How the UAE government is using AI to enhance citizen experiences

It’s well-known that the UAE Vision aims to make the UAE among the best countries in the world by the Golden Jubilee of the Union.

Speaking from my experience as both a long-time resident and technology partner of the UAE, and seeing the investments being made in improving citizen experiences, I have no doubt that the country will meet that target.

One of the keys to the country’s success, I believe, is the government’s considered approach to new technologies. Rather than simply jumping on a bandwagon, UAE government agencies tend to properly evaluate new technological trends, and ask a simple but pertinent question: “How can this help improve people’s lives?”

And it’s exactly that approach we’re seeing as the country takes part in the AI revolution.

AI (artificial intelligence) has been in the background of the average UAE resident’s life for several years. It’s been powering chatbots in contact centers, improving business analytics, and enhancing security through biometric recognition – all the while delivering incremental improvements to everyday experiences. But that quiet background technology has quickly moved to front of mind with the advent and virality of generative, large-language model AI, the most famous of which is ChatGPT.

This type of AI is a game-changer because, unlike the conversational AI applications that came before, it’s really able to communicate in a human-like fashion. Instead of being based on rigid scripting, limiting its conversational capabilities on narrowly pre-configured scenarios, generative AI can handle complex issues and recognise the context of conversations. And it genuinely works (for the most part).

Naturally, organisations around the world are quickly exploring generative AI to see how they can use it. And the same is true of the UAE government departments that we’re working with. But the end goal is a little more considered than simply finding interesting use cases (of which there are many) – there’s a larger, overarching strategy that could drastically improve the citizen experience.

We’re seeing POCs for using generative AI to improve chatbots. That’s no surprise, given that 74 per cent of consumers would rather use a chatbot than wait for a human agent, according to a research, despite the fact that many consumers believe these interactions are unhelpful.

We’re also seeing government departments explore using generative AI for self-service knowledge transfer, something that 79 per cent of consumers expect from the organisations they interact with. And there’s high interest in live translation use cases, too.

But to really get the best out of this technology, the leading government departments are thinking about how they can properly integrate generative AI into the heart of citizen experience. They’re pursuing the idea of a single middleware application that uses AI to bridge interactions between customer and agent – improve experiences for both at a rate we’ve never seen before. The use cases will then flow endlessly from that point.

With little effort or delay, customers and the agents serving them will be able to source the information they need, on-demand, and continue moving through the next steps in their customer journey. Organisations can also learn from these queries and see where to improve clarity or remove friction to better improve the experience.

Realistically, these applications won’t change the CX domain tomorrow. The process will be much more nuanced, and based on larger, overarching strategies like the ones we’re seeing in the UAE.

But if any country can get this right, it’s this one.

Rodolph Khoury is the regional sales lead for Dubai and Northern Emirates at Avaya

Read: DEWA becomes first UAE government entity to use ChatGPT