When disaster strikes, the public sees the most visible parts of the response: evacuations, first responders, rescue operations, and recovery efforts. But behind the scenes is a much larger network of people working to help communities manage through chaos.
That job is getting harder. Disasters are more frequent, more severe, and more costly. Pressure is mounting on emergency managers and the organizations that support them.
In a new RAND study supported by the Markle Foundation as part of the AI for Disasters and Emergencies Initiative (AIDE), senior policy researcher Jessica Jensen and her RAND colleagues examined how artificial intelligence could help carry some of that burden.
Over more than two decades, Jensen has helped emergency management rethink how communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from increasingly complex disasters. Now, she is exploring how AI could help a field that’s already stretched thin adapt to even greater demands.
What could AI realistically help emergency managers do—and how could that improve outcomes for communities?
AI can help with prediction and modeling, including when events are likely to occur and how severe impacts may be. It can also help bring together data from different groups, so people better understand what is happening during a disaster. If AI is used well, it can help communities get the right help at the right time without inefficiency or duplicated effort, ultimately saving lives.
Before disasters happen, emergency managers spend a lot of time on routine work like preparing plans, creating outreach materials, and managing grants. AI can speed up much of that work. That allows emergency managers to spend less time behind their desks and more time doing important public-facing work—helping people prepare, building community relationships, and focusing on the things that lessen disaster impacts.
Your team identified more than 1,000 AI-enabled products relevant to emergency management. What do these tools do, and what surprised you about your findings?
We were shocked by the number of tools out there. We thought we might find dozens. Instead, we found 1,179.
A lot of them support response. They support situational awareness, hazard monitoring, damage assessment, information sharing, and more. But the market is uneven, with more tools for response than for preparedness or recovery.
A big challenge facing emergency managers is that many of the products are very narrow. For example, many offer one piece of insight, but they do not connect different information streams or help create a fuller picture. That creates what we call a stacking problem. People would need to use multiple tools and would have to connect them. The products also tend not to facilitate interorganizational coordination, a hallmark of emergency management task areas.
What are the biggest barriers to using these tools—and what will it take for emergency management to adopt them more widely?
As we found, it’s not that the tools do not exist. It is whether organizations have the capacity to evaluate them, buy them, integrate them, and keep using them over time.
A lot of these products require technical expertise. Often, you need someone with an IT background to set the tool up and provide ongoing support. Many jurisdictions don’t have that kind of staffing. Many products also require internet connectivity, which can become an issue during response. A significant number depend on another product to work. And pricing is often hard to find—which makes procurement difficult.
Then you add privacy or cyber concerns, and the reality is that many offices are already stretched thin. One issue by itself may be manageable, but taken together, they can be overwhelming.
This is also where there is room for progress. Technology companies can design products more specifically for this field and prioritize transparency on pricing, access, and technical requirements—which will drive better adoption. Policymakers can make decisions about governance, procurement, and funding that make adoption easier. And emergency managers can build more familiarity with what these tools can do and where their limits are.
In your research, what role did large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots play in emergency management today?
We found they could be especially useful for administrative and communication tasks in emergency management. They can help summarize reports, draft materials, translate information, and process large amounts of text more efficiently.
Those kinds of general-purpose tools stood out as one place the field may be able to realize benefits quickly, since they have broad capabilities, are user-friendly, and already available to some jurisdictions. For more complex emergency management tasks, though, there is still more research and real-world testing that needs to be done to determine LLMs effectiveness.
This study was supported by the Markle Foundation’s AI for Disasters + Emergencies (AIDE) Initiative. How critical is philanthropic support in a fast-moving area like this?
One of the most important things philanthropies can do is bring together technology companies, the user community, and the researchers developing the underlying technologies, and facilitate conversations about how to balance everyone’s interests. That convening role—and the ability to sustain those conversations—can make the difference between tools that sound promising and tools that actually help communities. That is exactly what the AIDE Initiative is doing—bringing the right people together to explore how AI can better support disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.
You’ve dedicated your career to emergency management. What’s kept you in the field so long?
I’ve known I wanted to serve this field since I was 14. Around that time, a regular at the restaurant where I worked would talk about his job helping communities and organizations recover after disasters. What stayed with me was how many different people and systems have to come together to help a community heal.
Now, years later, this work feels even more meaningful. There is an incredible opportunity in emergency management to keep evolving the practice to better serve communities. And I care deeply about the people who do this work. They are hardworking, passionate, and committed—even when resources are scarce and the demands keep growing. In a world of increasing disasters and rising impacts, that work matters enormously. It’s what keeps me going.
– Megan Guilfoyle, Published courtesy of RAND.