Insights from the Forerunner Summit: How Forerunner is Supercharging Workflows with Generative AI

For hazard and emergency management teams across the country, the capacity to do the work that needs to get done, often with limited staff and resources, is a perennial challenge. In a survey of floodplain managers conducted by Forerunner,  57% of respondents said that a lack of funding and resources is the most significant obstacle to their work, while 45% of respondents said that staffing is one of their biggest day-to-day challenges.

"Teams are stretched thin. The paperwork keeps growing, the amount of processes and work that these teams have to pick up is continually expanding,” said JT White, Co-Founder and CEO of Forerunner, at a recent virtual summit hosted by Forerunner. “The stakes feel higher than ever from an emergency management standpoint because of hurricane seasons like last year, and thinking about what will happen this year."

Since Forerunner launched in 2019, the company’s mission has been to create innovative technology solutions that address the challenges that emergency management teams are facing, including leveraging generative AI to reduce the time needed to complete important tasks. The first generative-AI feature introduced to the Forerunner platform was Elevation Certificate (EC) Error Detection.

“You can upload a PDF of an EC, and it automatically extracts all of the data, geocodes the document to the correct property and location, and then checks it for errors,” explained White. “To date, we’ve used EC Error Detection to process over 400,000 documents, and we’ve detected over 750,000 issues, helping to ensure that new development is being designed correctly and we’re not allowing people to build their homes too low and increase the risk.” 

Forerunner has recently expanded this capability to include automated EC error summaries that floodplain managers can send directly to surveyors or property owners, streamlining the correction process. 

At the Forerunner Summit, White explained how Forerunner’s roadmap for implementing AI within its platform has evolved alongside the business itself. 

“With our work, we started helping communities with floodplain management and then moved into post-disaster recovery, and within that, we helped them with work like preliminary damage assessment at a property,” said White. “Naturally, customers began to ask if we could also do damage assessments on roads or bridges or stormwater systems within their communities. Then, when we rolled out our inspection capabilities, folks asked us if this could also work for grant workflows or project tracking.”

Customer requests were the catalyst for Forerunner to expand the platform’s capabilities into two core product concepts: objects and records. 

“Now, any geospatial layer can become an object. It can be a property, a road, a stormwater system, a community boundary, a debris drop-off location, and more. Each object has the helpful capabilities of properties - records, files, activity feed,” said White. “We also rethought what a record is. It used to be limited to things like inspections or communication logs, but now any workflow can become a record. So, grants, permits, projects, tickets, all these things can be built and customized into Forerunner. We’ve also created a much tighter connection between records and files, so now files can directly relate to records, giving users a better sense of those relationships through a completely traceable system of record.” 

Recently, Forerunner introduced several new AI-powered functionalities within the platform, which are designed to help free up emergency management teams from mundane and time-consuming tasks, so they can focus on other goals. 

AI-powered letter generation allows users to automatically generate letters through objects and record data. This feature has been particularly useful for Florida’s Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) and its Community Assistance Visits. FDEM’s Floodplain Management Specialist, Linda Vause, shares that Forerunner’s AI Letter Generation has significantly improved her workflow. 

"This has helped us tremendously. We do Community Assisted Visits, go out to the field and collect data, then we come back and do a one-on-one with the community, then we write a report,” said Vause. “It used to take us forever - everybody has a different writing system, a different way of thinking - but with AI, it’s going to be consistent, it’s going to be precise.” She added, “For me, writing a report would sometimes take literally days to complete, now it takes me minutes. We have more time to do other things that we've had to put on the back burner because we had these reports to write. It's amazing. I can't say enough about it.” 

Similarly, Forerunner is applying that same AI-powered letter generation technology to Mitigation Recommendation Letters by pulling in context from other sources of information, like FEMA's homeowner guide, to help inform the letter generation.

For code enforcement officers, AI streamlines the creation of violation documentation while leveraging existing regulations to inform the letters.  

"With an inspection record, we can take all of the data that's been collected, including the violations that were observed, and generate the Notice of Violation letter," says JT. "AI will find the article and the section the violation is related to, a description of that section, and then also the required actions by the homeowner."

Most recently, Forerunner has extended its AI capabilities to support grant management workflows: "Users can create grant records. Someone can submit a grant application and then use AI actions to create a grant application approval letter," said White.

For Forerunner, AI integration isn’t about creating complex models, adding additional training requirements, or process changes - nor is it meant to replace the people who are currently managing these critical tasks. 

“The most important part of this work isn't AI itself, it's the impact on your work. These tools are built to reduce the amount of manual work a team has to do. We want your work to be more accurate and more consistent,” said White. “We’re trying to build lightweight features that embed seamlessly into workflows that users already understand. We’ve learned the importance of keeping a human in the loop when utilizing AI, especially when compliance is on the line.”  

White also reiterated how Forerunner is dedicated to maintaining data privacy throughout AI integration.

“We know how important data privacy is to our users, so we’ve made sure that sensitive info and data are not being used to train the underlying AI model,” said White. “These principles are essential to us.”

With successful implementations already in place, Forerunner is focused on expanding its AI capabilities, using AI to amplify human capabilities, not replace them, and ensuring hazard management teams have the proper tools to serve their communities effectively as new challenges mount. 

"While there's a lot of buzz around AI, at Forerunner, we feel its most meaningful role is here,” said White. “Helping public servants do their jobs better, and we're excited about using capabilities like AI to help accelerate your work.”

Watch JT White's session on AI at the Forerunner Summit:

Watch other Summit sessions here.