In a new episode of Bold Pursuits, CNN’s Veronica Miracle dives into the transformative world of artificial intelligence, exploring how AI is revolutionising healthcare, enhancing security, and its capabilities in disaster management.

At the Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi, an ambitious AI strategy aims to enhance efficiency and safety across operations. Andrew Murphy, Chief Information Officer at Abu Dhabi Airports, tells Miracle about the potential of AI, "We have some 90,000 passengers going over 400 flights every single day, when you think about the number of processes that sit behind it, and the opportunity for AI to really optimise that, the opportunity’s endless."

One of Abu Dhabi based tech company G42’s biggest ventures is in the healthcare field under the subsidiary M42. Albarah El Khani, SVP of Operations at M42 is leading an ambitious project to map the genome of every single willing UAE citizen. Since 2019, they’ve successfully collected and sequenced the DNA of 600,000 Emiratis, 62% of the local population, "You’re talking about hundreds and thousands and millions of terabytes worth of data. It’s an immense amount of data that you have to store. That’s why it’s critical that we’re using AI to be able to interpret this data and pull insights from this data, because it’s humanly impractical to go through such vast amounts of data sets."

By obtaining the genome of every individual, M42 believes they can begin to treat patients with more precision. El Khani explains, "We used to in the clinical practice treat the disease. Now we’re treating the individual with that particular disease, with the right medication that’s precisely treated for that disease, all based on that individual’s genomic data set that we have."

In San Francisco, Miracle meets Adrian Aoun, the founder of Forward. His vision is for more people to have access to doctor’s offices, using AI pods, "Let’s build healthcare in the same way that you would build a Tesla, the same way you’d build an iPhone, the same way you build a modern TV, it’s just modern and intuitive and uses the latest technology."

The CarePod is capable of performing various diagnostic tasks, including blood tests, biometric scans, and can also provide patients with prescriptions, health plans, and a direct line to a Forward physician. Forward currently has five in operation around the US and are hoping to double their footprint in early 2025. Aoun says, "It takes a while to build technologies to a point where they are ready for mass adoption. been working for years on building a product like a CarePod. It took us generation after generation after generation to get something that is inexpensive enough, easy to use enough, has enough capabilities that enough people want them."

One of the more controversial areas of AI is its application in security and defence. Shield AI is at the forefront of this movement, developing autonomous technologies that can operate in complex, high-stakes environments with little to no human intervention. Under the leadership of former Navy SEAL Brandon Tseng, the company has developed an autonomous system known as ‘Hivemind’. Tseng says of the project, "We are building the world’s best AI pilot. The easiest way to think about an AI pilot is self-driving technology for defence, for drones. Why is that important? It enables drones to manoeuvre without GPS, without communications, without a remote pilot, and enables the concept of swarming."

Tseng believes AI piloted defence systems offer the most reliable and secure path forward, by minimising human error and optimising real-time decision-making, "An AI is going to outperform human decision making if it’s been well-trained, if it has accumulated the right amount of data, 99.99999% of the time. I think it’s pretty limiting for people to say an AI will never be able to be better than a human on something when it has repeatedly shown that it is better at performing a multitude of tasks."

Finally, Miracle sees how AI is being using in disaster management. This year, a Falcon 9 rocket carried more than 100 satellites into space. One of those belongs to Space42, a subsidiary of G42. It is the first of nine that will form a constellation around the Earth. Space42 managing director Hasan Al Hosani is hoping to use the technology to improve the way we respond to natural disasters and crises.

Space 42’s satellites are equipped with state-of-the-art sensors and AI-powered analytics to monitor and respond to natural disasters in real-time. The technology was put to the test during a recent crisis. Al Hosani describes, "What we’re looking at right now is the earthquake that happened in Turkey and Syria last year. Immediately acquiring the data and applying artificial intelligence on top of the data to start analysing the impact on the ground. The system is actually comparing the data imagery before the event and after the event. It can immediately recognise the areas impacted, what sorts of impact is there on the urban area, on the road network and everything."