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Good practice Imported

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

United Arab Emirates · Dubai · See the United Arab Emirates profile · See the Dubai profile

Evidence: Descriptive / self-reported Top 75% 47/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

DEWA's bilingual AI assistant Rammas has answered millions of utility-service enquiries via web, app, WhatsApp, Alexa and Instagram since 2017; usage figures are self-reported by DEWA, with no independent audit of the enquiry counts found.

87,000 enquiries
Enquiries handled in first six weeks (2017)
6.8 million+ enquiries
Cumulative enquiries answered (through end of 2022)
11 services
Direct transactional services offered

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA)
Period
Launched 31 March 2017; continuously operating and expanded through 2023
Keywords
utility customer service, e-government, virtual assistant, NLP, chatbot

Context

On 31 March 2017, Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) launched Rammas, one of the first bilingual (Arabic/English) artificial-intelligence virtual assistants deployed by a government body in the UAE, built to answer routine utility-account enquiries — billing questions, service requests, outage information — around the clock and reduce the load on human call-centre staff.

Activities

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. It now offers 11 direct transactional services alongside information on roughly 200 others.

Results

In its first six weeks of operation across DEWA's website, mobile app and Facebook page, DEWA reported roughly 87,000 enquiries handled. According to DEWA's own reporting, the assistant answered a cumulative total of more than 6.8 million enquiries through the end of 2022. GovInsider, an independent Asia-Pacific government-technology publication, corroborates the 2017 launch and DEWA's ownership of the service, but all quantitative usage figures trace back exclusively to DEWA's own press releases, with no independently audited usage, satisfaction, or cost-saving data found.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k) — No cost figures disclosed in available sources.
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — Launched 31 March 2017; expanded to additional channels (WhatsApp, Alexa, Google Assistant, Instagram) through March 2023.
Staffing & skills
DEWA customer-service and digital-channels team, AI/NLP vendor(s) providing the bilingual (Arabic/English) assistant (not named in available sources)

Conditions for success

  • Multi-channel deployment matching where citizens already are (web, app, WhatsApp, Alexa, Instagram)
  • Bilingual (Arabic/English) support suited to the local population
  • Sustained multi-year institutional ownership by DEWA enabling continuous channel expansion

Common failure modes

  • No independent audit of usage, satisfaction, or cost-saving figures
  • No published information on the underlying model, fairness testing, or data-protection safeguards

Where it fits

Governance type
government-owned utility authority
Scale
city/emirate-wide (Dubai)
Income level
high income

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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