ChatGPT – DEWA declares a utility first

Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA) has announced working to enrich its services with ChatGPT technology.

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the artificial intelligence company OpenAI’s chatbot, has been getting lots of press, both positive and negative, since its launch at the end of November 2022 and with its prominence due in no small measure to its backing by Microsoft.

Now DEWA, always at the leading edge of adoption of new digital technologies, has reported working with Microsoft to provide ChatGPT technology through its Digital DEWA subsidiary Moro Hub (Data Hub Integrated Solutions).

The aim is to provide services supported by this technology and employ it in serving customers and employees.

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“Our collaboration with Microsoft is a translation of the vision and directives to benefit from digital technologies and artificial intelligence to improve performance and enhance people’s lives,” says HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD and CEO of DEWA.

“It also supports the Dubai 10X initiative and our endeavour to contribute to shaping a new digital future for Dubai through Digital DEWA, the digital arm of DEWA, becoming the world’s first digital utility to use autonomous systems for renewable energy and storage. We are also expanding the use of AI and digital services.”

DEWA is no stranger to virtual assistants and introduced the AI-based ‘virtual employee’ Rammas in Q1 of 2017. Since then, the chatbot, which communicates in both Arabic and English, had responded to over 6.8 million customer written and voice enquiries by the end of 2022, the company has reported.

Rammas is similarly supported by Microsoft’s AI technology.

DEWA has also been increasingly adopting AI in its operations, with the introduction of an AI roadmap in 2017.

With its adoption of ChatGPT, DEWA anticipates becoming the first utility globally as well as the first UAE government entity to use the technology.

OpenAI describes ChatGPT as a model which interacts in a conversational way, the dialogue format making it possible to answer follow up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests.