ABU DHABI - UAE energy giant ADNOC will apply highly autonomous agentic artificial intelligence in the energy industry for the first time, in partnership with G42, Microsoft 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.O, 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.

(Reporting by Maha El Dahan and Youssef Saba; Writing by Nadine Awadalla and Tala Ramadan; Editing by Michael Georgy and Louise Heavens)