UAE, Saudi professionals among world's most optimistic about AI, says new report

TEXT START: Professionals in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are among the most optimistic in the world about artificial intelligence (AI), despite the concerns being raised around the globe by the CEOs of global tech giants, according to Korn Ferry's Workforce 2026 Global Insights Report.

The Dissection

The text launders a labor-market warning into a confidence story. Its own figures show AI increasing reported efficiency while making workers too busy to deliver meaningful results, expanding task loads, and stretching them beyond their capabilities. That is not liberation. It is automation being captured by management and converted into higher throughput demands.

The headline elevates sentiment and buries ownership, bargaining power, headcount, wages, and necessity. The article measures whether professionals feel positive—not whether their labor remains economically indispensable. Its 500 respondents per country provide an attitude snapshot, not proof of durable employment security.

The Core Fallacy

It treats optimism, efficiency, and expanded responsibilities as evidence of durable human value. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, all three can coexist with cognitive automation, labor substitution, and declining productive participation.

The real question is whether humans remain necessary once AI performs cognitive work at lower cost and those controlling AI capital can coordinate production without them. This report does not test that question. Its strongest evidence points in the opposite direction: AI raises output expectations faster than it raises human meaning or control.

The report also confuses role expansion with advancement. A broader remit can mean more leverage, but it can just as easily mean uncompensated scope creep before the organization decides which tasks no longer require a human at all.

Hidden Assumptions

• Positive sentiment provides economic protection.
• Efficiency gains will be shared with workers rather than captured by owners and managers.
• Expanded roles create bargaining power instead of workload intensification.
• Leaders can redesign work faster than AI can substitute for it.
• Regional optimism is a structural moat rather than a temporary social and institutional lag.
• More tasks mean more meaningful participation.
• Growth automatically preserves wages, status, and necessity.
• Professionals surveyed are representative of all workers exposed to displacement.
• Training and adaptation can overcome the ownership problem.

Social Function

Primary classification: transition management.

Secondary classifications: ideological anesthetic, prestige signaling, and corporate self-exoneration. The report gives institutions a convenient narrative: workers are enthusiastic, therefore the transition is healthy. That converts potential resistance into evidence of adaptability.

It contains a partial truth. The respondents may genuinely be optimistic, and AI may genuinely improve measured efficiency. But the article turns those facts into a false systemic conclusion. It never shows that workers control the systems producing the gains or that the gains preserve their economic necessity.

The Verdict

This is a soft-focus report about a hard transition. It records early indicators of P1 and P3: efficiency rises, workloads expand, meaningful impact declines, and capability strain increases. Then it labels workers’ willingness to absorb the shock a regional advantage.

Optimism can delay resistance. It cannot defeat P2 or P3. Gulf professionals who do not own or command AI capital, or occupy indispensable Sovereign/Servitor positions in energy, logistics, maintenance, governance, or equivalent bottlenecks, remain exposed. The article does not disprove obsolescence. It documents how obsolescence begins: first more tools, then more demands, then fewer humans required.