Every few months a new ranking declares some Gulf city the smartest in the region. The IMD Smart City Index 2026, published by the Swiss business school IMD, is worth a closer look because of what it measures and what it concludes. It placed Dubai sixth and Abu Dhabi tenth out of 148 cities worldwide, making the UAE the only country in the Middle East and North Africa with two cities in the global top ten, as Middle East AI News reported. The more interesting part is why.
What the index actually measures
The IMD index is not a count of sensors or apps. It combines hard data with surveys of how residents experience technology, infrastructure and governance across pillars such as health and safety, mobility, opportunities and governance. Dubai earned an A rating on both the structures and technology pillars, the highest the index awards, and Abu Dhabi matched it. Both cities scored above 0.76 on the technology pillar, with public trust in online government services reaching 95.7 percent in Dubai and 89 percent in Abu Dhabi. Those trust numbers, not the gadgets, are what set the Gulf entries apart.
The finding that matters
This year's headline conclusion is a useful corrective to the usual smart city pitch. The index found that structures, meaning institutions and public trust, are a stronger predictor of overall performance than technology scores alone. In other words, a city does not climb the table by buying more technology. It climbs by building institutions that deliver services people actually trust. The report singled out the Gulf model of state directed digital investment as a global reference point, but only when it is paired with high quality service delivery.
Why the Gulf scores well
The evidence sits in the apps residents use every day. Abu Dhabi's TAMM superapp serves around 3.6 million users across more than 1,100 services, while Dubai's DubaiNow covers some 280 services from 44 public sector entities, according to the same analysis. In Saudi Arabia, the Tawakkalna superapp now reaches 34 million users across 600 government services, and the UAE's national digital identity platform, UAE PASS, ties thousands of services together behind a single login. Saudi Arabia placed six cities in the Arab top ten, more than any other country in the region, with Riyadh climbing three places to 24th globally and AlUla jumping 27 places to 85th. The pattern across both countries is the same: invest in the plumbing of digital government, then make sure it works well enough that people use it.
The catch and the next test
There are caveats. The index rewards resident perception, which can lag or lead reality, and high trust scores in tightly run systems are not the same as the messy accountability of other governance models. A strong ranking is also easier to win in a compact, well funded city state than in a sprawling one. The forward question for the UAE is whether it can keep services improving as it reorganises. The country has just created a Federal Authority for Artificial Intelligence and Data to bring data, AI and digital government under one cabinet level body, as Gulf News reported. That body, led by Omar Sultan Al Olama and reporting to the cabinet, is meant to make data, AI and digital services line up across the federation, as The National reported. That consolidation is precisely the kind of institutional move the IMD index says matters most, and the kind other governments are now copying. Morocco's Idarati X.0 superapp project, launched in early 2026, is explicitly modelled on the same design principles.
The temptation with smart city rankings is to read them as a hardware contest and conclude that whoever spends most on technology wins. The IMD index argues the opposite, and the Gulf is the clearest illustration. Dubai and Abu Dhabi rank highly not because they have the most sensors but because residents trust the digital services their governments provide, and that trust is earned through delivery rather than announcements. The risk for the region is complacency: a high score is a snapshot, and trust is easy to erode if a flagship service degrades or a data incident undercuts confidence. The new federal authority will be judged on the same basis the index uses, whether coordination translates into services that quietly work, every day, for people who never think about the institutions behind them.
