Jefferson County, CO, 9-1-1 Center Uses Artificial Intelligence During Staff Shortage

Aug. 27—Jeffcom 911, Colorado's Jefferson County Communications Center, has adopted a new platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI), which is expected to reduce call times and alleviate the workload of county staff.

For years, local governments have been exploring how AI can help fill staff shortages, especially in call centers.

According to Michael Brewer, deputy director of Jeffcom 911, the county was looking to transition from what he described as "the best technology the 1960s had to offer" to a cloud-based system that leverages AI technology to support next-generation 911 (NG911).

Technology partner Carbyne announced the deployment in a news release earlier this month. Implementation is currently underway and is expected to take about two months — transforming Jeffcom 911 operations in at least two ways.

It will enhance the capability of the emergency communication centers, allowing for quicker response times, said Brewer, who also expects the new platform to reduce the number of people needed to operate a communication center — citing staffing challenges common throughout the 911 industry. At Jeffcom 911, the demand for service is high; Brewer said the dispatch communications center receives an average of 2,000 calls per day. About 20 to 25 percent of those are emergencies, while the others are nonemergency calls that still require a public safety response.

"We were never going to be able to hire and train our way out of that problem," Brewer said. "We really had to look to leverage existing and emerging technologies, to help us not only meet basic standards but be able to improve on those standards."

A key piece of this technology is that the platform uses AI for language translation. As Brewer said, this is especially helpful in serving Colorado's large immigrant population. Many call centers must rely on a language center to communicate with non-English-speaking residents, but this function further reduces response times.

In the coming weeks, Jeffcom 911 hopes to have the Carbyne Call Triage solution active, which will use AI in a unique way to address call surges. For example, if there is a large wildfire in the county, there is often a major influx of calls from people reporting smoke or fire. If the county is already responding to that incident, an influx of calls can deter resources from addressing other emergencies, like heart attacks. But with machine learning, this technology can identify the location of the incident that people are likely calling about. Screening calls to ensure callers are not reporting a major event that is already being addressed will allow the county to more effectively use the time of "that finite resource, which is the human," Brewer said.

Deb Szajngarten, Carbyne's vice president of marketing, cited a 15 to 20 minute time savings per incident in New Orleans when the city implemented Triage technology. This is especially helpful, she said, when a car accident leads to an influx of redundant calls, taking dispatchers' time away from other emergencies.

Triage also enables text messaging which, as Brewer noted, provides an enhanced experience for constituents who are deaf or hard of hearing. Accessibility is a priority and a mandate for the state of Colorado, which has enacted a law directing government agencies to meet accessibility standards.

The new platform's ability to more accurately locate callers — within one meter of where they're calling from, according to Szajngarten — also enables faster response times. Eighty-eight percent of 911 calls are made from a mobile phone, Brewer said, and sometimes the callers are moving. Better location data enhances response capabilities.

The platform also enables one-way video calling from residents, which could resolve issues like concerns about smoke from something such as a controlled burn that is not an emergency.

The system implementation is a significant change for Jeffcom 911, but Brewer said because the organization is relatively young — about six years old — change has been a fairly constant part of the culture.

"Change is in our DNA," he said.

In early August, Carbyne said it had inked a deal with AT&T centered on upgrading 911 infrastructure in the U.S. The collaboration focuses on providing emergency call centers access to new 911 technology, which in turn will quicken and otherwise improve emergency responses, according to a statement from the company.

More specifically, this deal, which involves cloud-hosted services, will enable emergency dispatch operations to receive what the statement called NG911 IP-based call routing and cloud-native emergency call handling.

"Working with AT&T and (Amazon Web Services) has been instrumental in completely redesigning the 911 infrastructure to support future needs," Amir Elichai, Carbyne CEO, said in the statement. "In this era of artificial intelligence advancements and rich data collaboration, it's crucial to have a robust infrastructure capable of adapting to rapid changes."

Thad Rueter contributed to this article.

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