Jun 27, 2025 · 23m · a16z
How AI Will Impact Emergency Response: The Tech That Could Soon Save Your Life w/ Michael Chime
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Michael Chime, Co-founder and CEO of Prepared, discusses how artificial intelligence is transforming public safety communications by automating routine non-emergency calls and providing real-time transcription and translation co-piloting for 911 dispatchers. Through strategic automation and human augmentation, Prepared aims to eliminate hold times, overcome language barriers, and modernize emergency response infrastructure nationwide.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 2.7 Guest teaching 3.3 Guest disagreement 0.1 The host pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 15:14 Reframing AI Boundaries on Emergency Calls
The guest politely rejects any implication that AI should automate life-safety emergency calls, asserting that human empathy is non-negotiable and automation belongs strictly in low-empathy, mundane tasks.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 15:07 Host Challenges Voice AI BoundariesThe host directly challenges the guest on whether customer appetite for AI voice agents reaches a hard boundary at live emergency 911 calls.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 8:20 Paper QA vs Automated AI QAThe guest reveals the startling low-tech reality of 911 quality assurance, educating the host on how directors manually listened to paper-based checklists covering only 2 to 3 percent of calls.
The host holds their own ▶ 8:53 Synthesizing Vertical AI Economic Trade-offsThe host demonstrates strong domain insight by summarizing the nuance between replacing manual human labor and enabling immense operational capacity that was previously impossible.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overview of Prepared's AI Emergency Platform | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | The host sets up foundational questions regarding Prepared's product and founding story, offering context about 1960s-era legacy 911 tech. The guest educates the host on how emergency infrastructure was built on outdated landline assumptions. | |
| Go-to-Market Strategy and Initial AI Applications | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | The host frames the go-to-market challenges of selling venture-backed software to local government. The guest explains how they adapted Slack's bottom-up freemium model to bypass legacy IT procurement and acquire 1,000 centers. | |
| Customer Adoption and Evolution of Voice & QA AI | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | The host offers a sharp observation on the dynamic between automating existing human labor and expanding previously constrained capacity. The guest illustrates this by contrasting 3% manual paper QA with 100% automated AI coverage. | |
| Augmenting Humans vs. Full Automation in 911 | 1 | 5 | 0 | 0 | The guest delivers extended narrative analogies to reframe AI as human augmentation rather than replacement. He walks through a dramatic real-world Mandarin shooting call where instant AI translation saved a life before a human interpreter arrived. | |
| Data Privacy, Security, and Compliance Standards | 4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | The host asks probing questions about CJIS compliance and explicitly challenges whether voice AI on emergency 911 calls is a bridge too far. The guest clarifies that human empathy remains essential for emergency calls, whereas automation handles non-emergencies. | |
| Onboarding Process and Blending Tech & Industry Culture | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | The host explores vertical AI change management and team culture integration. The guest details their 50/50 team split between SV technologists and former dispatchers, highlighted by mandatory dispatch center visits during onboarding. | |
| Role of AI in Government Services and Prepared's Growth | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | The host guides the final conversation across broader government AI adoption, current funding metrics, and long-term vision. The guest details how dispatchers will transition into air traffic controllers operating on a single screen. |
Statements from this episode (16)
Prepared automates non-emergency calls and provides AI co-piloting for 911 dispatchers
“We have a set of tools that totally offload mundane work off of a nine-on-one call taker, right? Things like noise complaints, parking tickets, non-emergency traffic, or back-end processes like quality assurance. We will do that completely. And then on emergen…”
Chime: Traditional 911 dispatch infrastructure assumes incoming calls are landlines
“The system that they're using every day built on the assumption that calls are landlines, that they were that outdated.”
Chime: Prepared grew to 1,000 emergency call centers across US
“We got from zero to a thousand centers across the country. It was about six of the U.S. On our platform really, really quickly.”
Chime: Large California emergency agencies face 40-minute non-emergency hold times
“There's big agencies out in California where the average hold time on non-emergency calls is 40 minutes.”
Chime: Prepared replaces 7-minute human translation delays with instant AI
“A language like Vietnamese could have a whole time of seven minutes for a human interpreter. Whereas where we come in and we just translate it instantly.”
Chime: Prepared on track to process over 20M emergency calls in 2025
“We're on a rate this year to process over twenty million calls, right?”
Prepared AI translation enabled 911 dispatch before human interpreter connected
“Call comes in, it's in Mandarin, and they hit the human interpreter like they normally would, and they just wait because they forget they have prepared, and then they look up, and they're like, okay, I have the transcription, and they could tell the guy was re…”
Chime: Hosting All Data Domestically Is Unique in Public Safety Tech
“One is everything's in the U.S. You know, you would think is fairly common, but is unique in the space.”
Chime: Emergency supervisors monitor 10 to 20 AI calls simultaneously
“You can have a person in some cities I've selected to do this monitoring. You know, 10 to 20 calls at once.”
Prepared deployed software at 911 centers within 24 hours of signing
“We've had centers that have literally signed and the next day are deployed and using it. So that was the quickest effort, 24 hours.”
Half of Prepared's team comes from 911 and public safety backgrounds
“So you can think of us culturally as like half of the business is just technologists, people that, you know, come from the valley, et cetera, and or from fast growing startups and Product engineering, et cetera. The other half of the business comes from nine o…”
Chime: New York City spends ~$50M annually on 311
“New York City, this is a 2009 stat, so maybe it's even gotten worse. Spends almost fifty million a year on three one.”
Prepared closes Series C, raising ~$130M in total funding
“We're rapidly approaching a 150 people, which is great. And then we just closed Series C, which we were excited about. So we raised roughly a hundred and thirty-ish million in funding.”
Chime: Future 911 dispatchers will operate like air traffic controllers
“I think in the future, nine-one-one operators become more like air traffic controllers, and they'll be able to focus on what they're really good at, just being an empathetic ear to the caller, and everything in the background is just being done, and the entire…”
Chime: Fragmenting public safety data across multiple systems impairs AI safety
“I think, like, I can't think of a better word, but I think it could be dangerous in the future if you don't bring them together, because AI is only as good as the data you give it. So if you silo all these pieces of information into eight different systems, it…”