{"id":181180,"date":"2025-08-28T01:25:24","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T01:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/181180\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T01:25:24","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T01:25:24","slug":"911-centers-are-so-understaffed-theyre-turning-to-ai-to-answer-calls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/181180\/","title":{"rendered":"911 centers are so understaffed, they’re turning to AI to answer calls"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Max Keenan joined Y Combinator\u2019s summer 2022 batch, he was working on Aurelian<\/a>, a company that automated appointment bookings for hair salons. But less than a year later, a conversation with one of his clients led him to a far more significant problem.<\/p>\n

A nearby school\u2019s carpool line was constantly blocking the parking lot of one of Aurelian\u2019s hair salon clients. The salon owner called the city\u2019s non-emergency line and was put on hold for 45 minutes before reaching a dispatcher. \u201cShe called me into her office afterwards, and was like, \u2018Max, do you want to help me out?\u2019\u201d Keenan told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

When he started to research how municipal non-emergency response call centers work, he discovered that they are often handled by the same people who are answering actual 911 emergencies.<\/p>\n

Aurelian pivoted to building an AI voice assistant that helps 911 call centers offload non-emergency call volume. The company announced on Wednesday that it raised a $14 million Series A led by NEA.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s AI voice agent is designed to triage non-urgent issues like noise complaints, parking violations, and even stolen wallet reports \u2014 situations that don\u2019t need an officer\u2019s immediate response or can be handled without dispatching personnel to the scene. <\/p>\n

Aurelian\u2019s AI is trained to recognize a real emergency and immediately transfer those calls to a human dispatcher, Keenan said. In other situations, the system collects key information and either creates a report for or relays the details directly to the police department for follow-up action.<\/p>\n

Since launching its AI assistant in May 2024, Aurelian has been deployed at more than a dozen 911 dispatch centers, including those serving Snohomish County, Washington; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Kalamazoo, Michigan.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Emergency call centers are adopting Aurelian largely because they are consistently understaffed \u2014 a direct result of dispatching being a high-pressure job that ranks among the top 10 industries with the highest turnover rates<\/a>. Emergency dispatchers are often asked to work overtime, with reports of 12- to 16-hour workdays in certain counties<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason why we\u2019re most focused on 911 is because it\u2019s the industry that has this pain point most acutely,\u201d Keenan said. \u201cWe think that these telecommunicators should have a chance of taking a break or go to the bathroom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mustafa Neemuchwala, a partner at NEA, said, \u201cOne of the things that blows my mind, you\u2019re not replacing an existing human being; you\u2019re replacing a person they wanted to hire but couldn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aurelian isn\u2019t the only AI startup tackling non-emergency calls. Hyper, which raised a $6.3 million seed round, came out of stealth last month<\/a>. Prepared, a company founded in 2019, also recently added an AI voice solution for emergency response.<\/p>\n

But Aurelian believes its product is ahead of the competition. According to Neemuchwala, Aurelian is the only company actually deployed and handling live calls. \u201cAs far as we know, nobody else is actually live,\u201d he said, referring to Aurelian responding to thousands of actual calls daily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Max Keenan joined Y Combinator\u2019s summer 2022 batch, he was working on Aurelian, a company that automated…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":181181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,49239,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-181180","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-nea","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115103788086839153","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}