transformation, focused sales effort on their best opportunities, accelerated R&D spending and maintained or increased marketing while competitors pulled back. That led to my first UAE strategy recommendation: remain on an economic offence. The slide underneath it emphasized economic R&D, continued investment in critical technology and continued digitization of the economy. This is a subtle but important distinction. When uncertainty arrives, most institutions immediately ask, “What can we cut?” The organizations that emerge stronger also ask, “What can we accelerate while everyone else is retreating?” For a nation, the same logic applies. Economic volatility should not automatically result in innovation volatility. In fact, uncertainty can be precisely the moment when investments in skills, infrastructure, science, technology and entrepreneurship matter most. 2. Technology: It's the Era of Acceleration The second perspective was technology, introduced with another blunt statement: “It's the Era of Acceleration!” The important point was that technology is not simply advancing. The cost, speed, scale and accessibility of technology are changing simultaneously. One slide tried to capture that through multiple exponential trends. Amazon's robot fleet had moved from roughly 1,000 in 2012 to tens of thousands. Genome sequencing had fallen from costs measured in hundreds of millions of dollars to a tiny fraction of that amount. Solar costs had collapsed. The cost of 3D printing had fallen dramatically. Battery storage had moved from around $1,100 per kWh toward less than $100. Those examples all tell the same story. What was expensive becomes cheap. What was scarce becomes plentiful. What was difficult becomes routine. What was impossible becomes possible. And once that happens, entirely new business models appear. Another slide looked at how long major platforms took to reach one million users. Netflix took about 3.5 years. Kickstarter and Airbnb took roughly 2.5 years. Twitter took two years. Facebook took ten months. Dropbox seven months. Spotify five months. Instagram two and a half months. ChatGPT? Five days. That was one of the most powerful statistics in the deck because it captured something bigger than ChatGPT. It illustrated the increasing speed at which a new technology can move from invention to mass awareness. Then came another curve: the collapsing cost of intelligence itself. The deck tracked AI model costs from GPT-4 at approximately $36 per million tokens through successively cheaper models, eventually showing GPT-4o Mini at around 25 cents per million tokens. On the same slide, Google model pricing was shown as having fallen by 97% in about 18 months. Pause on that. We tend to focus on how much more capable artificial intelligence is becoming, but the cost curve might ultimately be just as disruptive. If something becomes more powerful and dramatically cheaper at the same time, adoption does not merely increase. New uses suddenly become economically viable. Tasks that were once too expensive to automate become candidates for automation. Intelligence can be embedded into products that could never have supported it before. Small companies get access to capabilities previously limited to large organizations. Governments can apply sophisticated systems to millions of routine interactions. That is the real AI story: capability expansion plus cost collapse plus rapid diffusion. The applications were already moving rapidly into the industrial economy. The deck showed projected AI market growth in manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture and energy, with applications ranging from digital twins and robotics to predictive medicine, precision agriculture, utility-scale batteries and microgrids. Whether every one of those market projections proves correct is less important than the direction of travel. AI was moving out of the technology department and into the operating core of industry. So my technology recommendation to the UAE was: play on the AI tech offensive. The slide called for AI gyms, AI R&D and collaborative global networking.   I still love the idea of an AI gym. A gym is where you build muscle through repeated use. An AI gym should be where people develop technological muscle through repeated experimentation. Use it. Build with it. Test it. Make mistakes. Discover what works. Learn where it fails. Try again. Governments should be creating environments where people can learn AI by doing AI, not merely by attending seminars about AI. 3. Sustainability and the Environment: The Inevitability of Science The third perspective was sustainability and the environment. I subtitled it “A story of the inevitability of science.” That phrase was deliberate. Politics changes. Public opinion changes. Governments change. But engineering continues. Science continues. Cost curves continue. And in energy, the cost curves had become impossible to ignore. The price of solar modules had declined 99.6% since 1976. That is what technological disruption looks like. It does not necessarily arrive because somebody passes a law declaring that the future has changed. Sometimes a technology simply becomes so much cheaper that economics begins rewriting the future. The deployment curve was equally striking. The deck noted that it took roughly 22 years for the world to install its first terawatt of solar capacity, reaching that milestone in 2022. The second terawatt was expected within about three years, and the third in less than two more. That is acceleration in its purest form. Twenty-two years for the first unit of scale. Then just a few years for the next two. A related slide compared forecasts with actual growth in solar installations, EV market share and battery sales. Its headline captured the real message: THE SPEED OF CHANGE IS UNDERESTIMATED! That is enormously important for government policy. Infrastructure decisions are often made using linear forecasts. But if the underlying technology follows an exponential curve, a linear forecast can leave a country badly underprepared. The deck also pointed toward $11.5 trillion in energy investment by 2050, with 85% directed toward wind, solar, renewables, grids, smart technology and microgrids. For the UAE, an energy powerhouse, the significance should be obvious. The energy story is no longer simply one of producing and selling hydrocarbons. It increasingly involves owning expertise, infrastructure and intellectual capital across a much broader energy ecosystem. The future I described was one of grid-connected storage, industrial-scale batteries, local microgrids, sophisticated AI-based grid management and vehicle batteries increasingly becoming part of the electrical system itself. The message was simple: the architecture of energy is changing. Generation is becoming distributed. Storage is becoming ubiquitous. Intelligence is being embedded into the grid. Buildings are becoming generators. Vehicles are becoming mobile storage devices. Consumers become producers. Energy becomes a software and data problem as much as an engineering problem. Which led to my strategic recommendation: sustainability is the new business. The supporting priorities were new grid business models, AI taking on a role in the smart grid, and batteries at the heart of the future of energy. This was not an environmental argument alone. It was a competitiveness argument. Countries that treat sustainability solely as compliance risk missing the economic opportunity embedded within it. 4. Society: Generation Next The fourth perspective was society, and I called it Generation Next. This section began with one of the most optimistic statements in the deck: “An optimistic society that sees opportunities is a transforming one.” That matters because technology alone does not create transformation. A society has to believe it has permission to use technology to build something better. The demographic context is extraordinary. The deck noted that half of the global population was under 25, describing this cohort as globally wired, entrepreneurial, collaborative and change-oriented. The next slide drilled deeper into the entrepreneurial instincts of Millennials and Gen Z. It cited 66% as interested in starting their own business, 55% of young entrepreneurs valuing practical skills over formal education, 75% willing to take financial risks, and 80% of Gen Z seeing technology as part of their future business. That is not simply a demographic story. It is a policy signal. If the next generation is entrepreneurial, digitally fluent and more comfortable building a career around skills rather than credentials, then education, financing, regulation and government support systems need to evolve with them. One of my favourite slides in the presentation simply said: “When the kid playing Roblox gets into digital twin technology...” Think about it. To one generation, a digital twin is exotic industrial technology. To another, navigating persistent 3D environments and manipulating virtual worlds has been normal since childhood. What happens when that second generation starts designing airports, factories, hospitals, cities, transportation systems, energy grids and government services? They do not simply bring new tools. They bring new instincts. The deck characterized the Generation Next mindset as ambitious and independent, digitally native and tech savvy, socially and environmentally conscious, open to risk, practical and hands-on, and comfortable with acquiring knowledge just in time. That means the traditional model of education itself has to change. My next slide was titled “Critical future skills are not traditional ones.” It highlighted analytical thinking and innovation, active learning, critical thinking, complex problem solving, creativity, originality, initiative, leadership, social influence, advanced technology skills, resilience and reasoning. In an AI era, the premium shifts. The ability to obtain information becomes less scarce. The ability to interpret, question, combine, imagine and act on information becomes more valuable. I brought the section back to the UAE with another strategy: double down on the UAE brand. Transform education models and future skills faster. Groom the entrepreneurial mindset. But make sure future progress is driven by UAE native values. I was not suggesting that the UAE needed to become Silicon Valley. Why would it? Every successful innovation economy ultimately develops its own character. The opportunity was to build a distinctly UAE model for the future. 5. Government: Agile Leaders Lead Fast Nations Then came the fifth perspective, the one that mattered most for this particular audience. Government. The section title was “Agile leaders lead fast nations.” Everything I had discussed up to this point eventually lands on the desk of government. Volatility creates policy challenges. AI creates regulatory challenges. Energy transformation creates infrastructure challenges. Generational change creates education and workforce challenges. New industries create investment and competitiveness challenges. And while all that is happening, citizen expectations are rising. The deck cited 62% of citizens worldwide expecting government services to be as fast as private-sector services, while 48% were dissatisfied with the speed of government responses. People no longer compare a government website with the government website they used ten years ago. They compare it with the best digital experience they had this morning. Their bank. Amazon. Uber. Apple. A streaming service. An AI assistant. Government's competition for expectations is no longer simply other governments. The deck cited 80% of governments believing scenario planning and foresight are critical tools for future challenges, 75% of countries having regulatory sandboxes to test emerging technologies, 67% of public-sector workers believing they need digital-transformation training, and 75% of government leaders recognizing that slow decision-making is a barrier to effective governance. Taken together, those statistics reveal the central dilemma facing modern government. Governments understand that the future is accelerating. They understand they need to experiment. Their people know they need new skills. And their leaders know they are often moving too slowly. The deck suggested that the future of government involves supercharging innovation, making resilience the norm, fueling digital capabilities, scaling personalized services and treating data as an imperative at warp speed. AI was obviously part of that story. I included use cases such as AI in policymaking, data-driven decision making, traffic management, chatbot automation, fraud detection and infrastructure monitoring. The strategic point was straightforward: The productivity gap between governments that aggressively deploy new technology and those that merely dabble in it could become enormous. That has consequences far beyond administrative efficiency. It affects how quickly permits are issued, how efficiently infrastructure is operated, how rapidly emergencies are handled, how intelligently traffic is managed, how effectively fraud is identified and how quickly policy can respond to emerging conditions. In the private sector, we talk about competitive advantage. Governments can develop something similar: governance advantage. The countries able to make high-quality decisions faster, experiment more intelligently and deliver services more effectively can create an environment in which everything else moves faster too. The Master of Government Imagination That led to one of the ideas I developed specifically for the UAE keynote: the Master of Government Imagination, or MGI. I meant it partly in fun. But only partly. Governments have plenty of people trained in administration, law, economics, policy and management. Those skills are obviously essential. But who is formally trained in imagination? Who is responsible for seeing something nobody else sees yet? Who has permission to challenge a longstanding assumption? Who asks why a government service works the way it does? Who looks at a technology in another industry and wonders whether it could be applied to public services? The MGI mindset in the deck called on government leaders to see things differently, refuse to accept the status quo, be solution-oriented, focus on opportunity rather than threat, spur creativity in others, bring new ideas to life, learn and unlearn, refuse to automatically say “can't,” embrace complex challenges and challenge assumptions. That's actually quite a radical job description for a government official. And perhaps it shouldn't be. Because if government is expected to manage a world full of things that have never existed before, it needs people comfortable imagining things that have never existed before. Governments Need Sandboxes Too The next slide asked a particularly direct question: What do governments need to do? My answer was four things: enhance future-oriented decision making, provide experiential sandboxes, build a culture of accelerated decision making and upskill the government workforce relentlessly. The sandbox idea is important. Governments are often expected to get everything right before they do anything. But that is increasingly incompatible with a world in which technologies and business models are changing faster than governments can fully understand them. The alternative is not recklessness. It is structured experimentation. Test a regulation with one industry before applying it to an entire economy. Build a pilot government service for 10,000 people before launching it to ten million. Use a digital twin to simulate an infrastructure decision. Create a controlled environment in which a new financial technology can operate. Deploy AI internally before using it for critical public decisions. Learn what happens. Then adjust. The very idea of the regulatory sandbox reflects a shift from “we must know everything before we act” to “we need a safe way to learn while we act.” That is a much more appropriate model for an era of acceleration. From Fixed Government to Adaptive Government The presentation then went further. I proposed foresight-driven policy models, adaptive governance capable of flexibility and rapid iteration, public-private innovation hubs with government acting as facilitator, and a shift toward experiential goal-seeking rather than assuming that every desired result could always be perfectly specified in advance. This does not mean abandoning long-term thinking. It means combining long-term direction with short-term adaptability. A government might know where it wants to go without pretending it already knows every step required to get there. Traditional government often works from the premise that certainty creates control. Future-ready government recognizes that adaptability creates resilience. I illustrated that with another line designed to echo my earlier observation about companies: Government services that do not yet exist will develop programs not yet defined to support societal needs yet to emerge with ideas yet to be imagined. That sentence is worth reading twice. Government usually thinks of itself as administering the present. Increasingly, its real job is building capacity for the unknown. The UAE Opportunity: Be Fit for the Future The final strategic section brought all five perspectives back together. The slide declared an ambition for the UAE to be a global leader for future opportunities, based on future-oriented policies that accelerate industry, human capital and fast-moving trends, combined with new future-fit and agile government business models. The final instruction on the slide was beautifully simple: BE FIT FOR THE FUTURE. I think that is actually a better phrase than “future-proof.” Nothing is future-proof. A government cannot future-proof itself against every geopolitical shock, technological breakthrough, economic surprise, pandemic, environmental event or social change. But it can become future-fit. A fit organization responds better to stress. A fit economy adapts faster. A fit workforce learns continuously. A fit government experiments, adjusts and moves. And a fit country has the institutional confidence to take advantage of unexpected opportunity. That is where the UAE already had an interesting advantage. It had built a national identity around ambition. It had created extraordinary physical infrastructure at remarkable speed. It had recruited talent and investment globally. It had demonstrated a willingness to launch initiatives that might initially sound improbable elsewhere. My message wasn't that those achievements guaranteed future success. They didn't. My message was that the same mindset could now be applied to an entirely new set of challenges involving AI, energy, skills, entrepreneurship, demographics and government itself. The Real Definition of Innovation Near the end of the presentation, I returned to a word that gets used far too casually. Innovation. The conventional definition is straightforward: a new idea, method or device, or the introduction of something new. I added a third definition: Future-proofing a nation. Or, perhaps more accurately, making it future-fit. My final action plan was titled GET OUT IN FRONT. Translate fast-moving trends into opportunities through agile governance. Upskill and reskill. Encourage MGI thinking. Promote digital exploration through applied innovation. And invest in what I called experiential capital. Experiential capital might be one of the most important concepts in the whole deck. We invest enormous amounts of money in intellectual capital, what people know. But in a period of rapid change, what people have actually tried becomes equally important. Have they worked with an AI system? Have they built a digital twin? Have they run a regulatory sandbox? Have they tested a new energy architecture? Have they worked with a startup? Have they tried something that failed? Have they discovered why it failed? That accumulated experience becomes institutional capital. And it cannot be created overnight. You build it one experiment at a time. Which is why the final slide of the keynote contained perhaps the simplest advice of all: THINK BIG. START SMALL. SCALE FAST. That's a pretty good strategy for an entrepreneur. It's a pretty good strategy for a company. And it's probably not a bad strategy for a country either. The Speech That Wasn't So that is the keynote I never gave. The interesting thing, looking back, is that the cancellation does not diminish the work that went into it. If anything, the process tells its own story. The team in the Prime Minister's Office was demanding exactly what I was recommending in the presentation itself: clarity, speed, simplification, relevance and an intense focus on what leadership needed to understand now. The people I worked with were rigorous about every idea. They wanted every slide to communicate almost instantly. They wanted the presentation to operate at the level of national leadership, not as a collection of interesting technology trends. That forced me to keep returning to the bigger question: what does all of this mean for the future of a country? Ultimately, circumstances changed and the presentation never made it onto the stage. I was subsequently told that there was a desire for this particular perspective to be delivered locally, which I can certainly understand. Context matters. Culture matters. Local knowledge matters. But outsiders can sometimes provide something useful too. My role as a futurist has never been to arrive somewhere and announce that I know its future better than the people who live there. It is to look far beyond someone's normal field of view, across hundreds of developments in science, technology, business, demographics, energy and society, and ask a question that can be surprisingly difficult to ask from inside an organization or a country: What happens when all of this collides with you? That was the purpose of this keynote. And looking through the slides again, I think that is what was powerful about the deck. It wasn't really the individual statistics. It was the pattern they formed. Twenty-two years to reach the first terawatt of solar, then only a few years for the next two. Five days for ChatGPT to reach a million users. A 97% collapse in the cost of some AI models in about 18 months. A 99.6% decline in solar-module prices over several decades. A generation arriving with radically different assumptions about technology, entrepreneurship and education. Citizens beginning to expect government to operate at digital speed. Government leaders themselves acknowledging that slow decision-making has become an obstacle. Different statistics. Same story. Acceleration. And when the underlying environment accelerates, standing still isn't actually standing still. It is falling behind. The irony, of course, is that many of the specific numbers and examples in the deck will eventually become obsolete. AI will become dramatically more capable. Energy systems will continue to transform. New industries will emerge. Jobs we cannot yet describe will become routine. Technologies that seem remarkable today will eventually become boring infrastructure. That is not a weakness in a futurist presentation. It is the entire point. Future readiness is not about getting every prediction right. It is about building enough imagination, agility and institutional capacity to respond when reality turns out differently than expected. Epilogue: And Then the Future Showed Up There is one more part to this story. I built this presentation in the fall of 2024. The keynote was never delivered. And then, less than two years later, many of the ideas in it were subjected to a real-world stress test that nobody would have wished for. The Iran war erupted in February 2026, bringing missile and drone attacks, severe disruption to the Strait of Hormuz, interruptions to shipping and energy flows, airspace closures, tourism declines, supply-chain challenges and extraordinary geopolitical uncertainty to the Gulf. As I write this in late August 2026, the conflict itself is still not over. Indeed, the United States carried out new strikes against Iranian missile launchers on August 30. The impact on the UAE has been very real. Dubai International Airport, one of the most important pieces of connective infrastructure in the global economy, saw passenger traffic fall sharply during the second quarter as airlines rerouted flights and travellers avoided the region. First-half passenger numbers were down more than 30% from the previous year. And yet something else happened. The country adapted. By the first quarter of 2026, even as the regional conflict was affecting parts of the economy, UAE real GDP was still growing at 3%, while the non-oil economy grew 4.8% and accounted for 79.4% of national GDP. By the first half of the year, UAE non-oil foreign trade had reached a record AED1.937 trillion, up 13.1% year over year, while non-oil exports reached a record AED452.8 billion. That is not to suggest that the country somehow escaped the consequences of war. It did not. Aviation, hospitality, energy, shipping and consumer confidence were all affected. Inflation increased. Trade routes were disrupted. Investment decisions became more cautious. The Strait of Hormuz, through which so much of the Gulf's economic lifeblood traditionally flows, became a fundamental strategic vulnerability. Resilience is not the absence of damage. Resilience is the capacity to absorb damage, adapt and keep moving. And that is where the story becomes particularly interesting in the context of the keynote I prepared in 2024. Remember some of the ideas I was going to put in front of those 700 officials. Volatility is the new normal. Remain on an economic offence. The future belongs to those who are fast. Agile leaders lead fast nations. Build resilience as a norm. Develop adaptive governance. Create future-oriented decision-making capacity. Think big. Start small. Scale fast. At the time, those were ideas on slides. By 2026, they had become operating requirements. One of the more thoughtful assessments of the UAE's performance during the crisis made exactly this point: recovery was not something that was improvised after the war began. It had been built in advance through economic diversification, fiscal buffers, alternative import and export routes, labour-market policies and years of deliberate investment in institutional resilience. That distinction is crucial. You cannot manufacture resilience after the crisis begins. You discover during the crisis whether you built it beforehand. Diversification suddenly stops being an abstract economic strategy when your traditional energy and shipping routes are disrupted. Alternative logistics networks stop being an infrastructure planning exercise when the Strait of Hormuz becomes unreliable. Digital government stops being about convenience when institutions have to make decisions and communicate rapidly under pressure. Economic agility stops being a fashionable management phrase when businesses, workers and entire sectors have to adjust in real time. Even more striking is what happened with trade. Despite the geopolitical shock, the UAE continued expanding its non-oil economic relationships globally. That AED1.937 trillion in non-oil trade during the first half of 2026 was not simply a record. It was evidence of something much larger that the country had spent years building: optionality. And optionality might be one of the most valuable forms of national resilience. Multiple industries. Multiple trading relationships. Multiple transport routes. Multiple sources of investment. Multiple economic engines. Multiple technological capabilities. The more options you have, the less likely it is that any single disruption determines your future. There is an irony here that I can't ignore. In 2024, I had a slide telling the UAE government to become "future-fit." Two years later, circumstances delivered a brutal test of what future-fit actually means. It does not mean accurately predicting that a war will happen on a particular date. It does not mean knowing exactly which shipping lane will close, which airspace will become unavailable or which economic shock will arrive next. It means building sufficient economic diversity, institutional capacity, technological capability, infrastructure flexibility and decision-making speed that when something unexpected does happen, you have choices. And perhaps that is the most important lesson of the keynote I never gave. The future will always contain surprises. Some will be extraordinary opportunities. Others will be deeply unwelcome. Governments cannot choose which ones arrive. They can choose how prepared they are when they do. The deck ended with Think Big. Start Small. Scale Fast. Looking at what the UAE has had to navigate since February 2026, I might now add one more line: Build resilience before you need it. Because by the time you need it, it's already too late. Which is probably the single biggest idea I would have left with those 700 officials had I ever stepped onto that stage: You don't future-proof a nation by correctly predicting what happens next. You future-proof it by building a nation that can move when it does.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/08/monday-musings-the-keynote-i-never-gave-five-perspectives-on-the-future-of-the-uae/