AI is transforming EHS. Is your company ready?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used increasingly across industries to improve safety and efficiency. In the Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) field, AI already has a profound impact.
Easy-to-deploy AI systems can automatically collect data from various sources, including sensors and video cameras, to monitor employee exposures to hazardous materials and conditions in real-time, providing invaluable data that can be used to detect hazards and risk-prone behaviors to prevent accidents.
These new approaches offer a few important advantages over traditional techniques:

• They provide real-time data about EHS conditions in the workplace,
• They can be used to generate dynamic, comprehensive reports about EHS conditions, and
• They can help identify potential problems before they become serious.

These benefits help ensure that EHS standards continually improve, making workplaces safer with less burden on human resources.

Despite the benefits of using AI in EHS applications and the ease with which AI platforms like Teknoir allow it to be deployed, it is important to be cognizant of downstream challenges.

First, when presented with novel scenarios, AI systems can sometimes make inaccurate decisions. For example, a deployed AI system might misclassify a safety hazard as being low risk if it was not exposed to similar hazards during training. If error rates are high or begin to increase over time, there is sometimes a need to retrain the AI – just like people.

Another challenge is the ever-changing nature of industrial work environments. Moving and vibrating equipment, dust and debris, and extreme temperatures and moisture levels can create a very challenging deployment environment for cameras, sensors, and other hardware devices deployed in the field to monitor conditions. This must be a consideration when architecting and deploying EHS monitoring solutions and the AI that supports them.
Finally, AI-based systems need to be able to integrate with existing EHS management systems and corresponding processes. While inherently challenging, this is also an important opportunity for organizations to incorporate additional layers of protection to enhance worker safety.

The role of EHS consulting in AI adoption

As companies increasingly look to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance safety and simplify operations, the need for EHS consulting services is more important than ever.

While AI has the potential to revolutionize workflows and create efficiencies, it requires new approaches and corresponding change management to ensure safe and successful implementation. As such, it is important to have a team of EHS professionals who can assist with implementation and review the events detected by the AI system on an ongoing basis to ensure that it is functioning optimally.

EHS consultants can offer critical guidance to identify and mitigate risks, develop and integrate active and passive safety measures, and support the development of policies and procedures that ensure AI systems are used safely and effectively.

Looking forward, we see a tremendous opportunity for new partnerships between EHS consulting firms, businesses, and AI vendors to help connect these life-saving technologies to the workplaces that need them.

The potential for AI to improve safety in the workplace is immense, and businesses that embrace this technology stand to reap significant rewards in the form of improved workplace safety, fewer incidents to report, and eventually lower insurance premiums.

If you are ready for the future of EHS, contact us to discover more about Teknoir’s AI-enabled EHS monitoring solutions.

EHS consultants and system integrators, in particular, are encouraged to reach out to us at Partners@teknoir.ai.