Abu Dhabi, 17 February 2026: First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), the UAE’s global bank and one of the world’s largest and safest financial institutions, today announced significant progress in scaling the deployment of Artificial Intelligence across the Group, driven by the rapid maturation of its AI Innovation Hub and a strong focus on building future-ready talent and capabilities.
FAB’s AI deployment marks a shift from experimentation to enterprise-wide, production-grade AI, embedding intelligent automation, agentic AI and decision intelligence into core business processes. This approach is fuelling growth by enabling faster, data-driven decisions, greater operational efficiency and more personalised, responsive engagement with clients across the Group.
Sebastian Walter, Executive Vice President at FAB, leading the AI Innovation Hub, said: “As the UAE’s global bank, we are advancing our AI agenda in a disciplined and purposeful way, aligned with national priorities. The AI Innovation Hub plays a key role in translating emerging technologies into real business impact, by transforming how we work, enhancing productivity, elevating decision intelligence and strengthening client experience. FAB’s AI strategy is centered on augmenting human expertise, enabling our people to focus on higher-value advisory, risk intelligence and client engagement”.
The Group’s AI Innovation Hub acts as the engine for enterprise AI acceleration, providing governance, reusable capabilities and a structured pipeline to scale high-impact use cases across the bank. AI agents are now embedded across departments to automate routine activities, surface insights and support informed decision-making, seamlessly integrating AI into day-to-day operations.
FAB’s AI transformation is underpinned by a structured talent and capability agenda. Employees across the bank have been trained in applied AI skills, supported by an environment that empowers and encourages them to actively engage with AI and apply it confidently to enhance their effectiveness and improve both their professional experience and day-to-day life. The Bank continues to expand its AI talent base through targeted upskilling and specialist recruitment, ensuring long term capability development and sustainable innovation scale.
More than 30 agentic AI use cases are progressing across trade and payments, client operations, compliance and technology engineering, supporting our growth and delivering measurable improvements in productivity and client experience. FAB is also strengthening processes to safeguard intellectual property and ensure responsible innovation.
The Group’s AI agenda is supported by a modern enterprise data platform, with more than 90% of structured data now integrated and supported by an agentic AI layer. This enables the secure, scalable deployment of AI solutions across core businesses, aligned with regulatory, risk and compliance requirements.
All AI initiatives operate under a Group-wide Responsible AI framework, ensuring ethical, secure and compliant deployment. AI remains central to FAB’s long-term strategy, enhancing operational agility, strengthening risk intelligence and supporting the UAE’s ambition to build a digitally enabled, knowledge-based economy.