Half a century ago, Oman struck oil and bought itself a future. Today a second discovery is under way not beneath the desert, but inside our institutions, our enterprises and our people. Artificial intelligence is the first great resource in history that is not extracted but cultivated, and unlike oil, it appreciates with use. The nations that grasp this distinction will write the next chapters of economic history. The rest will read them.
Consider what the world's economists are actually telling us. In the World Economic Forum's latest Chief Economists' Outlook, nearly nine in ten expect global growth to weaken yet more than 90% expect AI adoption to accelerate, making it the single engine of optimism in an economy running low on it. The International Monetary Fund states flatly that AI can lift global growth. The Forum's Future of Jobs research projects that by 2030 structural change will create 170 million jobs and displace 92 million a net gain of 78 million while 86% of employers expect AI to transform their business within the decade. These are not the numbers of a passing fashion. They are the vital signs of a new industrial revolution.
Yet the same surveys carry a quieter message: the productivity dividend is arriving later, and more unevenly, than the early euphoria promised. Good. Every general-purpose technology has behaved this way electricity took a generation to redesign the factory before it redesigned the economy. The delay is a test of the adopter. AI rewards not those who buy it, but those who reorganise around it. The dividend, in other words, is earned in distinctly human currency.
Nowhere is that test more consequential than in the Gulf. Our region enters the AI era with capital, ambition and one of the youngest populations on earth and with an old vulnerability that recent months have made painfully vivid as energy shocks and geopolitical strain continue to shape the global outlook. For hydrocarbon economies, diversification is no longer a policy preference; it is an existential deadline. And AI is the most powerful diversification instrument the Gulf has ever been handed, because it is a force multiplier for everything else every port, every factory, every bank, every mind.
Oman, to its credit, is not waiting. Artificial intelligence sits at the heart of Vision 2040, whose latest progress report shows 74% of indicators advancing toward target. The National Programme for Artificial Intelligence is embedding the technology across healthcare, energy, finance and logistics. A dedicated Special AI Zone in Muscat now offers free-zone incentives to global investors and builders. The ambition is measurable: a digital economy contributing 10% of GDP by 2040, with the IMF suggesting the transformation could add 1.5 to 2 percentage points to annual growth. Omani business has answered the call 87% of the country's chief executives already deploy generative AI, ahead of the global average. Non-oil sectors now drive roughly 70% of GDP. The engine is turning.
And this month the engine gained a global gearbox. On 16 July in Shanghai, Oman signed the agreement establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation one of 29 founding members, and the only nation from the Middle East among them. The new intergovernmental body exists to narrow the AI divide between nations and make the technology safer for humanity. The signature carries a message worth pausing on: Oman does not intend merely to consume the rules of the intelligent age; it intends to help write them giving its firms and researchers access to frontier expertise, and a seat where global AI governance takes shape.
But engines need fuel, and the fuel of this transformation is the private sector above all, the small and medium enterprise. Oman's SME base passed 130,000 registered firms in 2025, and the Eleventh Five-Year Plan targets a private-sector contribution of 56% of GDP. Here lies AI's most radical property: it is the great equaliser. A ten-person logistics firm in Salalah can now run demand forecasting and fraud detection that a decade ago belonged only to multinationals. A young founder can compress the distance from idea to market from years to months. Diversified economies are not decreed from above; they are compounded from below, one more productive firm at a time. AI puts that compounding within reach of every Omani entrepreneur willing to seize it.
It would be dishonest, however, to pretend the road is clear. The binding constraint is not silicon but skill. Globally, half of executives name the shortage of capable people as the top barrier to AI adoption; 63% call the skills gap the greatest obstacle to transformation of any kind. Oman is no exception. A Special AI Zone without Omani engineers to animate it is a monument, not an economy. Data governance, affordable computing power and trust all matter but talent is the gate through which everything else must pass.
The remedy is demanding but not mysterious. Worldwide, 77% of employers plan to reskill their workforce to work alongside AI by 2030; Oman must match that with national urgency AI fluency built into schools and universities, reskilling funded as infrastructure rather than charity, and adoption designed for augmentation, not replacement. AI pays its highest returns when it amplifies human judgment. A nation that trains its people to direct these systems captures the dividend; one that lets the systems merely run captures inequality.
That, ultimately, is the choice before us. Artificial intelligence can be an engine of growth or an autopilot flying the economy somewhere nobody chose to go. The difference lies entirely in human hands in policy, in investment, in the courage to bet on our own people. Oil made Oman prosperous. Intelligence cultivated, distributed and defiantly human will make it unstoppable. The first discovery was luck. The second is a decision.
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