Rammas — Dubai Electricity and Water Authority's AI Customer Service Virtual Assistant

On 31 March 2017, Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) launched Rammas, described in its own press release as one of the first bilingual (Arabic/English) artificial-intelligence virtual assistants deployed by a government body in the UAE. Rammas was built to answer routine utility-account enquiries — billing questions, service requests, outage information — around the clock, reducing the load on human call-centre staff. In its first six weeks of operation across DEWA's website, mobile app and Facebook page, DEWA reported roughly 87,000 enquiries handled.

Since 2017, Rammas has expanded across additional channels, including DEWA's smart app, WhatsApp Business, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and, from March 2023, Instagram — which DEWA describes as the first such deployment by a UAE government entity. According to DEWA's own reporting, the assistant answered a cumulative total of more than 6.8 million enquiries through the end of 2022, and it now offers 11 direct transactional services alongside information on roughly 200 others.

GovInsider, an independent Asia-Pacific government-technology publication, corroborates the 2017 launch, DEWA's ownership of the service, and its positioning within Dubai's wider 'Smart Dubai' strategy. However, all quantitative usage figures — the 87,000 initial enquiries and the 6.8 million cumulative total — trace back exclusively to DEWA's own press releases; no independently audited usage, satisfaction, or cost-saving data was found. Rammas is a real, long-running, multi-channel service, but its performance claims should be read as unaudited operator-reported figures rather than externally verified outcomes.

Read the full analysis: https://www.dewa.gov.ae/en/about-us/media-publications/latest-news/2017/03/dewas-rammas-service-uses-artificial-intelligence-to-respond-to-customer-enquiries