One Million Lebanese AI Experts: Is Prompt Engineering Enough to Change Lebanon’s Labor Market?

One million people is a large number in any country, and it is larger in Lebanon. The United Arab Emirates and Lebanon announced on Friday, 25 September, an initiative called “One Million Lebanese AI Experts”, aimed at training one million people in Lebanon in the fundamentals of generative artificial intelligence and prompt engineering. The question that matters to anyone looking for a job or trying to keep their job is simple: what does this training actually mean for the labour market, and what does it not mean?

What exactly was announced

The announcement came during a meeting between Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, the UAE Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, and Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam on the sidelines of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The initiative falls under the UAE Government Experience Exchange Programme, in cooperation with the Lebanese government.

According to the official statement, the initiative targets all segments of Lebanese society, across ages, backgrounds and professional roles. The content focuses on two skills: using generative AI tools, and prompt engineering, the method of phrasing instructions for the model and directing it to produce more accurate and useful results. The statement says the aim is for participants to use these tools in their work and daily lives, to increase their productivity and develop solutions to problems they face.

A ground-level skill, not a ceiling

Prompt engineering is a genuine and useful skill, but it is important to call it by its proper name. It is the first layer of interacting with AI: knowing how to ask, how to review what is returned, and when not to trust it. Those who master it work faster at writing, summarising, translating, analysing tables and responding to clients. However, it does not by itself create a machine-learning engineer or a data scientist, nor does it alone open the specialised technical jobs that we track daily in the region, which require programming, statistics and system-building expertise.

Therefore the name of the initiative, “One Million Experts”, carries a promise larger than its announced content. The real value here is different: an employee at a bank, school or small company becomes more capable of using a tool that has become part of office work everywhere. That is not insignificant in a country whose economy is exhausted.

Why the Lebanese context matters

In the same meeting, Salam acknowledged that his government inherited weak institutions and an economy worn down by years of crises. In his speech to the General Assembly on the same day, he said the AI revolution opens unprecedented opportunities for progress, but it also raises challenges for the future of work and for human rights, and he called for international governance that places people, their freedom and privacy at the centre of this transformation.

In such an environment, remote work for companies outside the country becomes one of the clearest career pathways, and the ability to use AI tools efficiently has become an expected requirement in many of these jobs. Here, the training could have a tangible impact, if it indeed reaches those who need it.

What has not been mentioned yet

The statement has not yet specified a timeline, a registration platform, the language of the training, the entity that will deliver it on the ground, or whether participants will receive a certificate. These details determine the initiative’s value more than its headline number. This is not the first regional initiative of this size this month: Egypt and Intel announced in mid-September a programme to train one million citizens annually over three years. Repeating the same figure makes the real question how impact is measured: the number of people who complete the training, or the number whose jobs change because of it?

Your next step

If you are in Lebanon and want to benefit, follow the official channels of the Lebanese government and the Government Experience Exchange Programme until the registration window is announced, and do not pay any entity that offers to register you on your behalf. If you start the training, treat it as a launch point: apply what you learn to a real task from your work, and keep examples of what you have accomplished, as those examples convince an employer more than any attendance certificate. We at “Al-Fursa” will follow the details as they emerge and tell you what changes.