MONTPELIER, Vt. (WCAX) – A Vermont lawmaker has been selected to co-lead a national task force on artificial intelligence policy.

It’s part of a nationwide effort by Future Caucus to arm state lawmakers with knowledge and expertise on AI.

Bradford Democratic Rep. Monique Priestley co-chairs the task force with a Republican representative from Utah.

She says her focus is to learn more about how AI impacts consumer protection and data policy.

“Right now, AI is touching everything that we are interacting with. It’s used in software that determines if you can get a loan, if you can get an apartment, or whether or not you qualify for different education. Your health care is largely impacted by artificial intelligence,” Priestley said.

The task force will connect lawmakers with expert voices in the industry and create a first-of-its-kind bipartisan state AI policy memo to guide policymaking across the country.

Copyright 2025 WCAX. All rights reserved.

When someone calls 911, every second matters. But what about the thousands of interactions that aren’t true emergencies? A new AI tool is helping Virginia Beach, Va., manage those calls, giving dispatchers the breathing room they need to focus on life-or-death situations.

That shift is happening through the city’s use of Amazon Connect, bringing artificial intelligence and natural language processing into the nonemergency call workflow to help modernize how public safety communications are handled. The change essentially came from necessity, as high call volumes and a smaller workforce pushed the municipality’s Emergency Communications and Citizen Services Department to find innovative ways to manage increasing demand.

“We actually process more nonemergency calls per year,” Jada Lee, director for Emergency Communications and Citizen Services at Virginia Beach, said. “The same people in my department that process 911 calls on a daily basis are also responsible for processing 5,000 nonemergency calls.”

Instead of tying up 911-trained dispatchers with routine questions or ambiguous calls, the city’s 10-digit nonemergency number now routes through Amazon Connect. Callers are greeted with prompts, including a high-priority transfer option for true emergencies. From there, they speak naturally to explain their reason for calling.

“The Amazon Connect system can then translate those stated intents into specific workflows that we’ve configured inside of Connect,” Josh Nelson, Virginia Beach IT solutions manager, said. “It will either transfer the call to a queue, provide more information, send a text message, or it will transfer them to another city department that’s more appropriate.”

Since its implementation in April 2024, the technology’s impact on the department has been hard to miss. In an average month, the solution either completely handles nearly half of incoming calls to Amazon Connect, transfers them to the appropriate city department, or otherwise diverts them from 911 center agents. In actual numbers, that accounts for 44 to 45 percent of calls.

“When you look year over year, that translates to thousands fewer calls for live agents based on your average call duration, which works out to over 900 hours of continuous talk time,” he said. “That’s just April to December 2023 versus April to December 2024.”

The measurable impact on call volume had a noticeable effect on the day-to-day environment in the communications center. With fewer nonemergency calls interrupting the workflow, morale improved as the pressure of growing queues eased — so it was not surprising, department leaders said, that staff buy-in came quickly.

“They were extremely excited about not having to spend as much time processing nonemergency calls,” Lee said. “Those calls typically take longer, and our staff gets very anxious when they see the 911 queue start to build.”

To make the initial transition to Amazon Connect smooth, clear communication with the public was essential, especially to address early misconceptions. Before launch, the team worked to inform residents on how it worked, and what it would and wouldn’t do. That outreach helped ease concerns and build trust in the technology.

Residents, Nelson said, have responded well, especially when it comes to wait times and convenience. The central benefit to the public, he said, is that they’re not stuck in a queue waiting for a live person to tell them something that they could have obtained in other ways.

Buoyed by the system’s success, Virginia Beach is already planning to expand. Their team, Nelson says, has identified several other workflows and use cases and is looking into more, specifically potential integrations with 311 and the city’s Salesforce customer relationship management. Future use cases could focus on anything from towed vehicle inquiries to seasonal high-volume scenarios like fireworks complaints on July Fourth.

But while automation is making a difference in handling nonemergency calls, the goal isn’t to entirely replace humans in safety communications.

“We’re not trying to keep people from speaking to an agent,” Nelson said. “We make it very easy for people to get through to a live person, but we’re saving callers’ time.”

Finding the right mix of technology and the personal touch was part of the challenge, and not everyone was on board right away. For Lee, bringing AI into the picture wasn’t something she initially planned or expected. The director had some doubts early on about whether automation might make the experience feel too cold or impersonal to callers.

“I never thought that I would say, ‘yes, I want AI in my center,’” she said. “But people today, if they don’t have to talk to an actual person and they can have their needs met, then that’s what they prefer to do.”

And in a field grappling with national staffing shortages, Lee said she now sees this kind of technology as essential.

“Dispatch centers across the country are going to begin really looking at how they can use technology software to assist them in creating additional efficiencies in their day-to-day operations,” she said. “If someone is having a true emergency, yes, they want a human being on the other end of the phone. But in other areas, AI is definitely going to help.”