On April 3rd, Benchmark Gensuite welcomed a diverse group of industry leaders to the second installment of AI for EHS + Sustainability Forum, following up on the success of our inaugural forum in January.
Led by Founder & CEO R. Mukund and Chief Customer Officer Natasha Porter, the hour-long forum focused on the application of artificial intelligence in enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and overall business outcomes within EHS, and sustainability sectors. Attendees enjoyed a valuable learning and networking opportunity dedicated to fostering collaborative networks in these critical fields.
Key Insights from Amir Husain
The event kicked off with Amir Husain, a renowned AI luminary, founder of SparkCognition, and author of Generative AI for Leaders, leading a discussion on the on the extraordinary potential of AI in the EHS space and the capacity of emerging technologies to make a lasting global impact and revolutionize your organization.
“Environmental Health & Safety and generative AI is an area where so much is possible, but not enough is being said about it,” Amir shared. “I’m glad we’re brokering a conversation where we can explore this with more depth.”
Amir outlined generative AI’s transformative capacity to streamline training on complex regulations, automate incident reporting with advanced language models like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), accelerate sustainability product research, especially in material sciences, and elevate supply chain risk analysis with live data feeds. He also shared practical steps for beginners on an AI journey:
- Catalogue time-consuming tasks along with their key activities and data dependencies.
- Experiment with language models to tackle these tasks using various prompts.
- Save effective queries and establish a RAG pipeline for fetching data and generating solutions.
Survey Insights from Customers and Partner Community
Natasha Porter presented survey findings from the January forum, underscoring three key areas where AI could influence user activities:
- AI can potentially improve data entry quality by offering intelligent prompts that assist users in crafting more accurate incident descriptions.
- There’s a recognized capacity for AI to identify patterns and enhance insights by sifting through complex datasets to pinpoint actionable information and forecast unexpected events.
- Participants suggested that AI could facilitate automatic updates to regulatory content and employ video/image recognition technologies to detect near misses proactively.
Benchmark Gensuite team has been working on creating and developing solutions in each of these three areas, and a number of these were showcased in the January forum. She then highlighted three new features in our Generative AI solutions:
- Describe It AI feature assists users in refining their descriptions by offering generative AI-driven suggestions and prompts tailored to their input.
- Action Tracking System (ATS) Insights AI is designed to produce concise summaries that capture key data insights from dashboard reports, streamlining the interpretation of complex information.
- Ergonomic AI leverages advanced video analysis powered by AI to conduct thorough ergonomic assessments and evaluations, contributing to safer and more efficient work environments.
Learn more about Benchmark Gensuie’s full suite of AI solutions here.
Benchmark Gensuite AI Solutions Showcase
The forum shifted focus towards sustainability, where Vice-President of Sustainability, Stewardship, & ESG Solutions Amanda Petzinger outlined how AI is being integrated into sustainability reporting tools offered by Benchmark Gensuite:
- Applied AI in Operational Sustainability: This feature provides leaders with an AI-generated summary indicating pending or missing data points from previous months.
- AI in Sustainability Projects: An analytical tool summarizing performance across sites over recent months helps identify best practices for accelerating reduction efforts.
- Applied AI in Disclosure Reporting: To cope with increasing disclosure requests, Disclosure Support AI compares statements against guidelines from frameworks such as GRI or CSRD providing summaries of any missing elements.
The audience also got a first look at Responsio—a new tool still in development that’s aimed at streamlining responses to stakeholder queries—and discussed future applications like Applied AI: Climate Risk Identification and Mitigation, which would integrate risk data modeling into tools aiding risk identification and mitigation project suggestions.
As the industry continues to evolve, the lessons and best practices shared at this forum will undoubtedly shape not just the future of AI in EHS & Sustainability but across operational landscapes. The event paved the way for a new era where AI innovations will deliver clear value to organizations navigating the ever-changing regulatory landscape of EHS & Sustainability.
Watch the recording of the forum on-demand to catch up on all the insightful discussions from this month’s forum. Explore more upcoming events, webinars, and trainings, including the 2024 Benchmark Gensuite Impact Conference in May and our third AI Forum coming June 12th!
