AI and the future of emergency management
This report gives emergency managers (EM) and others who support EM functions, along with technology companies, funders, policymakers, and researchers, a picture of the artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled product landscape and the conditions that will shape how those products can support EM. The authors identified 1,179 AI-enabled products with potential relevance to EM, characterised the products they identified, described what it takes to adopt and diffuse those products, and identified what stands between the availability of those products and broad adoption and diffusion. This report is intended to give the EM community, technology companies, funders, policymakers, and researchers a reliable picture of available AI-enabled products so that they can act on what the landscape suggests for their own decisions, investments, and further work.
The recommendations are as follows:
- Emergency managers and others who support EM functions, technology companies, policymakers, and researchers should pursue sequenced action agendas that detail things each stakeholder group can do in the next 12 months, the next one to three years, and on an ongoing basis to support the adoption and diffusion of AI-enabled products to support EM.
- These stakeholders should also consider establishing a standing cross-sector alliance to focus sustained attention on AI-enabled product adoption and diffusion, anchored by members with the capacity to financially support and sustain the alliance.
- These stakeholders should consider launching a national-level EM AI readiness and adoption accelerator to function as an independent, Consumer Reports–style clearinghouse and provide product evaluations, standardized buyer guides, model procurement and contracting language, peer-learning cohorts, and practical deployment templates for low-capacity jurisdictions.
- These stakeholders should consider developing and sustaining a national, freely accessible education and training program designed as a tiered learning pathway to build AI awareness and capability among emergency managers and others who perform EM functions.
- These stakeholders should consider funding the critical outstanding research questions identified in this report—including whether large language models can effectively support EM tasks and whether national AI governance, procurement, and IT policies create systematic barriers to adoption—so that the answers can inform pilot projects, alliance work, and policy decisions.
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