The Complete Guide to Using AI in the Government Industry in Bahrain in 2025

Bahrain's AI moment has arrived: in 2025 the Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) rolled out the National Policy for the Use of Artificial Intelligence and adopted the GCC Guiding Manual on AI ethics, giving public servants a clear roadmap to scale AI across healthcare, education and public services while protecting privacy and human oversight; the policy is explicitly aligned with Bahrain's Economic Vision 2030 and UN SDGs.

This guide explains what that framework means for government teams - from legal compliance and procurement to skills programs like Tamkeen's target to train 50,000 Bahrainis in AI by 2030 - and highlights concrete use cases already in play, from citizen chatbots to satellite-powered monitoring of palm trees.

Read iGA's policy for implementation details and Bahrain's national AI strategy overview for governance and workforce goals.

Bahrain's national AI strategy, anchored by the Information & eGovernment Authority's newly published National Policy for the Use of Artificial Intelligence, sets a practical, ethics-first roadmap for scaling AI across public services while keeping legal safeguards front and center; the policy is explicitly tied to national laws such as the Personal Data Protection Law, the Protection of Information and State Documents Law and the Open Data Policy, and is complemented by the GCC Guiding Manual on AI ethics to reflect shared Gulf values and human‑centred principles.

The framework rests on four pillars - legal compliance, responsible adoption, public education, and international cooperation - and sits alongside a 2024 standalone AI law that requires transparency, human oversight and prohibits harmful uses while attaching penalties for violations.

Concrete national initiatives include large-scale training programs (targets to build local AI capacity), procurement and oversight guidance for government pilots, and sector use cases from smarter healthcare to satellite-driven monitoring - yes, even using imagery to track palm‑tree health - that illustrate how regulation and innovation are being balanced to drive economic and social goals in line with Economic Vision 2030 and the UN SDGs.

For the full policy text see iGA's announcement and a concise regulatory overview of Bahrain's AI rules and standards.

“promote the responsible and secure use of AI to drive economic and social growth, while improving government efficiency across key sectors.” - Mohammed Ali Al Qaed, iGA Chief Executive

Bahrain's digital government strategy is a fast-moving, citizen-centred program that treats online public services as a right - built around a clear Digital‑First principle, digital inclusion and a data‑once approach that cuts red tape and boosts transparency.

The plan stitches together practical building blocks: a single-sign-on eKey identity, NotifyMe national notifications, the Sijilat commercial portal and a cloud-native National Taxation System running on AWS to deliver high availability and on-demand scale; learn more in the Bahrain Digital Government Strategy principles and the Information & eGovernment Authority strategy overview.

Openness is baked in via the Bahrain Open Data Portal and Big Data warehouses so policymakers can use analytics for smarter decisions, while KPIs and executive committees (including the MCICT) monitor progress weekly.

Inclusion measures - free public Wi‑Fi, laptop distribution, assisted digital service centres and state‑of‑the‑art eGovernment kiosks with fingerprint biometrics and printers - mean the strategy isn't just for tech insiders (Bahrain already reports near‑universal internet reach).

Backed by the kingdom's Digital‑First Policies, the result is a coherent platform for AI, fintech and smart‑city pilots that lets citizens transact once, access services anywhere, and gives innovators a dependable public data backbone to build on.

Bahrain has stitched ethics into the very fabric of its AI rollout: the Information & eGovernment Authority's National Policy for the Use of Artificial Intelligence formally adopts the GCC Guiding Manual to ensure AI respects human dignity, Islamic values and regional identity while aligning with domestic laws like the Personal Data Protection Law and the Open Data Policy; the result is a tightly linked governance stack that couples practical safeguards - human oversight, transparency, privacy and non‑discrimination - with enforcement tools such as licensing, civil liability and fines from the standalone AI Regulation Law.

That joined approach is deliberately operational - iGA runs workshops and awareness programs to bring public servants up to speed, regulators are urged to apply procurement and safety checks, and sector rules explicitly bar life‑and‑death decisions from being made solely by machines - so the “ethics” box is not just aspirational but directly affects procurement, training and day‑to‑day service design.

For the full policy text see iGA's National Policy announcement and Bahrain's official AI guidelines that list core principles like human oversight, accountability and sustainability.

“promote the responsible and secure use of AI to drive economic and social growth, while improving government efficiency across key sectors.” - Mohammed Ali Al Qaed, iGA Chief Executive

Building real AI capacity is now a national project: Tamkeen's flagship program aims to train 50,000 Bahrainis in AI by 2030 through three tailored tracks - AI for Executives, AI Generalists and AI Specialists - with registration already open for the Generalists and Executives cohorts so enterprises can enroll staff directly via the Tamkeen AI Training Program registration page; the initiative pairs local and international training partners, maps to Tamkeen's 2025 strategic priorities, and is explicitly framed to boost private‑sector competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship while creating a dependable pipeline of AI‑literate talent for government pilots and industry projects.

Over the next five years the focus is practical - shift executive mindsets, equip generalists to use AI tools for automation and analytics, and later train specialists to build systems - so organisations that register today can expect a steady stream of trained professionals to staff digital transformation efforts across Bahrain.

For program details see the Tamkeen AI Training Program announcement and independent coverage from StartUp Bahrain.

“We launched this program to align the skills of Bahraini talent with labor market needs and equip them with future-ready capabilities. This training will support Bahrainis and open doors for their career development prospects. In addition, entrepreneurs and executives will also benefit from utilizing AI to boost efficiency, productivity, and the adoption of innovative technological solutions.” - Khalid Al Bayat, Chief Growth Officer at Tamkeen

Bahrain's R&D ecosystem is rapidly knitting together government labs, universities and private hubs so pilots move from whiteboard to real-world services: the iGA's National Innovation Hub acts as an integrated lab for AI prototypes and public‑sector pilots while the iGA Innovation Lab in Isa Town is running a six‑month iGA AI Talent Program that pairs top ICT students with on‑the‑job projects to build government-ready prototypes; research partnerships - notably the University of Bahrain and Benefit Company's AI and advanced computing lab - focus on cybersecurity, big data and sustainable energy, and an MoU with the Nasser AI R&D Center strengthens joint development.

Practical projects already translate into impact: a Botanical Atlas uses satellite imagery and AI to map vegetation and monitor palm trees for food‑security planning, open datasets fuel research via Bahrain's innovation pages and National Open Data Portal, and a new 57,000 m² industrial innovation hub at Salman Industrial City will give makerspace and light‑manufacturing capacity to young entrepreneurs.

Together with FinTech Bay, regulatory sandboxes and competitions like Fikra and the eGovernment Excellence Award, these nodes create a testbed where ethical governance, talent and industry meet to build deployable AI for public services.

"Young people possess the ambition and determination needed to shape a more advanced and prosperous future for our beloved nation." - His Highness Shaikh Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa

Putting AI to work in Bahrain's public sector rests on three practical pillars: clear procurement rules, enforceable technical and ethical standards, and a transparency-first mindset that treats data governance as infrastructure.

The Kingdom's 2024 standalone AI law already codifies duties on privacy, human oversight, licensing and an AI Unit to monitor compliance - with striking penalties (up to three years' jail or fines around BD2,000 for serious breaches) - while sectoral prohibitions even bar life‑and‑death decisions being made solely by machines; see the concise regulatory overview at Nemko AI Regulation Bahrain - full regulatory overview for the full breakdown.

Procurement has been trail‑blazing too: Bahrain was among the first to pilot the World Economic Forum's public‑sector AI procurement rules, a hands‑on exercise in balancing innovation and risk that is explained in the WEF

AI Procurement in a Box - World Economic Forum guide

and was formally announced in government releases such as the Bahrain News Agency 2019 AI procurement pilot briefing.

For implementers, the takeaway is simple and tangible: buy with standards in mind (transparency, explainability, human oversight), require licences and audits, and treat procurement contracts as a lever to enforce open, auditable data and model practices rather than an afterthought.

Bahraini banks and financial institutions are using AI across the customer journey and the back‑office to tighten security, speed service and meet regulators: retailers like BBK have deployed an AI‑enhanced fraud‑prevention platform that gives the bank comprehensive control over tokenization for mobile wallet provisioning and strengthens compliance with Central Bank of Bahrain rules, while specialist vendors are embedding ML into AML/KYC, transaction monitoring and behavioral‑risk scoring to automate alerts and reduce false positives.

Customer experience is being transformed too - chatbots and virtual assistants (for example BIBF's NOORA and bank bots such as Fatima and Dana) handle routine queries and staff training, freeing human teams for complex cases - and industry pilots show real‑time scoring of transaction batches can produce explainable alerts for regulators and investigators.

Taken together, these moves create a pragmatic safety net: AI detects subtle fraud patterns, vendors automate screening and banks use procurement and licensing rules to keep models auditable and human‑overseen, turning compliance into an operational advantage rather than a cost center; see BBK's announcement on the fraud platform and Faceki's AI AML offerings for how the technology is being applied in Bahrain.

“This collaboration marks a significant step forward in our commitment to enhancing our financial crime detection and prevention capabilities. By leveraging GPS advanced solution, we will not only strengthen our security measures but also demonstrate our commitment to providing our customers with the most secure and efficient banking experience.” - Nadine Al Shirawi, Head of Group Compliance and MLRO at BBK

Which country is using AI the most is less a single‑winner question and more a lesson in complementary strengths: the United States tops the Government AI Readiness rankings mainly because of a massive, mature technology sector and dense supplier ecosystem, while China's competitive edge lies in fast commercial deployment and execution at scale - and the Gulf is meanwhile buying compute and building data centres at pace to claim its regional stake.

For Bahrain that means three practical takeaways: invest in the Government + Data & Infrastructure pillars (the Oxford Government AI Readiness Index shows readiness hinges on those pillars), plan for energy and compute demand now (AI queries can use roughly ten times more energy than typical web searches, a key argument driving the US–Bahrain civil nuclear cooperation agreement around SMRs), and choose partnerships that balance access to hardware, governance standards and export‑control realities in the US‑China competition.

A vivid test: without resilient power and clear procurement rules, even the best predictive model is a paper champion - so Bahrain's path is to pair pragmatic infrastructure (data centres, energy) with governance, workforce pipelines and selective international alliances to turn national policy into real services rather than aspirational plans; see the Oxford Readiness Index and reporting on the US–Bahrain SMR agreement for context.

“Without applications, having only foundational models, whether open source or closed source, is worthless.” - Robin Li

For a practical, government-ready rollout in Bahrain, follow a short implementation checklist that ties policy to delivery: adopt iGA's iGA National AI Policy as the legal baseline and align every pilot with Vision 2030 and the national portal's digital‑first services (use the Bahrain National Portal eServices and eKey); embed procurement rules and technical standards into every contract so vendors deliver explainability, licences and auditable models rather than black‑box demos; start small with targeted pilots via the iGA Innovation Hub and scale proven use cases (fraud scoring, citizen chatbots, satellite‑based monitoring) only after independent audits and human‑oversight gates are in place; invest in workforce pipelines now - pair Tamkeen cohorts with practical courses so generalists and executives can use tools safely - and consider short, hands‑on upskilling like the AI Essentials for Work bootcamp (Nucamp) to build prompt and workflow literacy across teams.

Above all, pair governance with gritty operational checks - clear KPIs, weekly oversight by MCICT bodies, energy and data‑centre planning, and a culture of continuous auditing - because even the smartest model is a paper champion without power, procurement discipline and trained people to run it well.

“promote the responsible and secure use of AI to drive economic and social growth, while improving government efficiency across key sectors.” - Mohammed Ali Al Qaed, iGA Chief Executive