An emergency management agency wants to deploy a disaster-response AI tool that recommends resource allocation across county and state jurisdictions during major incidents. Planning reveals that county and state emergency data are governed separately with no shared framework. What is missing that the agency should establish first?

Recommending resource allocation across jurisdictions requires the AI tool to draw on data governed separately by county and state, so a cross-jurisdictional data-sharing framework establishing shared governance, access terms, and data standards is the foundational piece missing here. Without it, the tool either can't legally or technically combine the two data sources, or does so on an ad hoc basis that breaks down exactly when a real disaster puts it under pressure. Adopting one county's incident command structure regionwide addresses operational coordination during a response, a different problem from whether data can be shared and combined in the first place. A public dashboard is a downstream communication feature that depends on the tool already having reliable, integrated data to display. A cloud infrastructure vendor contract addresses where the tool runs, not whether it's legally and technically permitted to combine county and state data streams. This applies specifically to initiatives spanning separately governed jurisdictions; a tool operating entirely within one agency's own data wouldn't need this step. A concrete check is confirming a signed interagency agreement defines shared data standards and access rules before any cross-jurisdictional pilot begins.