Interview, Fireside Chat
How AI Will Impact Emergency Response: The Tech That Could Soon Save Your Life w/ Michael Chime
- Prepared is an AI assistant platform designed for 911 call centers, functioning as both an automation tool for mundane tasks and a co-pilot for emergency calls.
- For non-emergency calls (e.g., noise complaints, parking tickets), the system fully automates handling, reducing hold times from an average of 40 minutes to zero.
- For emergency calls, the AI acts as a co-pilot to manage transcription, translation, CAD entries, and interaction summarization, ensuring no critical details are missed before responders are dispatched.
- The company's founding story traces back to five years ago, driven by a personal catalyst: the founder grew up near a 2012 active shooter event at age 13 and subsequently built a student safety app for high schools.
- While piloting the school app, the team identified a gap where schools could capture emergency data (like photos) but lacked a seamless way to transmit it to outdated 911 systems.
- Research into 911 centers revealed infrastructure built on 1960s assumptions (landlines) that failed to support modern communication methods like text or multimedia.
- Prepared executed a "bottom-up" go-to-market strategy inspired by Slack and Yammer, launching a free tier to bypass traditional government procurement barriers.
- By proving value directly to end-users (call takers), the company scaled from zero to 1,000 centers in roughly six years.
- Current scale includes deployment at approximately 6,000 911 centers, with the goal of serving all 6,000 dispatching centers across the US.
- The company is on track to process over 20 million calls this year and recently closed a Series C funding round raising roughly $130 million.
- Prepared employs approximately 150 people and maintains a hybrid workforce of Silicon Valley technologists and public safety veterans.
- The company explicitly states it does not train its models on customer data, keeping all data processing localized within the US to comply with CJIS and SOC 2 standards.
- Specific product impacts highlighted include resolving critical safety gaps that human-only systems miss.
- In one instance, AI transcription identified a caller mentioning a child with autism near weapons, a detail the human call taker missed while panicking.
- In a Mandarin-speaking incident, immediate AI translation allowed dispatch to occur before a human interpreter could connect, potentially saving a victim who would have died while waiting for the interpreter.
- Prepared's approach to automation focuses on offloading "mundane" work (non-emergencies) and filling capability gaps (language barriers, manual QA) rather than replacing human empathy.
- The company reports transforming Quality Assurance (QA) from a manual process covering only 2-3% of calls to an automated system covering 100% of interactions.
- Voice AI agents for non-emergency lines are deployed with a human-in-the-loop monitoring dashboard, allowing supervisors to intervene or monitor 10-20 concurrent calls.
- Implementation timelines vary by product module, with translation and transcription features deployable within 24 hours, while Quality Assurance modules may require longer onboarding for workflow alignment.
- The company mandates that all new hires visit a 911 center within their first 90 days to instill deep empathy for the customer experience.
- Forward-looking statements project a future where 911 operators function like air traffic controllers, managing complex data while AI handles background processing.
- The company aims to consolidate the typical eight disparate screens used in 911 centers into a single, intelligent system to provide full context for AI processing.
- The founder views the current moment as a historic inflection point similar to the internet's rise, where AI can fundamentally reduce the cost and increase the efficacy of public safety services.
- Prepared anticipates that every city will eventually maintain a manned 311 line, offloading non-emergency volumes to ensure emergency lines are always staffed and responsive.