Investigating the Role of AI in Emergency Management: Use Cases, Challenges, and Opportunities

Though natural disasters and other hazards remain a persistent threat, Emergency Managers (EMs) face substantial barriers to effectively completing their life-saving job functions. Pervasive staffing challenges and diminishing funding sources complicate a profession tasked with timely, critical decision-making under uncertainty. While technology presents a significant opportunity to complement EMs’ workflows, commercial products are extremely costly and typically serve narrow use cases. To understand how EMs use and envision using technology, and in particular AI, we conducted in-depth interviews with 32 professionals spanning different geographic regions within the US. Through iterative thematic analysis and affinity mapping, we identified 7 key categories of AI technology use cases for EMs’ core job functions, representing 136 distinct specific use cases. In the context of these use cases, we describe the limitations of current technologies, provide guidance on EMs’ design needs, and highlight opportunities for computing research to support them.