Over the past three years, even as hundreds of drones and missiles continue to target its cities on a weekly basis, Ukraine has been quietly executing one of the most ambitious governance overhauls in its modern history: a comprehensive Public Investment Management (PIM) reform. While undertaking structural transformations of this magnitude would be a formidable challenge for any nation under normal circumstances, Ukraine is advancing its reform while facing staggering destruction. International estimates currently place the total cost of rebuilding the country at more than US$ 588 billion, encompassing thousands of intricate projects managed simultaneously by local communities, regional authorities, government ministries, and dozens of international development partners.
At the very center of this massive institutional undertaking is DREAM, Ukraine’s open digital ecosystem designed specifically for public investment management. Built from the ground up on core open government and open contracting principles, DREAM serves as a vital technological bridge. It connects disparate state-owned and external registers, supports rigorous project monitoring and data analysis, and establishes a single, transparent digital pipeline for public investment projects nationwide. Today, DREAM functions as the digital backbone of the entire reform effort. It currently supports more than 12,900 public investment projects spanning 18 distinct sectors, and is actively utilized by more than 1,300 municipalities, every regional administration, all national ministries, and major state-owned enterprises.
The platform covers the entire lifecycle of public investments, stretching seamlessly from initial project conception and feasibility appraisal through to formal prioritization, funding coordination, and implementation monitoring. As this monumental reform now enters its full-scale implementation phase, Ukrainian authorities and international partners are exploring how artificial intelligence can serve as its next practical enabler. The integration of AI aims to significantly strengthen institutional capacity, render complex PIM rules accessible and usable for every municipality across Ukraine, and ultimately improve the overall quality, strategic planning, and delivery efficiency of every investment project in the pipeline.
The Scale of the Capacity Challenge
This unprecedented scale brings with it an equally unprecedented practical capacity challenge on the ground. Public officials and local government workers must navigate a labyrinth of complex laws, stringent methodologies, public procurement rules, construction norms, financial requirements, and strict donor conditions. Local governments often operate under severe constraints, possessing limited staff, fragmented expertise, and very little time to pore over hundreds of pages of dense legal frameworks, methodologies, and operational manuals.
For instance, completing a full cycle of an investment pre-feasibility study for a relatively small municipal project typically demands about four weeks of full-time work for a single local government team. Consequently, preparing just ten such projects simultaneously becomes an overwhelming hurdle for a small municipal administration. During peak planning cycles, the central DREAM Project Office handles more than 850 support requests per day, even with extensive training programs, active helpdesks, and specialized expert networks already in place. During 2025 alone, the office organized 96 training events that engaged nearly 30,000 participants. Despite these extensive efforts, traditional support models struggle to scale at the rapid pace that the national recovery truly requires.
This persistent capacity shortage is made significantly more acute by the relentless pressures of wartime operations. More than 230 communities, representing roughly 15 percent of the country, hold front-line status. These areas face dense shelling, persistent drone attacks, critical energy infrastructure breakdowns, and continuous waves of internally displaced people arriving daily. All of these front-line communities must still be fully included in the PIM process and retain equitable access to vital reconstruction financing. When administrative capacity is stretched this thin, even the soundest regulatory rules become exceptionally difficult to apply in everyday practice.
A Strategic Approach to Artificial Intelligence
Project leaders emphasize that artificial intelligence cannot and will not replace public servants, expert human judgment, or political accountability, at least for the foreseeable future. However, it can dramatically improve how critical knowledge—such as government policies, operational methodologies, regulatory requirements, and sectoral expertise—is accessed, interpreted, and applied, particularly within a fast-evolving and complex reform environment. That specific gap is precisely what the initiative seeks to close.
Within the DREAM ecosystem, AI is not viewed as a flashy external automation tool, but rather as a foundational support layer embedded directly into existing governance workflows. Its core purpose is straightforward to explain yet difficult to achieve: to help everyday users prepare and appraise superior projects, understand complex regulatory requirements much faster, and make more consistent, evidence-based decisions. Three years of intense reform implementation have provided project leaders with a rare advantage that most technology projects lack: a solid foundation. This includes a verified knowledge base, a clear diagnostic picture of where municipal users frequently encounter bottlenecks, and the hard-won operational data necessary to build an assistant that is genuinely useful. Rather than serving as a superficial marketing feature, the tool is designed as a practical mechanism to support and empower the people tasked with rebuilding the nation.
With strong political backing from the Ministry for Development and the Ministry of Economy, the DREAM Project Office—supported by the Open Contracting Partnership and its established expertise in deploying AI tools for public procurement—joined forces with uStudio as an IT and AI innovation partner, alongside GCIEP and PwC with support from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), to develop an AI-powered assistant integrated directly into the DREAM ecosystem. This collaborative approach is firmly grounded in a working prototype, a curated and verified knowledge base, and a sophisticated hybrid architecture strictly aligned with Ukraine’s national data sovereignty and ethical AI principles as outlined in the official White Paper on Artificial Intelligence Regulation in Ukraine.
The DREAM AI Assistant: Three Stages of Implementation
The strategic rollout of the DREAM AI Assistant is meticulously aligned with the broader PIM Reform Roadmap spanning from 2024 to 2028, and is structured across three distinct phases of operational implementation.
During 2026, the AI assistant will deliver real-time guidance regarding PIM rules and the project preparation process directly within the DREAM interface. In this initial phase, the primary objective is to bridge the gap between complex legal language and practical execution by translating rigid methodological requirements into accessible, plain-language explanations tailored precisely to each user’s specific role, sector, and geographic location. Functioning as a trusted, round-the-clock entry point into the comprehensive PIM knowledge base, the assistant provides immediate, practical guidance for government bodies at every administrative level.
Initial testing of the DREAM AI Assistant took place in April 2026, during which focus group participants representing various local communities tested the assistant for real-world project preparation tasks, awarding it an average score of 4.33 out of 5 points. While developers continue to tailor and upgrade the tool based on this feedback, it has already demonstrated its potential to reduce administrative workloads and accelerate procedures by guiding users smoothly through project preparation.
Looking ahead to 2027, the assistant’s capabilities will expand into formal quality assurance. In this second phase, the system will assist municipal appraisal teams in identifying missing indicators or internal inconsistencies within feasibility studies, while proactively suggesting ways to better align proposed projects with national sectoral priorities. This will help improve their economic, environmental, and financial viability cases. By comparing new project submissions against historical validated cases, the system will enhance the overall consistency and transparency of thousands of public investment decisions.
In the final targeted phase spanning 2028 to 2029, the focus will shift toward advanced investment modeling. Utilizing geographic, demographic, fiscal, and economic data, the system will help officials explore diverse development scenarios and model alternative investment options. This advanced functionality will enable scenario-based assessments to determine precisely where public resources can achieve the greatest possible societal and economic impact.
Building a Safe and Responsible Architecture
Because public investment decisions involve exceptionally high financial stakes and sensitive administrative data, the DREAM AI Assistant has been constructed on a hybrid, fully auditable architecture designed to enforce rigorous governance standards.
The core of the system utilizes Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique that grounds every generated response exclusively in verified laws, official manuals, and approved guidelines. To safeguard sensitive government information, the system employs localized language models hosted securely within dedicated infrastructure to protect national data sovereignty. Every single answer generated by the assistant is fully traceable to an approved source, timestamped, and strictly version-controlled. Furthermore, the underlying architecture integrates a mandatory human-in-the-loop validation process to ensure that all content remains accurate and reflects the absolute most recent regulatory updates.
To systematically minimize the inherent risks of artificial intelligence hallucinations or the accidental retrieval of outdated guidance, the system flags all responses with specific source citations, timestamps, and version markers. Potential operational risks, such as factual errors or data privacy concerns, are proactively mitigated through structured prompt design and stringent access control protocols. A dedicated multidisciplinary oversight team continuously monitors the system to guarantee adherence to high ethical standards and ensure it remains firmly focused on its core public purpose.
Ukraine’s Lesson for the World
Ukraine’s ongoing experience demonstrates that the successful implementation of artificial intelligence in government does not begin with complex algorithms. Instead, it starts with clear rules, strong institutional frameworks, and the disciplined design of technology that directly serves the public interest. The advanced AI layer currently being integrated into DREAM is only as effective as the underlying reform infrastructure supporting it—an infrastructure that required three years of intense labor and institutional commitment to construct.
If executed successfully, this initiative has the potential to become not only a vital catalyst for Ukraine’s national recovery and long-term development, but also a globally relevant test case for how artificial intelligence can responsibly strengthen public investment management systems within highly complex, resource-constrained environments. A nation rebuilding under fire, while simultaneously maintaining a digital governance infrastructure at the absolute cutting edge, offers a profound demonstration of what is achievable when technology meets clear public purpose.
