It’s not supposed to be this way, but emergency dispatch centers have slowly become the dumping ground of government phone calls. If you’ve ever called your local nonemergency line, there’s a chance it ended up rerouted to an overworked 911 operator – who might have put you on hold because they were interrupted by an actual emergency. Artificial intelligence is offering a solution, and it already has two sizable footholds in Wisconsin.
Emergency dispatch centers – aka public safety answering points, or PSAPs – are understaffed. According to a 2023 industry survey, more than one-third of U.S. emergency dispatch centers have vacancy rates above 30%. Burnout is the most oft-cited reason for high turnover. “It’s been really hard to hire and keep staff on,” says Cory Lynch, operations supervisor of La Crosse County Public Safety Communications. PSAPs are “the redheaded stepchild of public safety,” adds Max Keenan, the 27-year-old co-founder of Seattle startup Aurelian.
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Aurelian’s AI-powered system called Ava has already fielded more than 50,000 total calls in the two Wisconsin counties – La Crosse and Waukesha – that adopted it in May 2025 and January 2026, respectively. If you call 911 in one of these communities, you still always get a human operator. Ava is instead trained to answer questions about court dates, parking fines and other procedural things. Ava recognizes hot words like “injuries,” “weapons” or “crash.” If it appears a caller might be in danger, Ava is instructed to immediately transfer the call to a Homo sapiens. “Aurelian does a really fantastic job of recognizing actual emergencies,” attests Chris Becker, operations manager for Waukesha County Communications. “Our emergency dispatchers are phenomenal at taking calls. They shouldn’t have to be burdened by administrative or nonemergency calls.”
As Keenan puts it: “You train your [dispatch] team as Navy SEALs and you’re asking them to be mall cops.”
Milwaukee’s AI Coach
The City of Milwaukee announced in January that its dispatch center was installing an AI-powered program called CommsCoach to use as a trainer for dispatchers. It reviews recordings of actual 911 calls and and creates interactive scenarios that operators can train with. CommsCoach costs $64,000 per year. The city is also looking at other emergency call center technologies.
Is this robot coming for 911 operators’ jobs? Nobody interviewed for this story thought so. “I don’t think AI will ever replace the human in a 911 center,” says La Crosse County’s Lynch. “The dispatcher is … picking up nuances of changes in inflection [and] background noises that I personally don’t see AI being able to take over.”
His county has at least four dispatchers per shift; in Waukesha County, it’s at least eight at all hours. Ava – which costs La Crosse, based on call volume, around $67,000 its first year and $81,000 its second, approximate to one employee with benefits – “is lightening the load on my staff,” Lynch says. “It isn’t replacing anybody … It’s making the dispatchers more efficient and ready to handle the emergencies that are coming in.”
Ava is already used in more than one-third of Washington state’s PSAPs. More Wisconsin contracts are rumored to be in the works. “We’re on the leading edge,” Becker says, “but soon we’ll be part of the crowd.”
