Over the past three years, Ukraine has been implementing a comprehensive Public Investment Management reform. That would be a significant undertaking in any country, but Ukraine is doing it while hundreds of drones and missiles are launched at its cities every week. International estimates currently put the total rebuilding costs at over US$ 588 billion, encompassing thousands of individual projects that communities, regions, ministries, and dozens of international partners are working on simultaneously across the nation.
At the center of this massive reform is DREAM, Ukraine’s open digital ecosystem for public investment management. Built squarely on open government and open contracting principles, DREAM connects state-owned and external registers, supports vital project monitoring and data analysis, and creates a single digital pipeline for public investment projects. Today, DREAM serves as the digital backbone of that reform, supporting more than 12,900 public investment projects spanning 18 distinct sectors. It is actively utilized by more than 1,300 municipalities, all regional administrations, every government ministry, and major state-owned enterprises.
The platform covers the full investment cycle, guiding initiatives from initial project conception and feasibility appraisal through to prioritization, funding coordination, and implementation monitoring. As this unprecedented reform enters its full-scale implementation phase, officials and developers are exploring how artificial intelligence can become its next practical enabler to strengthen institutional capacity, make complex public investment management rules usable for every municipality in Ukraine, and dramatically improve investment project quality, planning, and delivery efficiency.
The Scale of the Challenge
That expansive scale brings a profound practical capacity challenge on the ground. Public officials must navigate a labyrinth of complex laws, methodologies, procurement rules, construction norms, financial requirements, and strict donor conditions. Local governments often operate under immense strain with limited staff, fragmented expertise, and precious little time to parse hundreds of pages of dense legal texts, methodologies, and operational manuals.
For example, completing a full cycle of an investment pre-feasibility study for a relatively small project takes about four weeks of full-time work for a single local government team. As a result, the preparation of just ten projects becomes an overwhelming challenge for a small local government authority. During peak planning cycles, the 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. In the year 2025 alone, organizers held 96 training events covering almost 30,000 participants, alongside continuous helpdesks and expert networks. Traditional support models simply struggle to scale at the rapid pace this wartime reform requires.
This capacity shortage is made acute by the harsh realities of wartime pressures. Over 230 communities, representing around 15 percent of the country, currently hold frontline status, facing dense shelling, ongoing drone attacks, crippling energy infrastructure breakdowns, and massive waves of internally displaced people on a daily basis. Every single one of these communities needs to be included in the public investment management process and given equitable access to financing. Sound rules become exceedingly difficult to apply in practice when institutional capacity is stretched this thin.
Our Approach to Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence cannot replace public servants, expert judgment, or political accountability—at least not yet. However, it can dramatically improve how essential knowledge, including policies, methodologies, requirements, and sectoral expertise, is accessed, interpreted, and applied, especially in a fast-evolving and complex reform environment. That is the critical gap stakeholders are trying to close.
Within the DREAM ecosystem, developers view artificial intelligence not as an external automation tool, but as an integral support layer embedded directly into daily governance workflows. Its purpose is simple to explain but historically difficult to achieve: to help users prepare and appraise better projects, understand regulatory requirements faster, and make more consistent, evidence-based decisions.
Three years of intense reform implementation have provided something that most artificial intelligence projects lack: a solid foundation. Officials possess a verified knowledge base, a clear picture of where users routinely get stuck, and the hard-won operational data necessary to build an assistant that is genuinely useful. It is not designed to be a flashy feature to brag about, but rather a reliable mechanism to support and empower the people who have the heavy task of rebuilding the country.
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 recognized expertise in providing artificial intelligence tools for public procurement—has joined forces with uStudio as an IT and AI innovation partner, alongside GCIEP and PwC with support from the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), to develop a specialized, AI-powered assistant integrated directly into the DREAM ecosystem.
This comprehensive approach is firmly grounded in a working prototype, a curated and verified knowledge base, and a hybrid architecture strictly aligned with Ukraine’s data sovereignty and ethical artificial intelligence 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 Public Investment Management Reform Roadmap for 2024-2028, and it advances progressively through three distinct stages of implementation.
Throughout 2026, the artificial intelligence assistant provides real-time guidance on public investment management rules and the project preparation process directly within the DREAM interface. In this initial phase, the primary aim is to bridge the gap between complex legal language and practical application by translating intricate methodological requirements into accessible explanations tailored specifically to each user’s role, sector, and geographic location. Serving as a trusted, 24-hour entry point into the complete public investment management knowledge base, the assistant provides accessible and practical guidance for government bodies at every administrative level.
Developers tested the DREAM AI Assistant in April 2026. Focus group participants representing local communities used the assistant throughout the project preparation process, awarding it an average satisfaction score of 4.33 out of 5 points. While developers continue to tailor and upgrade the tool, it has already become obvious that it will significantly reduce workloads and speed up procedures by guiding DREAM users smoothly through project preparation.
Looking ahead to 2027, the DREAM AI assistant will expand its capabilities into quality assurance, helping appraisal teams identify missing indicators or glaring inconsistencies in feasibility studies. It will also suggest ways to better align projects with national sectoral priorities, improving their economic, environmental, financial, and overall structural cases. By comparing new submissions with historical validated cases, the system will enhance the consistency and transparency of thousands of investment decisions.
During 2028 and 2029, the long-term aim transitions to advanced investment modeling using geographic, demographic, fiscal, and other socioeconomic data to help officials explore various development scenarios and model alternative investment options. This advanced functionality will allow for rigorous scenario-based assessments to determine precisely where public resources can achieve the greatest possible impact for society.
Building a Safe and Responsible AI Architecture
Because public investment decisions involve high stakes and sensitive financial and infrastructural data, the DREAM AI assistant is constructed on a hybrid and fully auditable architecture designed to ensure responsible public governance at every turn.
The core of the system utilizes Retrieval-Augmented Generation, grounding every single generated response exclusively in verified laws, official manuals, and established guidelines. To safeguard sensitive information, the system employs localized language models hosted on secure infrastructure designed to protect national data sovereignty. Every answer provided by the system is traceable to an approved legal source, timestamped, and version-controlled. Furthermore, the architecture incorporates a human-in-the-loop validation process to ensure that all content remains accurate and reflects the most recent regulatory updates.
To minimize the risk of artificial intelligence hallucinations or the inadvertent use of outdated guidance, every response generated by the system points directly to an approved source and carries a specific timestamp and version marker. Potential operational risks, such as factual errors or privacy concerns, are proactively addressed through structured prompt design and rigorous access controls. A dedicated multidisciplinary oversight team continuously monitors the system to ensure it strictly adheres to ethical standards and remains focused on its core public purpose.
Ukraine’s Lesson for the World
Ukraine’s ongoing experience demonstrates clearly that effective artificial intelligence in government does not start with complex algorithms. Instead, it starts with clear rules, strong institutions, and the disciplined design of technology that directly serves the public purpose. The artificial intelligence layer being added to DREAM is only as useful as the underlying reform infrastructure beneath it, and that vital infrastructure took three years and enormous national effort to build.
If executed correctly, this pioneering initiative can become not only a powerful catalyst for Ukraine’s recovery and long-term development, but also a globally relevant test case for how artificial intelligence can responsibly strengthen public investment management systems in complex, high-pressure environments. A nation rebuilding under fire, with digital governance already operating at the cutting edge, provides exactly the right place to prove what is truly possible.
