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It is just one week to go until The Emergency Tech Show opens its doors at the NEC in Birmingham. As we prepare for an incredible two days, Alex Hedberg CCO of Premier Partner Evam shared his thoughts about ESN transition and how AI is aiding first responders when it comes to decision making in mission critical environments.
What are your priorities as a business right now?
One of our biggest priorities is helping public-safety organisations prepare for the transition to the next generation of mission-critical networks, both in Europe and globally. This transition creates a major opportunity to rethink how technology supports emergency response. Rather than replacing one communications network with another we are giving frontline teams access to better information, better applications and more modern ways of working.
The UK is one of Evam’s most important markets, and a major focus for us is helping organisations prepare for ESN and make that transition as smoothly as possible. Ultimately, our ambition is simple: to help move emergency response forward.
What are the challenges facing mission-critical communications right now?
The biggest challenge is that public safety is going through a significant technology transition, and many organisations are still working through what that actually means for their technology strategy. Moving from traditional radio networks towards modern mission-critical broadband creates enormous possibilities, but organisations need to make the right technology decisions today to benefit from them tomorrow.
Legacy technology is becoming a strategic risk. If organisations continue investing in platforms and devices that were designed for the previous generation of public-safety communications, they risk limiting the benefits they can gain from networks such as ESN.
You have recently implemented your modern incident-response solutions for West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and their brand-new fleet of fire appliances. How was that experience for you?
It has been a fantastic project. West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service is very forward-thinking in the way it approaches technology and has made a number of important decisions to prepare for the future of public-safety communications. That includes modernising the technology within its appliances and moving towards Android-based devices, which aligns with the direction of the ESN frontline device ecosystem.
For Evam, the fire service in West Yorkshire is exactly the kind of organisation we love working with. Customers like WYFRS are not just replacing existing technology, but thinking strategically about what the next generation of emergency response should look like. We are very proud to be part of that journey.
As a software-as-a-service provider, what approach do you take to integrating with an emergency service’s existing software commitments to provide a seamless implementation?
Integration is fundamental to what we do. Every organisation we work with has a different technology landscape that can involve different CAD systems, risk-information systems, mapping platforms and other operational applications. Our platform has been designed from the outset to operate within those environments rather than requiring organisations to replace everything around it.
Because we are built on a modern cloud architecture, we can integrate those systems into a consistent experience for the frontline user while managing the complexity behind the scenes. For UK customers, this is also supported by UK data residency.
The objective is always the same: implementation should simplify the operational environment, not introduce another technology silo.
What are you doing in the AI space to solve challenges faced by the emergency services?
AI has enormous potential within emergency services, and we are already incorporating it across a number of our products. There is one principle that guides our approach: AI should support decisions, not take decisions away from the first responder.
Emergency-service professionals operate in environments where judgement, context and accountability matter enormously. We see AI as a way of helping them identify relevant information faster, reduce repetitive work and make better-informed decisions while keeping the first responder firmly in control.
The goal is not to automate the human out of emergency response. It is to give them better tools.
When it comes to lowering the ‘cognitive load’ for the frontline responder, what is Evam doing to assist emergency services with risk information when every second counts?
At Evam, our approach to reducing cognitive load starts with understanding the actual workflow of the first responder. Technology should support that workflow rather than adding more steps to it. We spend a great deal of time understanding how crews operate, from mobilisation and travelling to an incident through to arrival and operations on scene. We design our software around those stages.
That means using automation and AI to surface the right information at the right time, instead of asking the responder to search through multiple systems or screens. The ultimate measure of good frontline technology is actually how little attention it demands. We want responders spending less time interacting with a screen and more time focused on the incident in front of them.
What can visitors to The Emergency Tech Show expect when they come to your stand at the show this year?
They can expect to see what the next generation of incident-response technology looks like in practice. We will be demonstrating how modern mobile technology, intelligent information, automation and integrated workflows can support responders throughout an incident. We are laser focused on how that technology fits into the transition towards ESN.
We want visitors to leave our stand with a much clearer picture of what is becoming possible for emergency services and how organisations can start preparing for that future today.
Evam is a Premier Partner of The Emergency Tech Show which takes place at the NEC on 16-17 September, and will be exhibiting on Stand D80. Register for your free ticket here.
