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Artificial intelligence (AI) is already embedded in many of the systems fire and rescue services use every day, but the challenge is how to utilise its capabilities in a way that enhances decision-making without undermining the trust that the public should have in emergency services. At The Emergency Tech Show 2025, a panel led by the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) explored how AI is being used today, where it could deliver the greatest impact, and why a values-led approach is critical.
Frank Long, a group manager and strategic lead for the NFCC, started the session by highlighting that while firefighting may still be defined by the mantra of “putting wet stuff on hot stuff,” modern fire and rescue is increasingly focused on prevention, protection and understanding risk before incidents occur.
“Fire, like any other societal problem, is actually quite complex. It’s intimately tied to social and economic drivers. What AI hopefully offers us is the ability to see things we never saw before and understand the problem like we’ve never really understood it before.”
Frank Long.
For Callum Faint, Chief Fire Officer of Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service, capacity is the most important issue. Like all emergency services, fire is operating in an increasingly constrained resourcing environment, and AI offers a way to relieve pressure without replacing people. “AI can alleviate some of the back-office stuff and less complicated tasks to free our highly trained staff to do what we actually want them to do,” he explained.
In Leicestershire, that includes using AI tools within recruitment and promotion processes. Variations of copilots and agents are used to sense-check assessments, improving impartiality and saving time, particularly in a smaller service where candidates are often known to assessors.
Callum stressed that AI is not replacing human judgement. “We’re using AI to sense-check the assessors, not to replace them,” he said.
Operationally, AI is already familiar territory, even if it has not always been labelled as such. Dynamic fire cover tools, which analyse patterns of demand and reposition appliances accordingly, have been in use for years. “We’ve probably been doing AI for an awfully long time,” Callum noted. “We just didn’t call it AI.”
A consistent theme throughout the panel’s discussion was the importance of reframing AI as augmentation rather than automation.
“We’re not at any point advocating for these tools to replace human judgement,” Frank said. “The human has to be at the centre of decision-making.”
This principle underpins the NFCC’s work to shape AI adoption across the sector, including the development of an AI register to capture where tools are being used, what has worked and where things have gone wrong. Alongside this, the NFCC is developing position statements and ethical guidance to help services engage with AI in a secure, principled way.
Looking to the future, the panel explored how AI could enhance situational awareness for firefighters and commanders during incidents. Callum highlighted the difficulty of accessing large volumes of data in constantly changing conditions, for example while responding to a road traffic collision.
“We’ve got the information,” he said. “But surfacing it on the route to an incident can be challenging. An AI tool that presents relevant data quickly and clearly would be brilliant.”
As incidents escalate, AI could also help commanders draw together building risk information, vulnerability data and operational guidance, potentially integrating police and ambulance data to provide a more multi-agency picture during major incidents.
Charlie Anderson from Amazon Web Services brought a supplier and practitioner perspective, drawing on her background as a former frontline police officer. She reinforced Callum and Frank’s argument for “human in the loop” decision-making and cautioned against adopting technology for its own sake.
“We shouldn’t be buying technology for technology’s sake. We should be looking at where the problem is and then where technology plays a part in helping us solve that.”
Charlie Anderson.
She pointed to work supporting Canadian wildfire response, where open-source sensor data was used to model fire trajectories and inform resource deployment. “That’s readily available information,” she said. “And it’s incredibly powerful.”
While AI’s potential on the incident ground is significant, the panel agreed that some of the biggest gains may come earlier, in prevention and protection. Moving beyond static, historic risk models towards predictive analysis could allow services to target limited resources more effectively, while still ensuring human oversight.
Trust was the key element of AI utilisation that all the panellists spoke about. “Our communities still expect us, as emergency services, to be making those decisions, not simply relying on a computer to say so,” said Frank.
AI may be advancing quickly in the fire service but the message from the panel was that progress must be people-centred and grounded in the realities of frontline response. And with emerging threats constantly changing the role of services and what they are called on to do, how can it be utilised even more effectively to help prevent crisis?
Listen to the full session below.
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