Long Queues, Pile Of Papers: TAMM Chief Recalls Childhood Memories Of Life Before AI

As a boy, Mohamed Al Askar, Director General of the TAMM Program at Abu Dhabi's Department of Government Enablement, had a simple but weighty job whenever his businessman father had to deal with the government: carry the file. Not a slim folder, but a hefty collection of original documents and papers that seemed to contain everything they might possibly need. He also had another duty: stand in queues and hold his father's place while he rushed between government counters.

Decades later, those childhood memories are shaping how Al Askar thinks about the future of government services.

Speaking at AI Everything Abu Dhabi, he recalled how his father would take him on long drives across the city to deal with licences, approvals and renewals.

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His father called him his“schoolie”, he said, explaining that the term meant he was essentially his“little porter”.

“When I say the file, I don't mean the thin folder we carry today. This thing was heavy, original of everything, document we didn't even think we needed,” Al Askar said.

And then there were the photocopies.

“You need three copies. Three copies,” he recalled, describing the familiar instruction that could send him sprinting across a government building with a coin in his hand.

“One copy for the guy behind the desk. Another copy for the guy who would mostly be in the same building. And a third copy, till now, sometimes at night, I'm trying to think, what was it even for?”

The goal of government transformation, he said, should not be to make younger generations appreciate how difficult those processes once were.

“It is not to make them appreciate how hard it was, but to meet their standard,” he said.

That philosophy is now at the heart of Abu Dhabi's push towards becoming the world's first AI-native government.

But Al Askar cautioned that AI should not simply be added to existing government processes.

“If you bolt AI on top of a bad process, you just make that bad process faster."

The ambition, he explained, has evolved from putting services online, to hiding the complexity behind the technology, and now towards a future where people simply state what they need and AI agents handle the work on their behalf.

“No more forms. A person just asks once, and we let our agent do it on their behalf."

The change is ultimately about deciding who should carry the complexity.

“Today, governments carry it. Before, me and my father used to carry it, because there was no one else,” he noted.

“This has been progress to me. Not a better interface, but a way lifted from people who should have never have been the ones holding it.”

When ChatGPT failed him

But Al Askar also offered a surprisingly personal warning about what can be lost when people become too dependent on AI.

He told the audience about trying to finish his speech while travelling on a plane. He had turned to AI for help, but the connection kept failing.

“Error after error, connections, it doesn't connect. And I honestly got tired,” he admitted.

With the plane landing and the speech unfinished, he eventually opened a Word document and started writing himself. Then something unexpected happened.“I enjoyed it!"

He said he enjoyed writing, deleting a sentence, thinking again and starting over.“And maybe I shouldn't say this in an AI conference, I had an original thought,” he joked.

“No prompt, no model. Just me and a black document.”

The experience made him reflect on how technology can improve productivity while also weakening skills people once exercised routinely.

Al Askar compared AI's effect on thinking to what calculators did to mental arithmetic and what Google did to solving crosswords.

“I used to do calculator in my head. I actually used to go to math competition at one stage in my life,” he recalled.

“But today, it gave me a slightly difficult calculation, and my first instinct is not to think, but to reach out for the device. And now we are doing the same thing with thinking.”

His answer was not to stop using AI.

“No,” he said when asked whether people should be afraid or stop.

Instead, he argued that people need to become better at using AI without surrendering their own ability to think.

“As our machine becomes more capable, our people must not become less capable."

The objective, he added, should be to use AI to challenge human judgement rather than replace it.

'Time back for the people'

For Al Askar, the most exciting part of AI is not AI itself, but what it can return to people.

He pointed to examples including students in Nigeria using AI as a tutor, AI's role in predicting the structure of more than 200 million proteins, and UK government employees who he said save an average of 26 minutes a day through AI.

“Twenty-six minutes doesn't sound like a revolution until you multiply it across a whole workforce every day, every year, maybe using your calculator,” he joked.

“That is what excites me about AI. Not AI for the sake of AI, it's time.”

“Time back for the teacher, time back for the scientist, time back for the public servant, and in the end, time back for the people.”

Abu Dhabi's own approach, he said, is increasingly focused on making government work around people rather than forcing people to navigate government.

The emirate has set a goal of becoming the world's first AI-native government by 2027, while TAMM has been developed as a unified platform for government services. The platform currently provides more than 1,150 services through a single portal.

Al Askar said the future will change people's expectations of government.

People will no longer accept returning to forms, menus and complicated processes, he said. Nor will they necessarily compare one government with another.

“They will compare their government with the best experience they have ever had.”

And the next generation, he predicted, will not ask which government department they need.

“They will just say, this is what I need. Make it happen.”

But the biggest risk posed by AI, he suggested, may not be machines becoming too intelligent.

“Perhaps the biggest risk of artificial intelligence is not that it becomes too smart. It's our intelligence becomes artificial."

He said there were things he hoped would never be automated:“Our judgment, our curiosity, our responsibilities.”

And he returned to the childhood memory with which he began.

His father, he said, still drives, and so does he.

“The difference is, who carries the complexity."

For Al Askar, the test of future government is therefore remarkably simple: before launching another feature, model or service, ask who it is actually for and whether it gives people something they genuinely need.

“What matters is that we make sure that drive is somewhere they choose to, not somewhere they have to,” he concluded.

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