Episode #21
Episode 21: Dispatched: Two Founders Reimagining What 911 Can Be
For our season finale, Max Keenan (Founder, Aurelian) and Scott MacDonald (CEO, GovWorx) join the show to take apart what 911 is, what it's becoming, and what has to stay human. Two founders. Opposite entry points into public safety. One shared North Star: the person in the chair. We cover staffing, burnout, AI in non-emergency, NG911, the myth of the "big bang," and what winning actually looks like ten years from now. They came at 911 from opposite directions. Scott joined the Air Force at 22 because he needed a job, became a firefighter, got assigned to the alarm room on the 1 AM shift, and realized he got more out of taking the call than riding the engine. He built his first CAD system inside Microsoft Access. Max was 22, automating phone calls for hair salons, when a salon owner called a non-emergency line about a blocked parking spot, waited 30 minutes, hung up, and dialed 911. He was lying on a friend's apartment floor because he couldn't afford a hotel room. He didn't know the industry existed he thought police officers answered the phone. Two entry points. Same North Star. A few moments that stayed with me: → "You train your team as Navy SEALs and you use them as mall cops." A 30% staffing shortage sitting on top of 70% non-emergency call volume. Max called it the greatest misallocation of labor he'd ever seen. → On why 911 companies fail. Not competition. "It's going to be suicide" — launching things that don't work, selling what doesn't exist. Max told the story of a vendor tapping him on the shoulder at a conference bar after he'd told a prospect "no, it doesn't do that": You should have just said yes. → On automation math nobody runs. If you automate 30% of your non-emergency calls, you may have just made the other 70% worse. Be a solution, not a hurdle. → On mental health as an existential threat. Maybe 2% of the population can actually do this job. Eleven known telecommunicator suicides this year alone. You can't stop the call from the mother who found her baby in the pool. You can stop the twelve hours of mandatory overtime every three days. → On what QA actually costs. One hour and seventeen minutes for a human to review a seven-minute call — covering 2% of calls. Scott's team has evaluated over 12 million. → On rigidity. One agency has 550 call types in their CAD. A call taker told Max she picks "physical altercation" over "fight" because she knows it gets a faster response. She knows the outcome. The system doesn't. → On the human in the middle. Scott wrote a blog post about being the person seated between two dinner guests who have nothing in common. That's the telecommunicator — translating panic into something real and durable. Machine can talk to machine. Human still needs a human. → On what winning looks like. Scott: "If all that's said in ten years is that there's more AI in 911, that's not a win." The win is a stronger profession — better retention, real reclassification, elevated recognition. And the line I keep coming back to, for every dispatcher listening: "The future is happening. Not around you, not without you — but with you." This one runs long and earns it. #911 #PublicSafety #EmergencyCommunications #NG911 #Dispatch #Telecommunicators #AI #GovTech #BeyondTheLaunch
