In an era when governments are racing to regulate artificial intelligence, the United Arab Emirates is doing something very different: it's inviting AI into the lawmaking process itself.

In March 2025, the UAE announced a plan to use generative AI to assist in drafting and amending federal laws. The country’s goal? To cut legislative development time by 70% while improving the clarity and relevance of legal texts.

🔗 Source: Financial Times

It’s an ambitious move - one that pushes AI beyond the usual administrative roles and into the heart of democratic processes.

What does AI-assisted legislation look like?

The UAE’s approach includes using AI tools to:

• Analyse existing laws and identify contradictions
• Suggest amendments based on previous legislative patterns
• Compare proposals against global legal trends
• Generate first drafts for review by human lawmakers

This shift reflects a growing confidence in AI’s ability to manage not just data, but complexity, nuance, and evolving public priorities.

Benefits: speed, precision, and consistency

Drafting legislation is traditionally a slow, manual process involving large teams of legal experts. By integrating AI into this workflow, the UAE hopes to:

• Reduce administrative bottlenecks
• Produce clearer, more accessible legal language
• Align domestic laws more efficiently with international standards

It’s a bold experiment - and one that, if successful, could become a model for other governments.

But the risks are real

Delegating legislative tasks to AI raises serious ethical and practical questions:

• Whose values are embedded in the algorithms?
• Can the public trust AI-generated laws?
• How do we ensure transparency, auditability, and democratic accountability?

Human oversight remains essential. The promise of AI must be balanced with safeguards against bias, opacity, and overreach.

What it means for Legal Tech - and for Ulla

While Ulla doesn’t write legislation, her role fits naturally into this evolving landscape. As governments and legal bodies handle more data and decisions, clarity, traceability, and secure communication become more important than ever.

Ulla’s AI-powered transcriptions and summaries help legal professionals, policy teams, and administrators capture every discussion clearly, maintain accurate records, and share knowledge securely. And because she can be deployed on local servers, Ulla fits the needs of institutions with high privacy standards - like governments.

In a world where AI is shaping laws themselves, tools like Ulla ensure that human oversight, collaboration, and context stay at the centre of the conversation.