The departments that are effectively integrating AI today aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets, the largest IT staffs or the best consultants. They are uniquely distinguished by their leaders, specifically the chiefs who understood from the jump that AI adoption was their problem to own and no one else’s.
This may strike some of you as uncomfortable, particularly for chiefs who don’t consider themselves “tech people.” But the truth is, leading AI adoption doesn’t require you to be a technologist. It requires you to be a leader.
It’s a culture problem
Emerging technology rarely fails because the tech itself doesn’t work. It fails because the culture isn’t ready for it. If the people closest to the work don’t have permission to experiment, if there’s no room to make small mistakes or there’s zero time to learn new tech, then adoption will fail.
Innovation needs breathing room; it needs the right environment. That’s a tough proposition for a profession like the fire service that that prizes tradition, discipline and proven methods — a profession rooted in a paramilitary structure where we look to the next in command for direction or the permission to act. It means our members are looking for explicit permission for AI adoption — permission that can only be granted from the top. That’s what winning AI looks like.
When firefighters see their chief experimenting with new tools, asking AI to help draft an after-action review, using it to analyze data for better decision-making, that signals something powerful. It tells the organization that curiosity is safe, that learning is expected, and that “how we do things now” is a starting point, not a finish line.
Three things chiefs need to do now
For chiefs, leading AI adoption comes down to three immediate priorities:
- Give your people permission to experiment. Pick a few entry-level AI uses (e.g., administrative drafting, training scenario development, data summarization) and tell your officers explicitly that they have license to try AI tools there. Most won’t, until they know it’s allowed.
- Invest in capacity, not just tools. Software is the easy part. The hard part is building AI literacy across your organization. Send people to conferences. Bring in speakers. Create a working group of curious people and give them bumper rails and a budget. The departments that win the next decade will be those that built internal expertise, not those that bought the most subscriptions.
- Protect your people during the learning curve. AI tools can and will occasionally produce wrong answers. Your people will use them imperfectly. Things will be awkward before they’re useful and chiefs who panic at the first bad output, or worse, who punish it, will kill adoption permanently. The departments that are getting this right are the ones where leaders absorbed those early bumps publicly and kept moving.
The cost of waiting
The temptation, especially for chiefs near the end of their careers, is to push this onto the next leader to figure out. That’s a reasonable instinct — it’s also wrong. The decisions being made in the fire service today surrounding AI will shape what’s possible for an organization’s future. Deferring those decisions isn’t being neutral; it’s making them by default. Without leadership, without your explicit permission, the environment for good AI to thrive in your organization won’t exist.
Your department’s AI future isn’t going to be determined by a vendor, a software platform or that tech-savvy lieutenant everyone is leaning on. It’s going to be written by you, by what you authorize, by what you model and by what you protect. The good news is that’s exactly what good leaders are trained to do. The bad news is there’s no one else who can do it but you.
