Dubai: In the presence of His Highness Sheikh Mansoor bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, President of the UAE Olympic Committee, the Mohammed bin Rashid Center for Leadership Development (MBRCLD) launched the Dubai Leadership Coach, a first-of-its-kind AI-powered government leadership coaching initiative designed for Dubai Government employees.
The initiative represents a significant step towards transforming leadership knowledge into an interactive experience that employees can access whenever and wherever they need it.
The project is inspired by the leadership and government management philosophy of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. This philosophy is built on ambition, swift execution, creating opportunities, empowering people, turning challenges into catalysts for development, and actively shaping the future rather than waiting for it.
The launch took place during the Mohammed bin Rashid Leadership Forum, the premier annual gathering dedicated to management and leadership, organised by MBRCLD. The Forum brought together 1,000 government and private sector leaders to explore the future of management and leadership, promote best practices, and advance the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to strengthen Dubai’s position as a global capital of excellence and innovation.
Dubai Leadership Coach aims to bring this philosophy closer to government employees in their daily work, enabling them to discuss real workplace situations, including team management, decision-making, organisational challenges, and communication and influence. Through personalised coaching sessions, employees can explore different perspectives and make decisions with greater awareness and confidence.
Leadership knowledge
The initiative introduces a new approach to making leadership knowledge readily accessible through a web browser, without requiring specialised software or dedicated devices.
The experience has been designed to resemble a human coaching session rather than a traditional question-and-answer system. The coach listens to users, understands the context of conversations, asks questions, responds dynamically, accommodates interruptions and maintains a natural flow of dialogue.
The platform is not intended to replace leadership coaches or development programmes. Instead, it extends their reach by providing continuous support between formal programmes and in-person coaching sessions.
A leadership mindset
The strength of Dubai Leadership Coach extends beyond its technology. Its knowledge base draws on insights from approximately 50,000 books on leadership and management, as well as nearly 100,000 biographies of leaders and prominent figures from around the world. This enables it to analyse situations from multiple perspectives and draw on a broad range of experiences, decisions and lessons.
The coach bases its responses on carefully curated and reliable leadership content, retrieving the most relevant knowledge before providing guidance. This helps minimise generic responses and grounds conversations in established leadership principles and practices while ensuring proper attribution and responsible use of content.
Its conversational capabilities have also been trained using methodologies developed by leadership coaching experts and aligned with standards set by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), one of the world’s most recognised professional bodies in the field. Rather than supplying ready-made answers, the coach asks questions, listens, challenges assumptions and helps users evaluate options and arrive at their own decisions.
From a photograph to a realistic digital coach
The platform uses a new generation of digital avatar technology, enabling an approved photograph to be transformed into an interactive avatar capable of speaking and engaging through voice and video.
The technology synchronises facial expressions and lip movements with speech in high-definition video, creating a natural and realistic experience that closely resembles human interaction.
The creation of digital characters and voices is governed by clear safeguards to protect identity and usage rights, ensuring that images and voices are used only within authorised parameters while maintaining trust and accountability.
An advanced, rigorously tested system
During development, the platform underwent extensive testing and benchmarking against more than 20 international and local AI models. These assessments evaluated reasoning quality, response speed and conversational naturalness.
The comparisons included models with up to 120 billion parameters before the adoption of an operating system built around an advanced sovereign AI model in the approximately 30-billion-parameter category.
Parameters are numerical units through which AI models learn patterns and context. This scale enables the system to process long conversations and connect different elements with a high degree of understanding.
The platform also relies on a hybrid computing architecture that combines sovereign local capabilities with trusted cloud services, supported by the latest generations of processing technology to deliver rapid responses and support large-scale use.
To maintain quality and safety, the system was tested using adversarial scenarios, complex questions and attempts to identify vulnerabilities. Responses generated by different models were also compared before the final experience was approved. Additional safeguards were implemented to protect digital identities, ensure accurate content attribution and preserve the quality of the underlying knowledge base.
A transformation in leadership development
The initiative represents a shift in the concept of leadership development, expanding its reach beyond programmes that serve limited cohorts to an experience that can support employees across Dubai Government.
By bringing leadership and critical-thinking tools closer to employees at different levels, the platform gives every employee an opportunity to benefit from coaching when facing real workplace challenges.
The project also reflects Dubai’s broader approach to artificial intelligence, moving beyond its use as a technological tool and applying it to develop human capabilities and strengthen skills.
In Dubai Leadership Coach, technology is not an end in itself but a means of making the leadership philosophy that shaped Dubai’s success more accessible. It transforms leadership knowledge from content that is read or taught at specific times into an interactive experience that employees can apply, discuss and benefit from continuously.
The initiative combines three elements in a single platform: the leadership philosophy of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, extensive global leadership knowledge and advanced AI capabilities. By serving Dubai Government employees, it extends the impact of leadership development across the government ecosystem, making leadership learning part of everyday work and turning routine situations into continuous opportunities for personal and professional growth.
