Your child will live in an AI world. Are we preparing them or just hoping for the best?

Last year, I sat with a mother in Sharjah who told me something I have not forgotten. Her daughter had come home from school and asked: “Mama, is AI going to do my job one day?” The girl was nine years old. And the mother had no answer.

That moment captures exactly where we are. A generation of children is growing up with intelligent questions about an intelligent world - and most of our education systems are still catching up. I have spent years working in classrooms, training teachers, and designing AI learning programmes across the UAE and Egypt. What I have seen is both encouraging and urgent.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, AI will transform operations for nearly 90 per cent of businesses by 2030, and 39 per cent of workers’ core skills are expected to change.

These are not distant projections. They are the world our children are already entering. The question is not whether they will encounter AI. It is whether they will be equipped to lead it.

For parents: The question is not "Will my child use AI? It is ‘how?"

Every child in the UAE today will use artificial intelligence as naturally as we use search engines. The real question is whether they will use it as passive consumers, letting it think for them, or as active creators who understand how to direct it, question it, and build with it. The difference between these two outcomes is not talent. It is education.

Research from our pilot programmes shows that children as young as five can engage meaningfully with AI-assisted learning when the environment is designed correctly. They are not learning to ‘code’ in the traditional sense. They are learning to think in structured, logical ways that prepare them for an AI-integrated world.

You do not need to understand artificial intelligence to support your child’s learning journey. You need to ask the right questions at their school.

For teachers: AI is not your replacement. It is your relief

I have delivered training workshops for Arabic language teachers in partnership with the Sharjah Private Education Authority (SPEA), and the first thing I always tell them is this: the teachers who will thrive in the next decade are not the ones who know the most about AI. They are the ones who know how to use it to free up their most valuable resource, their time and human attention.

AI tools can handle repetitive marking, differentiated materials, and individualised feedback. What they cannot do is notice a quiet student struggling emotionally. They cannot build the trust that makes a child willing to try again after failing. They cannot inspire. In our SPEA workshops, I watched teachers transform - from anxious about AI to advocates for it. That shift, in itself, is one of the most powerful outcomes we have achieved. That is the teacher’s irreplaceable role. AI does not diminish it; it clears the path to it.

A teacher who knows how to use AI is not less of a teacher. She is more of one.

What real results look like

In the 2024–2025 academic year, the Fusha Tech initiative was piloted across two schools - in Sharjah and Egypt, with 100 students from kindergarten through Grade 4. The programme combined an AI assistant named Fasih, which interacts entirely in Modern Standard Arabic, with adaptive exercises and a teacher analytics dashboard. Fasih corrects errors in real time, adjusts difficulty automatically, and never switches to dialect.

The results were clear: overall language performance improved by 12 percentage points. Reading comprehension rose from 70 per cent to 82 per cent. Oral expression in Fusha climbed from 58 per cent to 71 per cent. These numbers come from real classrooms, not a laboratory.

For school leaders: The window is now

When AI becomes a formal subject in UAE schools in the coming academic year, institutions that have already trained their teachers and piloted tools will have a significant advantage. Through EG i-School Hub, a UAE-based AI education initiative licenced through Innovation City, we work with school leaders to build this infrastructure. The approach is simple: start with strategy, not technology. The tool should follow the vision, not the other way around.

Why Arabic deserves special attention

Arabic-speaking students navigate a gap that peers in other languages rarely face: the distance between spoken dialect and the Modern Standard Arabic required academically. Digital technology has widened this gap by flooding young environments with colloquial content.

A UNESCO study shows that only 3 per cent of online content is currently available in Arabic, a digital gap that AI, used with intention, has the power to begin closing.

Fusha Tech was built specifically to address this reality, and its nomination as a finalist for the Mohammed bin Rashid Arabic Language Award affirms that innovation in Arabic education is a national priority; not a niche concern.

What each of us can do today

For parents: ask your child “Did you use AI to think for you today, or to think better?” The distinction matters more than you might expect. For teachers: try one AI tool this week - not to transform your teaching overnight, but to understand what it feels like from a learner’s perspective. For school leaders: start with one willing teacher, one class, one term. Measure what happens. Then build from there.

The children sitting in classrooms across the UAE today will inherit a world shaped by intelligent systems. Our responsibility as parents, educators, and citizens is to ensure they inherit it as builders, not bystanders. That is a responsibility worth taking seriously. Starting today.

This article was contributed by Eman El-Gibaly (LinkedIn). She is the Founder of EG Global Ltd and creator of EG i-School Hub, an AI education initiative serving schools across the UAE and GCC. She is a certified AI Prompter and a 16-time Microsoft Education Award recipient. Her Fusha Tech programme - which integrates AI with Modern Standard Arabic teaching - is currently a finalist for the Mohammed bin Rashid Arabic Language Award. She conducts AI training workshops for educators in partnership with the Sharjah Private Education Authority (SPEA).

This article was originally published on Khaleej Times.
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