Sheikh Hamdan Invites 500 Professionals to Join ‘500 Future Minds’ at Dubai Future Week

His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence of the UAE, has directed that 500 professionals from five future-driven sectors in Dubai be invited to take part in Dubai Future Week this November, through a gathering called 500 Future Minds.

The group will be drawn in equal numbers from the professions that run the city day to day. It will include 100 teachers, 100 frontline responders, 100 homegrown entrepreneurs, 100 economy and finance professionals, and 100 urban planners and architects. Announcing the invitation on X, Sheikh Hamdan framed the 500 as partners in the emirate’s long-term direction rather than guests at another conference.

We want these 500 participants to be our partners in advancing Mohammed bin Rashid’s vision for Dubai, which places people at the heart of our objectives and priorities.

Today, I directed the invitation of 500 professionals across five future-driven sectors in Dubai to share their expertise and ideas at ‘500 Future Minds’, a gathering at Dubai Future Week, taking place from 18 to 21 November at the Museum of the Future and Emirates Towers. We want these 500 participants to be our partners in advancing Mohammed bin Rashid’s vision for Dubai, which places people at the heart of our objectives and priorities.

— Hamdan bin Mohammed (@HamdanMohammed) October 21, 2026

A one-day working session, not a stage

500 Future Minds is designed as a one-day experience inside the wider event. Across the day, the participants will work through future scenarios relevant to their own sectors, examine how emerging technologies and wider transformations could reshape their work, and identify the priorities, ideas and commitments that can contribute to Dubai’s future. The official artwork for the gathering gives the group its own identity, a silver medallion carrying the name Dubai Shapers.

In a statement issued with the announcement, Sheikh Hamdan set out the thinking behind putting practitioners, rather than only senior executives and officials, in the room.

Dubai believes that shaping the future is a shared responsibility. It requires collective effort, and our ultimate goal is to build a better future for humanity.

The selection is the point worth noting. Foresight exercises usually draw their participants from ministries, consultancies and large companies. This one reserves most of its seats for the people who teach in the city’s classrooms, respond to its emergencies, build its young businesses and draw its neighbourhoods, alongside the finance professionals who fund them. What those five groups agree on in November will say as much about how Dubai sees its next decade as any keynote delivered that week.

One of eight concepts at Dubai Future Week

Dubai Future Week runs from November 18 to 21 at the Museum of the Future and Emirates Towers, organised by the Dubai Future Foundation, whose Board of Trustees Sheikh Hamdan chairs. Held under the theme ‘For the Human of the Future’, the event is expected to bring together more than 10,000 participants for keynote speeches, panel discussions, workshops, debates, competitions, pitch platforms, exhibitions and closed-door meetings across the Dubai Future District.

500 Future Minds is one of the week’s eight core concepts, alongside The Big Stage, The Prototype Floor, The Pitch, The Policy Room, The Challenge, Offstage and The District. The Challenge will host the third edition of the AI Grandmaster competition, with a grand prize of AED 1 million, while The Policy Room brings ministers, regulators and international organisations together to work on future-ready policy for areas such as AI and data governance.

The whole programme is organised around five questions: How We’ll Live, How We’ll Think, How We’ll Innovate, How We’ll Feel, and How We’ll Do Business. It is a deliberately human framing for an event that will spend much of its time on artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced computing, and it explains why the week’s most distinctive gathering is built around the city’s own workforce. The measure of 500 Future Minds will not be the day itself, but whether the priorities and commitments it produces find their way into sector plans once the week is over.