Page 15 - Case study: Smart Dubai - Rashid - City Concierge

• Cost savings through operational efficiencies: Rashid has been implemented as a circular
(shared) service capitalizing on the synergies that exist among the city entities that utilize it.
This has allowed significant cost savings; since in the absence of such a shared solution, each
and every entity would invest on cognitive computing and natural language processing skills
and systems on their own to implement it. It also eliminated various call center telephone calls
diverting them to Rashid as a freely provided digital service. Smart Dubai designed Rashid to be
adaptive and decentralized to accommodate future expansion in terms of economies of scale
(adding new entities) and also in terms of economies of scope (implementing new topics and
sub-topics).

• Encouraging entrepreneurship: Rashid has been incorporated in several economic services
(in addition to others in the city) including starting a business which actively promotes and
encourages entrepreneurship. Rashid has played a complementary role in enabling start-ups and
new businesses to be established in Dubai.

• Knowledge sharing across the public sector: Rashid collects detailed information about various
city services and related topics in Dubai. This allows Rashid to compile a powerful list of topics,
questions and their answers resulting in a rich knowledge base at the city level. It centralizes
human knowledge and experiences by mimicking experts’ knowledge into the brain of the
system. It will also be enhanced with private sector information eventually.

Environmental Impact:

• Enhanced Resilience: The centralized nature of Rashid’s implementation through a private
sector partner enabled disaster recovery and resilience aspects to be implemented as part of
the overall partnership approach. Rashid and its infrastructure is resilient by design featuring
redundancies, automatic fail-over mechanisms, etc. Hence, it is designed resilient to various
environmental stresses and disruptions.

• Reduced environmental impact: Shared implementation approach for Rashid undertaken by
Smart Dubai has circumvented the need for other city entities to replicate ICT infrastructures
in their own premises. This in turn has also resulted in reduced CO2 emissions. Hence, it is
designed as an environment conscious solution and provides benefits in green computing.

3. Conclusions

Happiness is at the core of Dubai’s digital transformation. In this context, Smart Dubai is utilizing
various emerging technologies, including AI, to strategically enhance city experiences.

This case study illustrates the use of cognitive computing in addressing various inquiries of city
residents and visitors through the use of natural language processing. The case study demonstrates
that cities have a wide range of technologies at their disposal to enhance the happiness as well as
quality of life. The topics in Rashid, the AI-based city concierge in Dubai, have been selected on
purpose to include popular and mostly sought after ones which ensured its uptake and success.

Smart Dubai – Rashid – City Concierge | Dubai, UAE 9