Dubai’s tech pitch to the world

If Gupta does arrange a base in Dubai, which he’s “planning on doing”, he will join the more than 3,400 active information technology (IT) companies that have Indians as founders or partners in the mainland, according to data from Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism. The number of Indian companies will be much higher if we include the hundreds in Jebel Ali Free Zone (Jafza), located in the Jebel Ali area at the far western end of Dubai.

Having offices in the emirate makes it easier for Indian startups to hire global talent, and it also makes it easier for the Dubai government to source good tech talent from India. High net-worth individuals (HNIs) and entrepreneurs from India are being lured to Dubai by tax reliefs, golden visas, world-class infrastructure, a better quality of life, speedy clearances, and business-friendly regulations.

The UAE issued 151,600 golden visas from 2019-2022, according to a 18 November article in ArabianBusiness. This visa, which allows its holders to stay and work in Dubai for 10 years, was introduced in 2019. Rajesh Sehgal, an angel investor and managing partner at Equanimity Investments, is one such golden visa holder. “Many of my friends have availed of the golden visa because the Dubai government has been very proactive in getting talent there,” says Sehgal. While the visa permits him to journey simply to Dubai, as of now, he stays in India.

India’s stringent laws round cryptocurrencies have additionally prompted some Web3 techpreneurs similar to Nischal Shetty, founding father of native crypto alternate WazirX, to open workplaces in Dubai. Sehgal says that “some crypto entrepreneurs have moved there resulting from regulatory hurdles in India”, but he also points out that Dubai is “an expensive city to live in unless you’re working there full-time.” Sehgal, although, underscores that none of Equanitmity’s portfolio corporations have a base in Dubai.

Lure of Dubai

Dubai was ranked the third most-preferred vacation spot for international employees in a December 2021 survey by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). London was ranked first, adopted by Amsterdam. Foreigners, together with Indians, are interested in the emirate’s high quality of life, its world-class roads and highways, luxurious malls, water parks, seashores, theme parks, desert safaris, tax-free salaries and business-friendly insurance policies.

An ongoing digital transformation is simply including to its sights as a tech hub.

Dubai, as an illustration, turned the primary authorities on this planet to show fully paperless final 12 months. Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum had then instructed the media that the emirate had thus saved about $350 million and 14 million man hours throughout Dubai’s authorities departments.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) has developed a blockchain-based registry for Dubai, the place free zones and mainland authorities can share info on registered corporations and completely different points of their construction.

In March 2017, the federal government launched the emirate’s first cognitive AI Lab in partnership with IBM, geared toward growing a roadmap for AI in Dubai. It can also be huge on cost-effective and clever public transport. Ahmed Hashem Bahrozyan, CEO of Public Transport Agency, Roads and Transport Authority, factors out that Dubai has had driverless metros since 2009.

“Their punctuality is second to none. And our metros are absolutely autonomous,” he says. Bahrozyan recalls that for “the first six months, we had a person simply standing in the driver’s cabin so that people would not feel concerned over not seeing any human in the engine room. This is important since technology has to gain the trust of the people”. The concept behind all these initiatives is to make the emirate’s infrastructure and governance smarter, extra energy-efficient.

The Dubai authorities measures the success of those initiatives by way of sure metrics. The Social Happiness Index (SHI) measures happiness and public sentiment through the use of AI to analyse social media information (nameless information from channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, information shops, and blogs). An identical dashboard analyses and visualizes information that exhibits how Dubai’s inhabitants is altering and shifting.

Building ecosystems

Cities and nations can nurture dynamic tech hubs that may turn out to be vibrant facilities of worldwide enterprise with the correct mix of insurance policies that … improve their enchantment to digital expertise and main tech corporations,” noted an April 2022 BCG report. According to Vladislav Boutenko, managing director and senior partner at BCG Dubai, the reason for Dubai’s success is that it “has adopted a systemic approach to growth and digital transformation”, and “manages all its departments as ecosystems”.

He makes a valid point. “Each department has a certain degree of autonomy in governance and providing services, but we all collaborate with each other. We also want to ensure that any deployment is scientific—we first pilot, see the outcomes, and then we scale,” says Omar Sultan Al Olama, UAE minister of state for synthetic intelligence, digital financial system and distant work purposes.

“Everything (in Dubai) has an expiry date—even our insurance policies. So, yearly, you’ll discover a few of our insurance policies expire in order that they continue to be related and up-to-date”, says Hamad Al Mansoori, director general, Digital Dubai. Mansoori insists that all services have to be continually “redesigned—be they government, private sector or free zone areas—to customize them for groups of people regardless of whether they are individuals or professionals and regardless of their income-levels”. As an instance, since mobiles have smaller screens (as in comparison with desktops) that make it tough to fill kinds on-line, the federal government resized the enter fields to swimsuit cellular screens.

Educating authorities authorities about the advantages and downsides of applied sciences similar to AI, by way of job losses and algorithmic biases, is one other focus space. “The largest problem in AI is ignorance within the decision-making course of. We sort out this ignorance by providing authorities officers an opportunity to attend the Kellogg College’s AI coaching programme on the University of Oxford to learn code, ethics, and really graduate within the programme. Later, they pitch the AI purposes they suggest to implement to a panel of consultants. One situation—all such purposes should have an moral use, else they’ve to return to the drawing desk,” Olama says.

In the case of crypto and blockchain, Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA)—the world’s first such central authority to regulate virtual assets—has safeguards to protect its citizens. As for Dubai’s public transportation strategy, safety is a critical element of driverless vehicles. Bahrozyan points outs that while Dubai plans to have “25% of our trips through autonomous mode by 2030, we have currently achieved 10-11%. After driverless metros, our next focus is taxis. We do not want to just be the first but also want to be the safest.”

Dubai desires to rework the emirate into one of many world’s high 10 metaverse economies in addition to a world hub for the metaverse group. The intention is to draw greater than 1,000 corporations within the fields of blockchain and metaverse and assist greater than 40,000 digital jobs by 2030.

This futuristic imaginative and prescient is being incubated at 13 ‘future councils’. The council on AI, as an illustration, focuses on governance and laws. The power council identifies alternatives to rework Dubai right into a sustainable ecosystem powered by clear power. The council on expertise explores the talents required to excel in Industry 4.0, and the means to develop these abilities. Dubai Future Research aids in proposing short- and long-term suggestions to its stakeholders primarily based on native, regional, and international developments.

The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution UAE (C4IR UAE), which is a collaboration between the Dubai Future Foundation and the World Economic Forum, focuses on blockchain, accountable AI use circumstances, and precision drugs in healthcare and authorities to co-develop consent and information privateness frameworks, and to guard affected person information utilized in human genome sequencing programmes.

Lessons for India

Comparisons are odious between a metropolis with about 3.5 million residents and a rustic with a inhabitants of about 1.4 billion. India itself is nicely on its strategy to reaching its goal of changing into a $1 trillion digital financial system by 2025-26. It is already the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem, with practically 10,000 tech and deeptech (AI, IoT, blockchain, Web3, biotech, metaverse, and many others.) startups. India additionally has world-class institutes of expertise (IITs, IIITs and NITs) that often collaborate with corporations throughout the nation. The authorities’s Aadhaar-enabled funds system and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), too, have revolutionized the funds ecosystem. India additionally launched its National AI Mission in May 2020, aiming to be an AI energy to reckon with. And whereas the Indian authorities could dislike cryptocurrencies, it’s piloting a digital rupee, and helps blockchain (tech that powers cryptocurrencies).

However, India’s infrastructure, poor air high quality, and low requirements of dwelling, are a dampener for international expertise.

To be certain, India is constructing an ecosystem in Gujarat that will sometime rival monetary and tech hubs like Dubai, Mauritius and Singapore. Christened the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City), the 886 acres of land with 62 million sq. ft of land contains workplace areas, residential flats, faculties, hospitals, inns, golf equipment, retail, and leisure services. The Indian authorities has additionally supplied a number of incentives together with a 100% tax vacation for a decade to companies that’s arrange inside the hub’s International Financial Services Center (IFSC). But GIFT City is a piece in progress.

Bengaluru, dubbed India’s Silicon Valley, is one other success story with 40-50% of the tech consultants there having “moved there from elsewhere in India”, according to an April 2022 BCG report.

Bengaluru started by attracting big domestic and international technology companies into “export zones” within the Eighties with tax incentives and low, government-subsidized lease for workplace area. It “sustained and expanded its place as India’s main digital hub partially by investing in increased schooling, startup incubators, and different native improvement platforms to assist innovators and entrepreneurs create new native tech corporations. The metropolis is now dwelling to 48% of India’s R&D workforce,” the report explains. But Bengaluru’s potholed roads and disorderly traffic, too, remain sore points for expats.

“We do not have a Shenzen, Singapore, or Dubai in India. The global cosmopolitan hub is missing in India. Dubai attracts intellectual and business capital. India needs to focus more on the ease of doing business here to building better infrastructure, providing a global quality of life, and ensuring that people are safe and secure,” insists Jayanth Kolla, co-founder of deeptech analysis and advisory agency Convergence Catalyst.

Sehgal believes it’s “not about zero taxes however offering good infrastructure, and good execution of initiatives, which generally is completed by Asians, even in Dubai”. He asks: “Everyone is saying this is the decade of India. Why would you leave India and go to Dubai if you had good infrastructure and ease of business here itself?”

The emirate’s digital transformation is luring expertise from throughout the globe. What can India be taught from it?

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