DUBAI 12 November 2017: Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa) announced the recruitment of five robots as staff.
The robots will have an employee number with the first robot’s employee number being 99000099.
The pioneering government initiative at the UAE level and comes after Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council of Dubai, inaugurated Dewa’s Future Centre for Customer Happiness. This is the first integrated smart customer happiness centre in Dubai, which relies on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics.
“We have adopted innovation as a cornerstone for continuous improvement to enhance Dewa’s competitiveness in all areas. We keep up to date with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and take advantage of disruptive technologies in various fields, develop AI, Robotics, IoT, 3D printing and by supporting the Dubai 10X initiative, to propel Dubai towards the future, making it 10 years ahead of other global cities, through government innovation, and to enhance Dubai’s leadership in shaping the future. This supports our vision of becoming a sustainable innovative world-class utility,” said Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of Dewa.
Dewa launched Rammas, its virtual employee, at the beginning of 2017 on its smart app, website and Amazon Alexa’s system. Dewa is the first government organisation to launch an online chatbot in both Arabic and English. Rammas can respond to an unlimited number of enquiries in record time and is making significant progress in AI technology.