ALIF: Building AI Fluency, One Cohort at a Time

AI adoption is growing quickly. Organization-wide impact is not.

Most organizations now use AI in at least one business function. Yet the majority remain in the experimentation or piloting stages and have not begun scaling AI across the enterprise. Only a small fraction have reached the point where AI is thoroughly integrated across most of their functions. Everyone else is somewhere behind them.

What distinguished these organizations was not technology alone. It was the workforce. These organizations invested early in the workforce and operating foundations surrounding AI, including training, change management, workflow redesign, and leadership sponsorship. In government, where the workflows in question govern tax administration, healthcare delivery, and national security, that dependency only sharpens. The systems only work if the people responsible for them know how to evaluate, apply, and govern them.

From Theory to Operational Playbook

ALIF, Scale AI's flagship Generative AI Foundations program for government professionals across technical and non-technical roles, draws its name from Alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and the related Arabic verb meaning "to become familiar with." Both meanings reflect the program's purpose: to provide a starting point and build familiarity with AI from the ground up. Developed by Scale AI for the region, ALIF integrates Arabic, regional use cases, and public-sector context into the curriculum from the outset, rather than treating localization as a translation step.

ALIF was first launched in Qatar in December 2025 by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), in partnership with Scale AI, and is delivered through Qatar Digital Academy (QDA).

ALIF is built on the principle that effective AI learning must be applied, hands-on, and contextually relevant. It helps government professionals move beyond general awareness and build the practical foundations for operational fluency. Rather than stopping at concepts, ALIF connects foundational understanding with practice grounded in the work of government.

The curriculum is inspired by the playbook Scale's delivery teams use on live engagements, distilled into a structured, accredited program and informed by Scale's experience building and deploying production AI systems. Those lessons are translated into structured exercises and scenarios adapted to the realities of government work. Its core teaching objective is to move learners from awareness of AI to the ability to think through where AI can support their own workflow, and how to use it confidently and responsibly.

In Qatar, ALIF directly contributes to the country’s broader digital capability ambitions. It aligns with the Digital Agenda 2030 objective of increasing professional staff digital competencies by 10%, as well as the Third National Development Strategy’s target for more than 46% of the workforce to hold skilled or highly skilled roles. Through this alignment, ALIF supports MCIT’s wider efforts to strengthen government services and accelerate digital transformation across the state.

Designed with an Arabic-first focus while remaining fully accessible in English, the program split into two distinct tracks:

ALIF Core is a one-day, hands-on, instructor-led workshop built for business and policy professionals. It covers AI foundations, safe output evaluation, and practical use-case identification. Every participant leaves with an AI Opportunity Canvas: a concrete, public sector-specific proposal they can bring back to their team.

ALIF Tech is a two-day, hands-on, instructor-led workshop designed for ICT professionals. It covers technical foundations, multimodal generative AI, model training, retrieval-augmented generation, and the architecture, risks, and governance considerations associated with AI agents.

What ALIF Has Delivered

Between January and June 2026, ALIF delivered 15 cohorts and upskilled 240 government professionals from more than 40 entities, including MCIT, the General Tax Authority, the Qatar Armed Forces, the Amiri Diwan, the Prime Minister's Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hamad Medical Corporation, ADLSA, and Qatar Rail.

Learning assessments demonstrated measurable progress. Average scores increased from 57% before the program to 77% afterward, a gain of 20 percentage points. Nearly 8 in 10 participants improved their results, and a similar proportion met the requirements for the program's Digital Competence certificate.

These results demonstrate ALIF’s reach and its ability to strengthen foundational AI capability. The program’s next measure of impact is workplace application: whether participants advance viable use cases, apply responsible AI practices, and transfer their learning into day-to-day government work.

Why It Works

The curriculum is grounded in production reality. Every lab, scenario, and discussion in ALIF is drawn from the public sector work Scale's teams do on live engagements, whether that is drafting a policy memo with strict safety guardrails or delegating workflows to an AI agent. Learners encounter the same tradeoffs Scale's engineers face on live deployments, in the same order they face them.

It is built for the audience. ALIF was designed from the ground up for public sector professionals: their workflows, their data sensitivities, their accountability structures. Generic AI training retooled for government does not carry that specificity, and specificity is what makes training transfer to the job rather than stopping at comprehension.

What's Next

The ALIF roadmap for 2026 is expanding across two fronts.

Advanced modules are rolling out deeper dives into production-grade prompting, safe RAG pipelines, and multi-step agentic workflows. The goal is to push graduates from foundational fluency into applied expertise.

A new self-paced LMS is being built alongside the live cohorts. It features live playgrounds where learners can build, break, and refine real prompts and agents in a safe, self-directed environment. The LMS is designed to extend the cohort experience and compound it over time.

The model is deliberate. Instructor-led cohorts establish the conceptual frame. The LMS converts that frame into a practiced reflex. Together, they move graduates from understanding how Generative AI works to building and deploying real tools inside their ministries.

That is what turns an educational initiative into measurable public sector productivity: shorter document turnarounds, fewer rote tasks consuming senior officers' time, and a workforce that can spot and de-risk AI opportunities before they stall.

Build Your Team's AI Fluency

By structuring training directly around the practical day-to-day responsibilities of government professionals, ALIF offers a proven framework for public sector entities aiming to intentionally accelerate their AI adoption. To learn more about how Scale partners with governments to deploy AI in operational environments, whether by joining an upcoming cohort, commissioning a dedicated program for your organization, or piloting our LMS, visit scale.com.