Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) and Sustainability programs are critical for organizations worldwide, but leaders face significant challenges to achieve success. From difficulty in hiring and retaining skilled employees to issues with data overload and compliance, there are numerous obstacles – but artificial intelligence (AI) and, specifically, generative AI capabilities are proving to be secret weapons that fuel incredible impact.
Leaders Need More Support
Despite business leaders’ best efforts, workplaces have gotten more dangerous. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, injuries and illnesses increased from 2021 to 2022 (up 7.5% to 2.8 million) as did fatal work injuries (up 5.7% to 5,486).
Why? As the fight for talent persists, companies are struggling to hire and retain skilled, safety-conscious workers and EHS leaders who can drive industrial accidents, injuries, infections, and fatalities to zero. Plus, with an overwhelming volume of safety and incident-related data available, teams remain frustrated by how little they’re able to extract timely insights to improve workplace safety.
To make things even more challenging, EHS leaders are wearing more hats than ever. Many are spearheading employee wellness programs while also driving sustainability initiatives, overseeing crisis management, and more.
With so little time yet so much at risk, EHS leaders need a smarter, more efficient data management platform with AI features to help them drive a bigger safety impact.
AI: Your Ally in EHS, Sustainability & Beyond
Smart EHS platforms that host AI-enabled applications provide frontline workers and EHS leaders with the tools and insights needed to spot unsafe working conditions, predict potentially serious incidents (PSIs), and quickly make changes to save lives. By leveraging AI capabilities, leaders can unlock several key benefits that lead to bottom-line impact:
Enhanced Insights
Generative AI solutions, such as Benchmark Gensuite’s Genny AI, drive visibility into employee concerns, near misses, unsafe working conditions and incident reports for leaders to address. Integration with remote sensors enables real-time facilities and operations monitoring, which helps drive timely interventions or responses to safety incidents.
AI can also improve the collection of structured and unstructured safety data for further analysis. By leveraging AI-driven analytics, organizations can identify trends in historical safety data, enabling them to trial potential procedural changes or new safety measures and foster a culture of safety awareness among employees. Making informed, data-driven decisions should reduce accidents, incidents, injuries, and fatalities, and ultimately promote a safer work environment – an obvious benefit for the workforce and a crowning achievement for safety leadership.
Boosted Productivity
Another key benefit of AI is its ability to improve the efficiency and quality of frontline data capture in areas like incident management and hazard recognition, which will drive worker productivity and safety.
AI-enabled EHS capabilities create efficiency at scale. Manually recording and collecting data from individual sources and using spreadsheets to manage and analyze it is an unsustainable – and ultimately, unsafe – approach to making data-driven safety decisions. By automatically capturing and transmitting large volumes of safety-related data, smart, integrated EHS applications enable staff to analyze more data, faster, and with fewer errors. In turn, they facilitate faster, more accurate decision making without overburdening the frontline workforce.
AI-enabled EHS and sustainability compliance tools also streamline data collection and reporting and ensure adherence to internal policies, such as safety guidelines and external regulations. They automate regulatory reporting and documentation, reducing manual efforts and ensuring accuracy and consistency. By enhancing reporting mechanisms and compliance efforts, these capabilities improve the lives of workers throughout the entire organization.
Real-Time Decision Support
Generative AI solutions optimize decision making for EHS leaders and frontline workers by delivering critical and or time-sensitive data when and where they need it to fulfill their obligations.
They leverage advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to provide EHS leaders with actionable insights and intelligent recommendations, enabling them to drive continuous improvement initiatives and amplify their impact. Generative AI capabilities further enhance decision-making by simulating various scenarios and recommending optimal courses of action.
Generative AI capabilities also serve as virtual assistants to front-line workers and help them complete routine tasks with ease. For example, they can pre-populate standard safety incident and compliance reports and guide them through the submission process.
Genny AI is At Your Service
AI capabilities are enhancing the way that EHS and sustainability leaders, as well as frontline workers foster a safety-minded culture and fulfill their obligations to each other. We’re doing our part by bringing an intuitive, user-friendly solution, GennyAI, to EHS and sustainability teams.
From real-time safety monitoring to automated data analysis and workforce engagement, Genny AI empowers organizations to make informed changes to reduce workplace accidents, injuries and fatalities while ensuring compliance with EHS and sustainability regulations. It represents our five-year investment in AI technology to advance best practices, drive innovation, and create a product that grows alongside the customer.
Ready to enter the future of EHS with Genny? Start your journey by attending our informational on-demand webinar AI – for EHS + Sustainability Collaboration Forum!
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