Global AI leaders and UAE innovators show how AI is accelerating drug discovery, supporting healthcare workers and reshaping patient care at world’s largest AI-first expo and summit
Abu Dhabi, UAE – October 2026: As Abu Dhabi accelerates the use of AI, genomics and precision medicine across its healthcare ecosystem, Ai Everything Abu Dhabi 2026 will bring global and UAE innovators to ADNEC Centre from 6–7 October, showcasing advances spanning AI-designed medicines, Arabic-first clinical systems, and digital health.
The momentum is already visible across the emirate. Abu Dhabi’s AI-powered Patient Safety System now connects 100% of hospitals and serves more than 60,000 users, while the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi has described the emirate as a “living lab” for health innovation, supported by integrated health infrastructure and population-scale genomics.
Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, the world’s largest AI-first expo and summit, will channel this energy into two days of high-impact summit sessions and live exhibition demos as AI’s transformative impact on the global healthcare market is set to surge in value by more than five times over the next five years, from US$36 billion in 2026 to US$194 billion in 2031.
AI drug discovery pioneer joins 180+ global AI leaders in Abu Dhabi:
Among more than 180 AI leaders speaking at Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, AI drug discovery pioneer Dr. Alex Aliper, Co-Founder and President of Insilico Medicine, will take to the Main Stage for The Machines Curing Us conference session to examine AI-designed drugs, machine-driven bionics, and genomics.
Dr. Aliper pioneered the use of AI across multi-omics drug discovery, drug repurposing, generative chemistry and biology, and helped put an AI-designed drug into human clinical trials. He built a team of more than 100 AI engineers and was recognised among the “Top 100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare” by Deep Knowledge Analytics. Insilico Medicine’s AI-discovered Rentosertib, for the lung-scarring disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), has recently entered Phase III clinical trials.
“AI is already transforming the discovery engine, from identifying novel targets to designing high-quality molecules and delivering preclinical candidates in 12–18 months,” said Dr. Aliper. “At Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, I will highlight the first UAE-discovered molecules produced in Abu Dhabi and how local AI talent hubs and collaborative models can help turn discovery platforms into global patient impact.”
The conference programme will also examine autonomous AI in scientific research at Aila and the Rise of the AI Scientist session.
Show floor spotlights frontline healthcare AI in action:
Ai Everything Abu Dhabi will convene more than 400 AI infrastructure builders, model makers, unicorns and startups from 60 countries, with healthcare among the sectors demonstrating AI in action. On the exhibition floor, Abu Dhabi-based NABDH Technologies will showcase its Arabic-first Clinical Workflow Intelligence System, enabling doctors and patients to consult in Gulf Arabic before transforming encounters into structured English clinical documentation. The system is also designed as a revenue and efficiency engine for healthcare providers, reducing administrative workload and costs. Already used in patient consultations in Dubai, NABDH is part of a Department of Health – Abu Dhabi validation programme.
“NABDH is addressing a regional problem that has largely been approached with technology designed first for English-speaking healthcare systems and adapted to Arabic afterwards,” said Afra Alahbabi, Founder and CEO of NABDH Technologies. “We are building from the opposite direction: Arabic-first, developed in the UAE, hosted in the UAE, and designed around the clinical, operational and regulatory realities of healthcare in this market.”
Meanwhile, Crane AI Labs will highlight an early childhood AI assistant built on Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence’s (MBZUAI) K2 Horizon. The company is adapting the Abu Dhabi-developed open model for African languages and on-device use where connectivity may be limited. Crane’s clinical-support technology is already deployed across 15+ public health facilities in East Africa, with 250+ consented health workers.
“Institutions want AI that works in the languages their people speak, on the devices they already own, without depending on connectivity or foreign cloud infrastructure,” said Kato Steven Mubiru, CEO and Co-Founder of Crane AI Labs. “That is a sovereignty requirement as much as a technical one — and why we build offline first rather than as a fallback.”
Health data becomes a foundation for AI at scale
Enterprise data platform Snowflake will spotlight the data foundations needed to deploy healthcare AI at scale. In the UAE, its client NMC Healthcare is centralising information across 70 facilities to support operational insight and patient care.
“The UAE has established itself as one of the world’s leading AI markets through ambitious national strategies and sustained investment in digital infrastructure,” said Ahmed Hafez, Director, Solution Engineering for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Snowflake. “We want to demonstrate how organisations can move from AI experimentation to production using trusted, governed enterprise data.”
Meanwhile, UAE-born THABER will showcase how AI can bring together fragmented health and human-performance data, combining recovery, training, nutrition, wearable and activity data to provide adaptive guidance around readiness and performance.
“We are surrounded by a lot of data, but the real challenge is turning it into context, understanding and action,” said Jasem Alketbi, Founder of THABER. “We want to build intelligent systems originating from the UAE that help people and organisations make better decisions.”
200+ investors managing US$100 billion put health-tech scale in focus
Ai Everything Abu Dhabi will bring together more than 150 startups and 200 investors with US$100 billion in assets under management, including investors with portfolios spanning healthcare, health-tech and life sciences.
ExpertEase AI, which develops AI-powered digital employees, is among the companies seeking capital. Its technology is being used by Australian healthcare provider TwinView Health, where AI has reduced manual processing of nurses’ shift reports by approximately 90%, from around 30 minutes to one to two minutes per report.
“This is a good example of how we see AI creating value: not simply answering questions but becoming an operational layer between frontline workers and existing enterprise systems,” said Deniz Subasi, Founder and Chief AI Officer of ExpertEase AI.
At the event, ExpertEase AI will announce its first external seed round to support international expansion and market entry, including the UAE and wider Middle East.
Furthermore, UAE-based health-tech company Digital Wellbeing is raising a US$500,000 pre-seed round as it uses AI to understand how screen use affects how people feel. The company says app users report 66% less screen time and a 50% improvement in mood. At Ai Everything Abu Dhabi, it will launch its first predictive AI model, designed to learn individual usage patterns and identify when a user’s mood may deteriorate while scrolling.
“We measure what matters: how apps affect user’s energy and emotions,” said Omnia Salah, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Digital Wellbeing. “We can now see which apps leave people lighter, and which leave them drained. We can help content creators, educators, merchants and governments decide what is best for the people watching.”
Organised by inD, with the Department of Government Enablement as Host Partner and Solutions+, a Mubadala company, as Global Partner, Ai Everything Abu Dhabi brings together the institutions and technology leaders shaping the next era of AI. The ecosystem spans Abu Dhabi powerhouses including the Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), First Abu Dhabi Bank and Hub71, alongside global technology leaders AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Mistral AI and ASUS, among others.
About Ai Everything Abu Dhabi:
Ai Everything Abu Dhabi is the world’s largest AI-first Expo and Summit, architecting powerful alliances across business, capital, and policy in the new global AI economic order. The two-day event in the UAE Capital unites the world’s foremost AI experts, thought leaders, and corporate innovators to discover the most transformative hands-on use cases, address AI commercialisation challenges, forge new partnerships, accelerate cross-continental innovation, and shape the future of AI applications. Organised by inD, hosted by the Department of Government Enablement – Abu Dhabi (DGE), and accelerated by Solutions+, a Mubadala company, as Global Partner, Ai Everything Abu Dhabi takes place from 6-7 October 2026 at ADNEC.
