The Intelligent Address: ONE Development Is Building Abu Dhabi’s Smartest Community

This article is part of Entrepreneur Middle East’s Real Estate Leaders Special Edition – August 2026.

When ONE Development entered Abu Dhabi, it was not simply expanding into a new market. It was placing a bet on where cities themselves are heading. The company’s debut in the capital, ONE Residence on Al Reem Island, is a statement of that conviction rendered in glass and steel — a 31-storey waterfront tower designed around technologies that are only beginning to enter the mainstream conversation about how we live. Alongside AI-powered building operations, the project incorporates infrastructure for electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft and drone-enabled logistics, delivered through partnerships with the Advanced Mobility Hub and VertiHub. It is, in effect, a building designed not only for how people live today but for how they may move and connect a decade from now.

For Founder and Chairman Ali Al Gebely, however, the hardware is only part of the story. The ambition runs deeper than novelty. “The future of real estate lies in creating communities that grow more intelligent over time, with technology seamlessly integrated into everyday living,” he says. It is a subtle but important distinction. The goal is not a building studded with gadgets, but a home that learns — one that becomes more responsive, more efficient and more attuned to its residents the longer they live in it. In an industry that has traditionally treated a completed building as a finished product, that is a quietly radical idea.

The inclusion of infrastructure for flying taxis and drone logistics is the most eye-catching expression of that forward orientation. It would be easy to dismiss as futurism, but the logic is grounded: the region is investing heavily in advanced air mobility, and a building conceived today will still be standing when those networks mature. By designing for eVTOL landing and drone-enabled delivery from the outset, ONE Residence positions itself to plug into that future rather than scramble to retrofit for it later — a small illustration of the company’s wider habit of building for the market that is coming rather than only the one that exists. For residents, the promise is tangible: a home ready for a world in which the journey to work, or the arrival of a parcel, may one day take to the air.

Although ONE Development is one of the UAE’s newer names, its foundations reach back considerably further. The company is part of Al Gebely Holding, a family-owned group with a 44-year history spanning construction, energy, technology, hospitality and investment. That heritage has given the developer the ballast of an established business while leaving it free to approach real estate with a distinctly modern outlook. For Al Gebely, whose own background blends economics, engineering and business, property has never been simply a matter of construction. He sees it instead as the meeting point of infrastructure, technology and long-term operational performance — a philosophy that has shaped the company’s growth from the very beginning.

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That thinking first drew attention not in Abu Dhabi but in Dubai, where ONE Development made its mark with Laguna Residence, a project whose initial release sold out within weeks. Crucially, the company resisted the temptation to treat artificial intelligence as a marketing slogan. Instead it embedded intelligence throughout the development process — from planning and pricing through to predictive maintenance and energy optimisation after handover. Resident behaviour informed everything from the choice of amenities to the design of shared spaces, producing an environment intended to evolve alongside the people using it. The success of Laguna validated the premise, and it is precisely that philosophy which ONE Residence now carries into the capital, adapted to Abu Dhabi’s own ambitions around innovation, sustainability and future mobility.

The choice of Abu Dhabi, and the timing of it, is no accident. The emirate’s real estate market has entered a new phase, propelled by population growth, sustained investment and a sharpening focus on long-term quality. Demand is shifting decisively away from standalone residential towers and towards integrated communities, as buyers place ever greater value on walkability, wellness, connected amenities and neighbourhoods designed around the texture of everyday life. Al Gebely sees in that evolution an opening to rethink how developments are conceived in the first place. “The UAE is entering a defining chapter in its real estate journey,” he says. “Every emirate is contributing to a vision built on innovation, long-term value and creating better places to live.” Locating ONE Residence on Al Reem Island — a fast-maturing waterfront district within easy reach of the capital’s business core — is a considered expression of confidence in Abu Dhabi as one of the region’s most important long-term growth markets.

What ties the whole approach together is the company’s proprietary ONE AI platform, which it regards less as a feature than as a foundation. The system applies artificial intelligence across the entire lifecycle of a project — from the initial analysis of land and the setting of prices, through to predictive maintenance, energy management and operational performance once residents have moved in. Rather than treating AI as an add-on to be advertised, ONE Development positions it as the operating system running quietly beneath every community it builds. It is the mechanism by which Al Gebely’s vision of a home that grows more intelligent over time becomes something concrete: a building that monitors its own systems, anticipates its own needs and optimises itself continuously, long after the last resident has collected their keys.

That emphasis on performance over time speaks to a broader shift in how the best developers are beginning to define success. ONE Residence marks the company’s first chapter in Abu Dhabi, but it is explicitly not intended to be its last. ONE Development has set out plans to expand further across the UAE while growing its presence in Egypt and other international markets, pursued through a disciplined, long-term strategy rather than a race for scale. For Al Gebely, expansion is not measured by the number of projects delivered. The real test, he believes, will be whether the communities the company builds continue to improve in the years after they are completed — whether they perform, adapt and appreciate rather than simply age.

It is a standard that neatly captures where urban living itself appears to be heading. As expectations evolve, developers will increasingly be judged not only by what they build but by how well those places function over time — by liveability, intelligence and endurance rather than the spectacle of a launch. That is the challenge ONE Development has set for itself on Al Reem Island, and the one it intends to carry into every market that follows. In a capital already reimagining what a city can be, it is a proposition with a certain elegant logic: build homes clever enough to keep getting better, and let time make the case.

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