MBRCLD launches AI-powered Dubai Leadership Coach for government employees

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 ele