AI Resilience Report forCommand and Control Center Officers

If you're worried about AI taking over jobs in emergency dispatch, here's the honest picture: AI is already in 911 centers right now, but it's being used as a teammate — not a replacement — for human telecommunicators. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration ran a yearlong cross-country project documenting the transformative impact AI is already having on public safety communications, partnering with APCO, NENA, NASNA, and the FCC and featuring testimonials from agencies actively using AI to support telecommunicators in their life-saving work.

The most common use is filtering out non-emergency calls so human officers can focus on real crises. In Washington's Tri-Cities, Seattle-based Aurelian AI began handling calls coming into SECOMM's non-emergency phone number; the system does not impact calls made directly to 911, where the agency aims to answer emergency calls within 10 to 15 seconds. Industry experts describe this as augmentation: AI call automation isn't about replacing people — instead, it allows skilled professionals to focus on the calls that truly need human expertise while AI manages routine, repetitive or low-priority calls, helping reduce stress and burnout among staff.

AI is also being used behind the scenes for quality assurance — Critical Insights AI is a cloud-based analytics platform that automates the arduous process of quality assurance, so instead of supervisors manually reviewing a small random sample of calls, AI reviews them at scale.

Adoption is moving quickly because dispatch centers are in crisis. Over 80% of emergency call centers are understaffed, with some facing vacancy rates as high as 83%, the national average turnover rate hovers around 17% (and exceeds 50% in larger centers), and training a new hire costs between $30,000 and $60,000 — with up to half of trainees failing probation. When hiring humans is this hard, AI that handles routine calls becomes very appealing financially ^[1].

However, public trust is a real brake on adoption — a survey of 2,000 Americans found that 16% believe 911 calls are being answered by AI instead of live dispatchers without disclosure, signaling that transparency rules and ethical guardrails will shape how fast agencies deploy these tools. The good news for young people considering this career: human judgment, empathy, and the ability to calm a panicked caller during life-or-death moments are exactly the skills APCO and NTIA panels say AI cannot replace ^[2]. AI is freeing telecommunicators from the boring stuff so they can do the meaningful, human work.