Your Crews Figured Out AI. Your Agency Didn't.
Robert Grand · Battalion Chief who still runs calls
Microsoft just released its 2026 Work Trend Index. The headline finding is blunt. Employees are already using AI. The organizations they work for are the bottleneck.
That hits different in Fire and EMS.
While the corporate world is just now waking up to this gap, our profession has been living a version of it for years. The tools changed. The calls got more complex. The documentation load grew. And somewhere in all of that, the people doing the work figured out how to adapt. Leadership largely did not. AI is just the latest version of that same story.
Right now, on shift, your medics are using ChatGPT to help write PCR narratives. Your firefighters are using it to study for promotional exams. Your company officers are running incident summaries through AI tools faster than any debriefing process your agency has ever designed. Nobody asked permission. Nobody waited for a policy. It is just happening. And most chiefs have no idea.
That is not an accusation. It is an observation about how technology moves versus how organizations move.
Microsoft surveyed 20,000 workers across 10 countries and found that nearly half of all AI interactions involve cognitive work, things like analysis, problem solving, and creative thinking, not just summarizing documents (Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index). That is your people doing the hard work of the job, faster. But your agency’s documentation systems, SOG/SOP frameworks, training infrastructure, and quality improvement processes were built before any of this existed. The tool is outrunning the organization.
Here is what I think is actually happening in Fire and EMS agencies right now, and why it matters.
The first group is the blockers.
These are the agencies where IT locked down access to AI tools on government systems and called it a day. The decision usually comes from a reasonable place. Data security concerns are real. HIPAA compliance is real. The fear of sensitive patient information ending up inside a commercial AI model is a legitimate concern that deserves a serious answer.
But blocking the tool is not a strategy. It is a delay. Your crews are not sitting at their workstations waiting for permission. They are on their personal phones on the apparatus floor. The information is still flowing. You just lost visibility into how.
If your agency is in this group, the conversation you need to have is not about whether to allow AI. It is about how to create a controlled environment where it can be used appropriately, with guardrails, rather than underground without any.
The second group is the skeptics.
These are the chiefs who have watched enough technology trends come and go that AI feels like another novelty. They sat through the Toughbook rollout that never quite worked the way it was supposed to. The tablet-based ePCR transition. The GPS-integrated dispatch systems. Each one promised to change everything and each one came with a multi-year implementation headache.
That skepticism is earned. But the Microsoft research surfaces something important here. Sixty-five percent of AI users say they worry about falling behind if they do not keep pace, yet nearly half say it feels safer to focus on existing goals than to redesign how work gets done (Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index). That tension exists in every Fire/EMS organization right now, at every rank.
The skeptics are not wrong that hype exists. They are wrong if they think watching from the sideline is a neutral position. AI capability is not growing incrementally. It is compounding. The tool your medic is using today to help write a narrative is the same underlying technology that will be embedded in your CAD system, your QI workflow, and your after-action review process within a few years.
The third group is the unaware.
This is probably the largest group, and there is no criticism in it. These are leaders genuinely focused on running their organizations, managing staffing crises, navigating political environments, and delivering service. AI has not risen to the top of their priority list because nothing has forced it there yet.
But here is what the Microsoft data makes clear. Organizational factors like culture, leadership behavior, and how work is structured drive roughly twice the AI impact of what any individual employee does on their own (Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index). The bottleneck is never the crew. It rarely is. The bottleneck is the system around them.
The agencies building AI-literate cultures right now, where leadership understands the tools, sets clear expectations, and creates frameworks for appropriate use, those agencies will have a structural advantage in documentation quality, training efficiency, and operational learning that compounds over time.
In Fire and EMS we talk a lot about being ready. Ready for the call. Ready for the mass casualty. Ready for the next disaster. But readiness is not just tactical. It is organizational. And right now, a lot of agencies are tactically sharp and organizationally asleep.
Your crews already figured this out. The question is whether leadership is going to catch up before the gap becomes a problem you cannot close.
Read the full Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index at microsoft.com/worklab/work-trend-index
Robert Grand is a Battalion Chief at Eugene Springfield Fire with 24 years in the fire service and the founder of FRI Suite, an operational technology platform built for emergency services, by someone who still runs calls.
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