Artificial Intelligence (AI) has received significant attention in recent years, with claims of unlimited potential across sectors and industries. Despite the media hype about AI, there is limited understanding of how governments can utilize AI for the delivery of value to citizens and what are the barriers and trade-offs that need to be addressed to lead to value realization. AI has the potential to bring transformative benefits to society, but first we need to understand the current state of play in the public sector through an appropriate theoretical lens. We adopt the attention-based view of the organization to identify key challenges in terms of organizational attention. This study draws on a single case study in Saudi Arabia to identify key challenges associated with the adoption of AI.