What happened
RAND published a landscape assessment of AI-enabled products available to support U.S. emergency management (EM) work, identifying the products on the market, what is required to adopt and diffuse them, and pathways to support broader adoption. The report finds emergency managers are making purchasing decisions in a 'crowded technology marketplace with limited time, technical capacity, and standardized information,' and demand on EM functions increasingly outpaces capacity as hazards and disasters grow in frequency and intensity. Authored by Jessica Jensen, Jessie Riposo, Leah Dion, and Glen L. Woodbury using qualitative and mixed-methods research.
Why it matters
Gives public-sector executives and emergency management leaders a vetted market landscape and adoption roadmap for AI procurement decisions in a historically underserved, high-stakes domain where vendor claims are hard to verify.
Action needed
Share with emergency management and public-safety technology procurement leads to benchmark current AI vendor evaluations against RAND's adoption-pathway criteria.