Abu Dhabi Deploys AutoGov, AI That Handles Government Paperwork for Citizens

In Abu Dhabi, residents no longer need to track the renewal date for their ID card, health insurance, or vehicle registration. The AutoGov feature in the government's TAMM app does it for them, it initiates the procedure, fills out the documents, and collects the payment before the resident even thinks about it.

TAMM, Arabic for "consider it done," is a single, centralized access point for public services in the emirate of Abu Dhabi. Instead of redirecting citizens between dozens of individual agency websites, the app brings them together in one place, and since 2025 has added a layer of automated action on top.

How AutoGov Works

AutoGov takes over recurring, predictable tasks: renewing an ID card, extending health insurance, registering a vehicle, paying a parking fine, or scheduling a routine medical appointment. The system detects an approaching deadline on its own, initiates the administrative procedure, and collects the payment, without any action from the resident.

On top of that there's an image-recognition layer that lets residents report infrastructure damage, such as a broken streetlight, and automatically routes the report to the right administrative department. TAMM's CEO Mohamed Al Askar describes this model as government that operates like a modern tech company and anticipates citizens' needs instead of waiting for them to file a request.

Government operates like modern tech companies and anticipates citizens' needs - Mohamed Al Askar, CEO of TAMM

Scale of the Rollout

TAMM today has practically universal adoption among the emirate's residents and integrates over 1,100 services from more than 90 public and private partners. This is the result of several years of systematic expansion: Abu Dhabi became the first in the world to appoint a Minister of Artificial Intelligence in 2017, and in 2019 opened the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world's first graduate university dedicated solely to AI.

The investment in AI is part of the UAE's strategy to diversify its economy beyond oil. According to a PwC analysis, artificial intelligence could add as much as $320 billion to the Middle East economy by the end of the decade. At the same time, the emirate maintains parallel technology cooperation with both the US and China, and the Trump administration expanded UAE access to advanced AI chips in exchange for geopolitical cooperation.

The Price of Convenience

A model in which the state automatically initiates administrative procedures on a citizen's behalf requires full access to their personal, financial, and health data. An app that acts on the user's behalf, run by a state that sees every ID renewal and every parking fine, is both a convenience and a surveillance system.

Experts note that Abu Dhabi's model relies on a centralized, monarchical power structure without electoral accountability mechanisms, which makes it hard to replicate in democratic countries. Rolling out a similar system in the European Union would require not only legal changes but the consent of institutions that protect citizens' privacy, including reconciling it with GDPR rules and the EU's AI Act.

What It Means for Poland

Poland is working on its own, much more modest counterpart: construction of the Multiportal RP is set to begin this fall, a platform with AI elements meant to guide citizens step by step through official matters and translate procedures into plain language. Unlike AutoGov, the Polish solution is not meant to make decisions or initiate matters on a citizen's behalf, officials stress that the "human-in-the-loop" principle is essential for public administration.

Abu Dhabi's model shows how far administrative automation can go once legal and institutional barriers are removed, but also how high a price, in the form of state oversight over citizens' daily lives, that can come at. For Polish public offices, which are only just learning to use AI for searching information and drafting documents, it is a distant but clear reference point on the map of possible directions for e-government development.