Dubai: The UAE’s National Committee for the Agentic AI Project has launched a unified guide for designing government services around artificial intelligence assistants, as the country moves towards a model in which AI can understand a customer’s request and carry out the necessary steps on their behalf.The Assistant AI Government Experience Design Guide establishes a common approach for federal entities to redesign services so that customers no longer have to identify the responsible authority, navigate procedures or repeatedly provide information themselves.The guide was unveiled during a specialised workshop attended by officials and government service and AI teams from federal ministries and entities. The session was designed to help agencies reshape their services in line with the objectives of the UAE’s Assistant AI project.Mohammed Rashid bin Taliah, Assistant Minister of Cabinet Affairs for Government Knowledge Exchange and head of the Government Services Track of the Assistant AI project, said the technology would fundamentally change how people interact with government.Under the current model, customers are typically responsible for finding the service they need, determining which government entity provides it, understanding the requirements, submitting information and documents and following the process until their transaction is completed.Under the new model, the interaction could begin simply with a conversation. The AI assistant would understand what the customer wants, determine the steps required, carry them out and coordinate with the relevant government entities on the customer’s behalf.Bin Taliah said customers were ultimately interested in obtaining a result rather than navigating a series of procedures.The success of assistant AI, he said, should therefore not be measured by the number of messages exchanged with a customer, but by whether the system can complete the service and deliver the desired outcome.The broader transformation is not simply about changing how people communicate with government, he added, but about shifting the burden of completing a service from the customer to the government.A fully functioning AI assistant would be able to understand a customer’s intent, use information already held by government, plan how to fulfil the request, execute the required steps, coordinate between entities and handle exceptional cases until a clear and complete outcome is reached.The unified guide is intended to provide federal entities with a common framework for making that transition, as the UAE seeks to move government services beyond digital forms and individual transactions towards AI assistants capable of completing tasks for customers.