AI Resilience Report forPublic Safety Telecommunicators

If you've ever wondered what happens when you dial 911, you can rest assured that humans are still very much in charge — but they're starting to get help from AI, especially for the busywork that pulls them away from real emergencies. The clearest example right now is AI handling non-emergency calls. In Washington state, the company claims it can save dispatchers about three hours every day and makes it so that callers do not need to wait on hold for a live dispatcher, and the change will not replace any dispatcher jobs.

During testing, the system handled 68% of 1,000 recorded non-emergency calls ^[1] and was programmed to bump callers to a human the moment it detected frustration, anxiety, or "trigger words."

San Diego is doing something similar. According to Axios, the AI service is able to track dispatchers to ensure they are following protocol, though police say they aren't using that feature right now, and it also offers "AI insights," which include documenting the calls and prompting dispatchers to ask certain questions ^[2]. The dispatchers' union says the tools are meant to help, not replace, humans ^[2].

Major vendors are pushing further: Motorola Solutions just rolled out new "agentic" assistants that can transcribe calls, summarize incidents, and pre-fill computer-aided dispatch records ^[3] — exactly the data-entry and record-keeping tasks O*NET rates as highly automatable. APCO International, the field's main professional society, says AI can support emergency communications centers through real-time threat detection, predictive analytics and automated incident response, but cautions against the risks of AI "hallucinations," opaque decision-making, and susceptibility to exploitation if not properly managed, and stresses keeping a human "in the loop" for ethical reasoning and critical decisions ^[4].

Adoption is moving faster than in many other government jobs, mostly because of a staffing crisis. A Wisconsin Watch panel of dispatchers concluded that 911 centers across the country are experiencing a shortage of dispatchers, the work is mentally taxing, and that's amplified when there are fewer people on staff, with the group specifically pointing to AI as one tool helping tackle problems without replacing dispatchers ^[5]. Costs also pencil out — Washington's SECOMM is paying about $120,000 a year for the service, far less than several full-time dispatcher salaries, and San Diego signed a one-year, $263,434 contract with Invictus Apps ^[2].

What slows things down is trust. Privacy advocates worry "AI insights" could quietly become biometric or voice surveillance, and people with uncertain immigration status might avoid calling 911 ^[2] if they fear AI tracking. Unions are negotiating which features can even be turned on, and APCO is developing a new AI standard with a working group ^[4] so agencies don't rush in unsafely.

The honest bottom line: the highly repetitive parts of the job — typing into databases, logging calls, sorting non-emergencies — are being automated, but the human skills that matter most (calming a panicked caller, judging priority, exercising empathy under pressure) are exactly what AI still can't do. That's a hopeful spot to be in if you're thinking about this career.