It isn’t a search bar.
Not anymore.
Dubai’s Electricity and Water Authority, better known as DEWA, just became the first UAE government entity to bring Microsoft 365’s Copilot Cowork into the daily grind. This isn’t your standard chatbot. This is agentic AI.
It actively plans and executes tasks. It acts, rather than just answering questions.
We used to talk about AI as an assistant. Something that helps you find that email from 2019. Copilot Cowork works differently. It looks at your context. The meetings, the files, the chain of emails. It builds a plan. Then it starts executing across Microsoft’s suite.
The worker keeps control, obviously. Oversight stays human. But the AI does the heavy lifting on complex, multi-step tasks.
Does this sound risky? Maybe. That’s why the employee always has the final say. But for a utility serving a city obsessed with becoming ‘smart,’ the shift from assistant to executor feels like the next logical, terrifying, exciting step.
DEWA didn’t get here overnight. They started playing with AI in 2017.
Seventeen years in utilities. Early days in tech. They’ve already got Rammas, an AI assistant that’s handled over 12.7 million inquiries. Satisfaction rates sit at 95%. They’ve put automation into legal affairs, IT support, even customer portals like Khadamatech. By early 2024, they’d rolled out ChatGPT and standard Copilot features. Earlier this year they launched the first utility app directly on the ChatGPT platform.
Now they want to be the world’s first AI-native utility.
What does that mean? It means AI isn’t a separate department or a pilot program. It’s woven into power generation. Customer service. Governance. Cybersecurity.
Why does this matter?
Look at the scale. Dubai wants a smart city. DEWA provides the juice and the water. If they can cut costs and streamline processes using tools that actually do things rather than just suggesting things, the efficiency gains are real. Faster public services. Lower overhead.
It sets a signal for the rest of the UAE public sector, too. Agentic AI isn’t just hype. It’s sitting on desks, processing workflows, and waiting for permission to work.
We are moving away from typing prompts into voids. We are moving toward hiring digital colleagues.
The question isn’t if other departments will follow.
It’s how quickly they will realize they need help too.
