Dubai’s Department of Finance Launches “ASCEND” — The World’s First AI-Powered System for Financial Compliance
Dubai’s Department of Finance (DoF) has launched “ASCEND”, an artificial intelligence-powered system designed to verify financial compliance and provide smart recommendations. Unveiled during the inaugural Dubai AI Week 2025, ASCEND is the first system of its kind globally in the field of public financial governance.
His Excellency Abdulrahman Saleh Al Saleh, Director General of DoF, emphasized that ASCEND reflects the department’s commitment to modernizing government financial operations and ensuring future-readiness by embracing advanced technologies and innovation. He stated, “Integrating AI into our financial governance model boosts operational efficiency and positions Dubai as a global leader in financial compliance and governance through digitalization.”
Huda Hamdan Al Sheikh, Executive Director of Corporate Services and Chief AI Officer at DoF, noted that ASCEND was strategically developed in response to key challenges in compliance governance such as data fragmentation, manual processes, and the lack of real-time monitoring tools. She described the launch as a milestone in Dubai’s journey toward smart, future-ready governance, transforming traditional and time-consuming review processes into fully automated, AI-driven mechanisms.
She emphasized that ASCEND is not merely a technical solution, but a long-term vision for intelligent financial governance, seamlessly integrated with DoF’s internal systems to enable unified compliance monitoring without data migration. By launching it during Dubai AI Week, the department reinforces Dubai’s position as a global pioneer in AI-driven government innovation and offers a model that can reshape financial compliance systems worldwide.
The system uses advanced technologies such as open-source large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture to analyze complex legal texts, understand financial workflows, and assess adherence to relevant laws and regulations.
Fatima Butti Al Suwaidi, Director of Strategy and Corporate Performance and ASCEND Project Manager, highlighted the system’s key features, including gap analysis, risk detection, and KPI alignment with legal standards. She explained that ASCEND generates actionable, AI-backed recommendations to improve compliance practices and automatically produces structured compliance reports in both Arabic and English.
ASCEND is designed to be secure and scalable, and it operates on a UAE-based cloud infrastructure, ensuring full data sovereignty and adherence to national information security standards.
This achievement adds to the impact of Dubai AI Week 2025, which showcases how artificial intelligence is reshaping government services, enhancing efficiency, and enabling smarter decision-making—highlighting Dubai’s leadership in pioneering transformative AI initiatives in the public sector.