TRAVERSE CITY- An artificial intelligence system fielding non-emergency calls at Grand Traverse County’s 911 center is finally meeting expectations after a turbulent launch, the dispatch director told county commissioners this week.
Central Dispatch Director Corey LeCureux said the AI call-taking platform, purchased last July from vendor Aurelian, did not go live until mid-October due to a series of technical problems. When it finally launched, it deflected just 3 to 5 percent of non-emergency calls, far short of its 30 percent target.
LeCureux said there was a point he wanted to abandon the system entirely.
“Not only was it more work for our people, but it was more work for me and support staff,” he said. “We’re investing a lot of time in it.”
After he raised concerns with the vendor, LeCureux said Aurelian doubled down with additional resources. Over the past two months, the system’s performance has improved significantly, and it has now reached the 30 percent deflection goal.
The AI handles only the non-emergency line. All 911 calls go directly to a human dispatcher.
“When you call 911, you have the right, you deserve to talk to a human being,” LeCureux said. “We’re not going to do that. We don’t need to do that. And we would never want to do that.”
LeCureux described the system as an investment in people, not a replacement for them. He said the goal is to free up trained dispatchers to focus on emergencies and first responder safety rather than fielding misdirected calls.
The largest category of deflected calls has been people trying to reach the county jail, accounting for roughly 75 percent of all deflections. Other common redirections include requests for police records, road condition inquiries routed to the road commission and weather information.
Ahead of this week’s winter storm, LeCureux said he contacted Aurelian’s CEO on a Saturday morning and asked the company to build a weather deflection feature. The system was able to take callers’ inquiries about weather conditions and text them a link to the National Weather Service forecast for the Traverse City area, all within hours of the request.
The system has handled more than 15,000 calls since October. By comparison, the dispatcher who fielded the most calls in 2025 handled just under 9,000 for the entire year.
LeCureux said the AI still gets confused about 10 percent of the time, and public cooperation remains a challenge. He said callers who speak to the system conversationally tend to get the best results, while those who try to bypass it with button-pressing or repeated demands for an agent are more likely to have a frustrating experience.
“The people who are getting the best service from this thing are those that you can tell aren’t really realizing that it is an automated assistant,” he said.
When the system cannot resolve a call, it does not hang up. Instead, it collects the caller’s name, phone number, address and reason for calling and queues that information for a dispatcher to follow up. LeCureux said the system can also detect when a caller on the non-emergency line actually has an emergency and escalate the call to 911 priority.
The hang-up rate sits at about 2.9 percent, lower than LeCureux expected.
County commissioners asked LeCureux to provide a year-over-year comparison of call data once the system has been running through peak summer season.
The contract includes a one-year trial period that began when it was signed, and LeCureux said he plans to ask Aurelian to extend the timeline so the evaluation can include data from Cherry Festival.
LeCureux said the system could eventually handle between 25,000 and 30,000 calls annually at its current deflection rate, which is more than three times what the best human call takers can handle in a year