The organisations I speak to across the UAE aren’t struggling because they lack technology. They’re struggling because their people haven’t been equipped to think critically about how to use it.
Business across the UAE are investing heavily in AI. Very few are asking whether their people are equipped to use it well. More coding, More data. More prompt engineering. This seemed logical: the world is going digital, so people need to go completely digital now.
The reality is more interesting than that.
According to Korn Ferry’s Talent Acquisition Trends 2026, nearly three quarters of hiring leaders in the UAE now rank critical thinking as the single most important skill they’re looking for in their workforce development. This ranked above AI certifications, technical ability, and above almost everything else.
A report in Gulf News ranked AI skills fifth, behind problem-solving, leadership capability, collaboration with AI agents, and adaptability.
Jonathan Holmes, Managing Director for Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Korn Ferry, pointed out that the skill most in demand right now is critical thinking.
This doesn’t mean that AI skills don’t matter. It means that they’re not enough on their own. The organisations getting this right aren’t choosing between critical thinking and AI literacy, they’re building both skills deliberately.
Why AI Raised the Value of Human Thinking
AI is everywhere and has become the baseline for how companies operate across the globe. Organisations across the UAE, from government entities to financial institutions to logistics companies, are embedding AI tools into daily operations. It’s no longer a differentiator to know how to use them, it’s the minimum requirement.
And that’s exactly why critical thinking has moved to the top of the list.
What AI cannot do, at least not yet and not reliably, is interpret its own outputs with genuine judgement. It can process vast amounts of information, it can surface patterns, generate options, draft responses faster than any human team.
But the moment those outputs need to be challenged, contextualised, or applied to a decision that carries real consequences, you need a person in the room who can think critically.
The people who will be most valuable in their workforce won’t be those who are simply relying on AI for automation. They’re the ones who understand how AI works, know how to use it well, and can interrogate its outputs with the kind of sound decision-making that no algorithm can replicate. Critical thinking and AI literacy, working together, is what that looks like in practice.
Why AI Raised the Value of Human Thinking
Picture a sales team that’s been handed an AI tool to help prioritise leads and generate outreach. The tool works, the data is clean, the recommendations are logical on paper.
But the experienced account executive looks at the top-ranked lead and knows, from a conversation three months ago, that the budget was frozen. The AI doesn’t know that. What makes this person valuable isn’t that they ignored the tool, it’s that they understood what it’s capable of doing and not doing, then applied their own judgement to bridge that gap.
Enough AI literacy to use the tool effectively, and enough critical thinking to know when to override it. Neither skill alone is sufficient. And right now in the UAE, most teams have not developed either skill to the level that is now required.
The Skill Gap Nobody is Talking About
The conversation in most organisations has been almost entirely focused on AI adoption. For example, which tools to implement, which processes to automate, which platforms to invest in. Very few have asked the harder question of whether their people are equipped to work with these tools intelligently.
There’s a meaningful difference between using an AI tool and understanding it. Knowing how to prompt a system is one thing. Knowing how It was trained, where its blind spots are, how to verify its outputs, and how to apply the results to a real business context is a different capability entirely.
And layered on top of that, the ability to think critically about what you’re seeing, question assumptions baked into the output, and reach a sound conclusion under uncertainty.
These are learned skills and they develop through deliberate practice, structured feedback, and programmes designed to build both dimensions, not just one of them. The organisations that are pulling ahead are the ones that recognise this gap and are doing something about it, investing in soft skills training and AI capability development as part of the same workforce strategy, not as separate workstreams.
It’s Not Just About Senior Leaders
A common mistake is to treat critical thinking as a leadership competency, as something to develop in managers and executives through corporate training, while the rest of the team gets handed an AI tool and left to figure it out. That logic made sense a decade ago. It doesn’t hold anymore.
When AI tools are sitting in the hands of every employee, from customer service agents to junior analysts to sales coordinators, the ability to use those tools with judgement, not just efficiency, matters at every level. A junior team member who genuinely understands the AI platform they’re working with, and can critically evaluate what it’s telling them, is more valuable than a senior who uses it on autopilot and accepts every output at face value.
This has direct implications for how workforce development is designed. Building critical thinking and AI literacy across a workforce, not just at the top of it, requires programmes that go beyond information transfer. It means creating space for people to practise reasoning, to stress-test AI outputs in realistic scenarios, and to develop the confidence to know when the technology is helping and when it’s leading them astray.
When the Pressure Came, the Thinking Had to Change
We saw this play out directly with a mid-market retail and hospitality client here in the UAE. When a period of intense, unforeseen industry pressure hit, the kind that compresses timelines, rattles teams, and sends sales figures in the wrong direction, the response from their people was telling.
The problem-solving training we delivered wasn’t about new tools or new processes, but about building the mental habits that allow people to assess a situation clearly, identify what they can actually influence, and move forward with intent rather than anxiety. A shift followed that enabled teams that had been reactive, to become proactive.
Team members started bringing solutions instead of waiting to be told what to do and even in our brainstorming sessions these waves of new approaches started to appear. The pressure on the organisation didn’t disappear, but the organisation’s capacity to meet it, did.
And this is what critical thinking looks like when it’s been properly developed, it presents itself as a skill that can be built and applied when it matters most. In a business environment where AI is increasingly part of every decision, it’s a skill that becomes more powerful when it’s paired with genuine AI knowledge.
The Question Worth Asking
If three quarters of the UAE’s hiring leaders are now prioritising critical thinking above almost everything else, then it’s natural that the following two things follow.
First, the organisations competing for top talent need their existing people to already have it, because strong critical thinkers will be harder and more expensive to hire as demand rises. Second, the teams that develop this capability intentionally, through structured decision-making training and soft skills development, alongside real AI literacy programmes, will adapt faster, make better decisions, and get far more return from their technology investments than those that treat the two as separate priorities.
The question we should be asking isn’t whether your team uses AI. In 2026, they almost certainly do. The question is whether they’re using it with the judgement, knowledge, and critical thinking capability to use it well.
That combination is what we build, and in the current climate, it’s what every forward-thinking organisation across the UAE and GCC should be building too.
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