State and local emergency management agencies face a persistent challenge: expanding missions paired with constrained staffing and resources. Artificial intelligence offers a practical path forward. However, risks and concerns have held practitioners back from wholeheartedly engaging in this capability. This session presents five concrete AI use cases for state and local emergency management: 1. Jurisdiction-specific AI: knowledge bases built from existing plans and SOPs-query-able in plain language during activations or for staff onboarding. 2. Improved public messaging and situational awareness: multilingual content generation, social media intelligence monitoring, misinformation detection, and data visualization. 3. Facilitated incident reconstruction: AI-generated event timelines, damage mapping from unstructured field reports, and historical pattern visualization for mitigation justification. 4. Research and planning: querying after-action report archives for systemic findings, stress-testing plans against failure scenarios, and building data-driven budget justifications. 5. Rapid exercise design: realistic scenario generation, synthetic media injects, and AI-powered role-players that reduce weeks of preparation to hours. This session pairs emergency management expertise with technical AI knowledge. Attendees will hear about real-world, practical applications and leave with an actionable steps forward requiring no additional budget or specialized skills.
