2027 Agenda

For decades, 911 response has been built around a promise technology could not always keep indoors: knowing not just what building a caller is in, but which floor. Public safety leaders are now facing that promise made real. Advances in beacon-based and beaconless positioning technologies are converging with GIS-driven indoor mapping to make floor-level, room-level location a practical, scalable expectation, rather than a rare, building-by-building achievement. The technology already exists on the phones and networks around us today; what remains is unlocking it and correlating it against authoritative maps of the buildings responders actually enter.

This session explores what that shift means for dispatch, response time, and responder safety, and lays out the choices public safety leaders will need to make as both beacon-based and beaconless approaches mature. Attendees will get a real-world look at how one city - St. Cloud, Minnesota - is deploying authoritative indoor GIS across its own buildings today, tied directly to a live 911 and public-safety use case, alongside brief examples from school-safety mapping and drone-assisted response programs.

Whether you are evaluating vendors, planning a pilot, or simply trying to understand where indoor location technology is headed, this session will help you separate genuine progress from hype, and start asking the right questions of your own partners and providers.