The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
First Time Founders with Ed Elson – This Company Uses AI To Help 911 Save Lives
Sun, 01 Jun 2025
Ed speaks with Michael Chime, CEO and co-founder of Prepared, an assistive AI platform for emergency response. They discuss the challenges facing 911 call centers, the lessons Michael has learned as a manager, and how he frames Prepared’s value proposition to investors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the challenges facing 911 call centers?
Roughly 60% of that traffic is non-emergent. It's things like noise complaints, parking tickets, where 911 becomes this dumping ground or catch-all for really any requests in a city. And that bogs down operators. So it's interesting. It's not linear that you'd see call volume rise in a community. There's certainly places where crime is going up, but...
But you're seeing call volume rise, and it doesn't necessarily mean crime is. I actually think that's such an opportunity for technology to help process situations better by just simply reallocating resource and being thoughtful of the prioritization of the call queue. So that's one interesting trend. I would also say that this one's probably more obvious.
is that it's just like you're seeing the same staffing challenge in law enforcement and response broadly. I think that, you know, post defund the police, the nobility of that job has just changed, right, in our society in a way that maybe is changing right now.
But I think there was certainly this like, hey, you know, when I was a kid in third grade classes, you know, people would say, what do you want to be when you grow up? And a lot of hands would go up and say like, hey, you know, I want to be a cop. And I think that, The third grade class of today, many hands would go up, but not many would say. They want to be a YouTuber now. Yeah, exactly.
They want to be Jake Paul. So I think that has shifted. And I think that, you know, that job, I would say response broadly, emergency services broadly, when it suddenly becomes thankless, is not super exciting slash attractive. Right. It's like very, very hard and arduous job. You're responding to emergencies.
Or if you're a call taker and have a ton of empathy for it, that's why we're building for them. It's just like you're consistently all day listening to people's worst moments, right? And you couple that with it being thankless. You couple that with...
It being low paying in a lot of places, we can talk about this, but dispatchers in a lot of areas, and we're pushing for this and others are pushing for this to change, but they aren't classified as first responders. So they get separate benefits, they get separate pay than a first responder does. In a lot of places, they're treated like clerical workers. So if you're doing...
If you're getting paid like a clerical worker and the benefits of a clerical worker, but you've got to listen to people's worst moments, not a lot of people sign up for that gig. And so you face it. It's very, very hard to go and hire a dispatcher today. Guys, this is just so concerning to hear.
Just at like a government level level, I mean, who actually runs 9-1-1? Like, what is this 9-1-1 entity? I assume it's not the federal government. I'd assume it's more state or more local. But what actually is 9-1-1 and who are those people?
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Chapter 2: How does Prepared's AI technology help save lives?
You think about what is AI really good at? It's really good at taking a lot of valuable information, aggregating it together, pulling insights quickly, and then, okay, now we can go and use that.
If I have 10 different systems in 911 that I'm using, and all of them are from different vendors, and the data is siloed, you're never going to be able to capture all of those data sources and get the intelligence from it. And so to just give you some of the rough systems, it's like today, you have a call come in, and that 911 call is in one system.
The data we punch in out to the responder in another system. The radio is happening in another system. The protocols are in other systems. What you would really want is an intelligent system that knows all those things happening in real time and can suggest what responders should we send based on a bunch of different factors.
Isn't that a hardware product though? I mean, the thing that comes to mind is what Sam Altman and Johnny Ive are secretly building, which is one product, a piece of hardware replaces the screen. It's not going to be glasses that you put on, but it's something that just consolidates all of the data, whether it be audio or text or video. Isn't that what you're kind of describing?
I don't think so. I think it'll be still software. I think that the hardware will be the computer, the desktop. And that it'll more be that like all of these disparate systems come together and that the AI layer on top of it will now have all of the data intelligence. So I'll give you an example that maybe we'll bring in frame. So like,
If you have an emergency today, right, call comes in and, you know, like, we find out that there's weapons on scene and that a person on scene has autism. This is a real example of this. A person on scene has autism. You know, we're trying to make a decision on who we should send. Here's a couple failure modes.
One is because that is a small detail in the broader thing, there's weapons on scene, we could just miss that there's somebody on scene with autism. That could not even find its way into the notes out to a responder. We catch that, right? We put that in. If you have a transcript of the entire call, the AI would not Miss that, right? So that's one failure mode.
But then the second thing is now we have to make a decision. Who is the best person to send to this situation, right? Let's say there's one responder two minutes away and there's one responder one minute away, right? Today, because that's such a fast moving event and emergency, we are going to send the person one minute away.
You can't take into account that many factors other than proximity, right? But if I knew the records of that, both of those responders, and the guy two minutes away, I saw in his report that he has an autistic kid at home. This is his life. He's done this every day. He knows exactly how to handle this. And the other guy, one minute away, it's his first day on the job.
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