When citizens in Richmond, Va., call either 911 or the non-emergency police number, they’re directed to the city’s emergency communications center. Emergency calls are prioritized, but with more than 8,500 total calls coming in each week, dispatchers are forced to balance calls about parking tickets and potholes with those about car crashes and crimes in progress.
“Our call takers have a very stressful job,” says Thomas Gann, technology manager for the Richmond Department of Emergency Communications, Preparedness and Response. “They do a fantastic job of getting the right help to callers at the right time. But that goes awry when a call taker is already on the phone assisting a citizen with a non-emergency, and 911 rings.”
Last year, Gann saw an opportunity to use artificial intelligence to reduce the burden of routine inquiries on dispatchers, freeing up more capacity for emergency calls. In July 2025, Richmond went live with Amazon Connect, a cloud-based contact center platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and deployed in collaboration with CDW Government. The system uses generative AI to greet non-emergency callers, answer questions about city services and route calls to the right agencies — ideally, without sending calls to a human dispatcher…