Dubai swaps app championship for AI agents race

Dubai has renamed its Create Apps Championship the Create AI Agents Championship, with Crown Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum announcing the switch as this year's winners were honoured on 7 October. The stated ambition is "making Dubai the first city to lead innovation in this field."

The distinction driving the rebrand: a chatbot answers a question, while an agent can be given a goal and left to work toward it with limited human input. Entrants must find a real problem, build an agent to solve it, test its impact and show how it could become a business.

Launched as a local contest in 2023, the competition has drawn 15,564 applications from 153 countries, producing 1,700 prototypes and more than 140 live apps, according to the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, which runs it. This year alone brought 9,754 applications — more than the first two editions combined — with more than 250 mentors involved and a team flying 55 hours from Nicaragua to take part.

Saeed Al Gergawi, vice president of the Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, frames the emirate as a platform: innovators prove a concept in Dubai, then deploy it in their home markets. "Anyone that has just an idea, to be able to test it and then to be able to deploy it in their own markets, in their home geographies," he said. Rakesh Mavath, co-founder of Takeem and a winner from the first edition, now runs administration, content marketing and go-to-market on agentic AI in the backend. "Agentic AI matters for one simple reason. It's ease of use of the consumer," he said.

Dubai sells speed, and the target is explicit: shrink a journey that usually takes years into less than six months. What gets proven in the emirate then arrives in home markets whose regulators never watched the trial run.

There is no minimum age to enter, and no requirement to write code.