ABU DHABI, Nov 4 (Reuters) -

UAE energy giant ADNOC will apply highly autonomous agentic

artificial intelligence in the energy industry for the first

time, in partnership with G42, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and AIQ, its CEO Sultan

Al Jaber said on Monday at an industry event in Abu Dhabi.

The UAE, a wealthy oil producer and longtime security

partner of the U.S., is hoping for greater access to American

technology to build its own advanced tech industry.

The push is led by the government-backed G42, which in

April received a $1.5 billion investment from Microsoft ( MSFT )

, which aims to diversify the UAE's economy away from

oil.

"The exponential growth of AI is creating a power surge

that no one anticipated 18 months ago, when ChatGPT took off,"

said Jaber, who is also the Minister of Industry and Advanced

Technology and COP28 President.

Agentic AI is considered the next frontier in artificial

intelligence, allowing the system to operate autonomously and

perform tasks on behalf of users.

"It will not only analyse petabytes of data, it will

proactively and autonomously identify operational improvements,"

Jaber said. "It will speed up seismic surveys from months to

days. It will increase the accuracy of production forecasts by

up to 90%."

The UAE is pouring billions of dollars into artificial

intelligence, which has included the development of Arabic and

Hindi language chatbot applications similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Emirati officials believe the Gulf state's bet on

artificial intelligence will strengthen its international clout

by making it a key economic actor long after demand for oil has

dried up.