Source: WIRED
Emergency management agencies are experimenting with AI-powered chatbots to deliver time-sensitive alerts, betting that personalized, conversational interfaces will overcome decades of alert fatigue and low engagement rates. The obstacle is behavioral, not technological: people already ignore or misinterpret emergency notifications from official channels. An AI layer adds failure points around trust, verification, and whether consumers will treat an automated alert with urgency they withhold from their phones. Institutions face a tension between consumers who are oversaturated with notifications and increasingly skeptical of automated messages.