Around 63% of smartphone users in the UAE are expected to delegate everyday tasks to artificial intelligence (AI) agents by 2030, as the technology moves beyond answering questions to performing activities on behalf of users, according to a new report by Ericsson ConsumerLab.
The study, titled ‘An Agentic Life: How Consumer AI Usage is Shaping Future Network Needs’, found that 10% of respondents in the UAE already use agentic AI to complete tasks they would previously have handled themselves. This is twice the global figure of 5%, highlighting the country's relatively strong adoption of emerging AI technologies.
The report identified 18% of UAE smartphone owners as AI super users, referring to consumers who make extensive use of multimodal AI technologies. This proportion is projected to rise to approximately 46% by 2030.
Meanwhile, 38% of respondents expect to use AI on an additional type of device, such as smart glasses, by the end of the decade. The findings indicate that AI interactions could increasingly extend across multiple devices rather than remain limited to smartphones.
As AI agents take on tasks in the background, they could become a new category of largely invisible network users, generating demand for connectivity even when consumers are not actively using their devices.
It was discovered that the AI response time is significantly more critical in influencing the network satisfaction of UAE AI super users compared to the average users by 2.4 times.
According to Jasmeet Sethi, Head of Ericsson ConsumerLab, the increasing use of AI technology among the consumers in the UAE is giving rise to needs for connectivity which go beyond typical screen-related connectivity.
Despite growing adoption, concerns about security and identity verification persist. The report found that 54% of daily AI users in the UAE are strongly concerned about fake AI assistants acting in their name.
Verifying the identity of the AI agents was found to be the task of the communication service providers, implying that telecoms can play a much bigger role in building up trust in AI as the technology starts being increasingly incorporated in daily life.
As Petra Schirren, President of Ericsson Gulf Region, noted, “the United Arab Emirates sees a faster uptake of advanced AI technologies compared to the world average due to its advanced technology environment and openness to innovation among consumers.”
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Ericsson ConsumerLab conducted a study that involved more than 43,000 smartphone users aged between 15 to 69 years in 27 different markets which included UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, USA, UK, China, and India among others.
As reported by Ericsson, this is a representative sample of about 1.7 billion smartphone users around the world. These results show that mobile networks have to adapt to handle more automated processes in addition to the existing use of smartphones by users of the AI agent.