You operate in an environment where the velocity of crisis accelerates every year. Cascading disasters, cyber incursions, and infrastructure failures compound faster than traditional protocols allow you to respond. The sheer volume of information, including weather data, situational reports, and resource requests, has become physically impossible for one person to process manually.
Yet, many organizations still hesitate to adopt the one capability that scales to meet this challenge: Artificial Intelligence.
This hesitation often stems from a misunderstanding of the tool's purpose. AI is not here to replace the emergency manager. It is here to facilitate a necessary professional evolution. As Tom Sivak, Chief Emergency Manager at Emergency Management One, observes, the field is moving from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy. In this new reality, your value as a strategic leader does not come from what you memorize or manually execute. It comes from how effectively you allocate intelligence, direct resources, and maintain the strategic vision while algorithms handle the processing.
The Allocation Economy Demands a New Leadership Skill Set
For decades, emergency management valued the "Rolodex leader," the person who knew exactly who to call and held the entire plan in their head. That model fails when faced with the complexity of modern polycrises.
Sivak identifies this shift as a transition from doing the work to directing it. In a knowledge economy, you are compensated based on what you retain. In an allocation economy, you are measured by how well you can portion out the resources of intelligence. This requires you to think less like a subject matter expert and more like a conductor.
You need vision, a taste for ideas, and the ability to effectively communicate intent. The manual labor of the past, such as spending 40 hours writing a grant application or compiling a situation report from scratch, is a misuse of your expertise. In an allocation economy, you define the end state and the parameters. Then, you allocate the generation of that work to AI, reserving your mental energy for review, refinement, and decision-making. As Sivak notes, this is exactly what effective project managers do: they solve the problem in front of them by leveraging the right resources, rather than trying to do it all themselves.
Operationalize AI on Blue Sky Days
A common failure pattern in crisis management is the introduction of new tools during a response. This never works. If you do not use a system on a quiet Tuesday, you will not use it effectively during a Category 5 hurricane.
Sivak, drawing from his experience as FEMA Region V Administrator, emphasizes this distinction: "If we use AI every day, it's a forethought, not an afterthought. If we don't use AI and we're only using it in an incident, that's gonna be the afterthought component."
You must integrate these tools into your daily workflow now. Use AI to draft your routine briefs. Use it to synthesize meeting notes or analyze policy documents. This daily repetition builds the "muscle memory" your team needs. Sivak argues that we need to move the maturity model from being "writers" to being "editors."
When the pressure rises, you want your team to trust the tool because they used it yesterday. You want them to know its limitations because they tested it last week. If you wait for the "gray sky" day to deploy AI, you add cognitive load to an already overwhelmed team. You create friction instead of flow.
The Human Lever in the Loop
Hesitancy often masks a deeper fear: the fear of replacement. But in high-stakes environments, the human element becomes more critical, not less. AI processes data; it does not possess judgment.
"AI today does not have that gut intuition. That's experience," Sivak notes. "Humans are still the levers behind it."
Consider the "silos of excellence" that exist in every activation. You have power experts, water experts, and logistics experts. In a complex incident, these silos often fail to communicate effectively. Sivak points out that AI can synthesize data across these domains, identifying patterns and conflicts that a human might miss in the heat of the moment, helping to "bore through" those silos.
But the machine does not make the decision. You do. You bring the context of community politics. You understand the history of the jurisdiction. You know the "ground truth" that data sets often miss. The machine presents the courses of action; you apply the wisdom.
This "human in the loop" concept is non-negotiable. You are the editor. You are the validator. The goal is to let the machine do the heavy lifting of ingestion and synthesis so you can apply your experience where it matters most: solving the novel problems that no plan accounted for.
The Path Forward: From Overload to Operational Excellence
The profession faces a burnout crisis. We ask emergency managers to do more with less, cut budgets, and still manage increasingly complex disasters. We are at a breaking point.
Adopting the allocation economy mindset is the only scalable way to buy back time. It allows you to step away from the keyboard and get back into the community. It frees you to build relationships, understand local risks, and go home to your family without the weight of administrative backlog.
Challenge yourself to start today. Pick one administrative task. Allocate it to an AI tool. Edit the output. Then ask yourself: What strategic problem can I solve with the hour I just saved?
The future of crisis management belongs to those who learn to allocate intelligence. Do not let technology run circles around you. Wrap your arms around it, and lead.