RAND distinguishes emergency-management AI supply from demonstrated adoption and resilience

Ask the emergency manager, IT lead and procurement team which concrete task consumes scarce capacity and whether a product can complete it with existing data and staff. Include accessibility and community-service stakeholders when outputs affect residents. Offer a bounded readiness assessment with one candidate workflow and a documented baseline. The value hypothesis is identifying a feasible, supportable use before scarce funds are committed. Do not present a large product count as adoption evidence or assume an advertised capability delivers disaster resilience. Qualify recurring support, integration and training costs before proposing broader deployment; low-capacity agencies may need shared services or process changes first.

Draw the dependency chain for the selected task, including identity, data preparation, external APIs, model services and human approval. Require current technical documentation and authorized test data. Test connectivity loss, service throttling, stale inputs and incomplete outputs across the full chain. For a document copilot, verify citations and instruction isolation; for agents, constrain tools and prohibit unapproved operational actions. Compare local, hosted and hybrid options using measured task performance and recovery effort. Validate security claims directly. The landscape informs questions to ask but supplies no product-specific benchmark, so the proof of value must establish local fit independently.

Name an emergency-management process owner with IT, procurement and training counterparts. Baseline the task, inventory dependencies, negotiate support and exit terms, and train staff before a limited pilot. Dependencies include maintained data, available reviewers and capacity to recover when services fail. Governance checkpoints should approve information handling, scope changes and any increase in agent permissions. Proposed acceptance includes completed end-to-end tasks, documented human review, a successful offline or manual fallback exercise and measured staff effort against baseline. These are proposed tests. Track hidden integration work and recurring costs; the principal risk is buying capability that the organization cannot sustain during a disruption.