Dubai’s DEWA moves 76% of services to agentic AI

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has moved 76% of its services to agentic artificial intelligence (AI), cutting processing times by up to 95% as the utility provider works to make its services faster and easier for customers.

DEWA said on Tuesday it had transformed 16 of its 21 services with agentic AI in less than 90 days, with the remaining five expected to be completed within the next two months.

For customers, the changes mean fewer steps and inputs across services, including electricity and water supply activation, as well as technical notifications. DEWA has also applied the technology to its payment reconciliation framework, which supports 13 services and processes around 13.3 million transactions annually.

The technology has brought significant improvements to electricity and water activation services, with DEWA cutting processing time from around eight minutes to two. The service, which handles around 210,000 transactions a year, now requires customers to provide three inputs instead of 10 and complete three steps instead of nine, reducing the overall completion time by 75%.

DEWA has also transformed its payment reconciliation system, which supports 13 services and handles around 13.3 million transactions annually. The new system can process and validate data, detect anomalies, manage exceptions, and monitor operations around the clock. As a result, the daily processing cycle has fallen from around four hours to 12 minutes, representing a 95% reduction in processing time.

While the change is primarily operational, faster reconciliation strengthens the processes that support DEWA’s customer services and enables anomalies and exceptions to be identified and managed continuously.

DEWA has also introduced agentic AI into the handling of technical notifications for electricity and water. The utility provider has implemented a smart system that receives, classifies and verifies requests, as well as coordinates workflows through resolution. The process has evolved from relying on 16 coordinators to a fully autonomous system that operates around the clock.

DEWA’s latest rollout builds on an AI strategy that began in 2017, when the utility first started integrating AI into its operations. It later launched a roadmap to become “the world’s first AI-native utility” to improve performance, productivity and the overall customer experience.

According to HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of DEWA, the latest transformation builds of these efforts to accelerate delivery and improve accuracy and efficiency across its operations in line with Dubai’s wider AI ambitions.

“We are proud that DEWA is one of the first government organizations in the UAE to deploy these technologies at such an advanced level, driving the transition from AI models that support users and provide information to models capable of autonomously executing tasks and operations end-to-end,” Tayer said.

He added that the shift towards agentic AI allows DEWA to deliver a more seamless service experience around the clock, while also streamlining internal workflows and improving the experience for employees and other stakeholders.

Once the remaining five services are transformed over the next two months, DEWA’s program will cover all 21 services in its portfolio.