Did you know that there were 2.6 million workplace injuries in the United States in 2023? While the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics points out that number fell significantly since 2022, any amount of workplace injuries can have an outsized impact on operations.
Beyond the need to keep workers safe and healthy, each injury carries a significant financial impact for the company. Direct costs of a single safety incident can average as much as $44,000, and associated costs such as equipment damage and unplanned downtime can multiply that figure 2-10x.
Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) leaders save lives and livelihoods every day. They work to enable today’s industrial environments to function at maximum performance while ensuring team member protection and well-being.
But achieving a zero-incident workplace is a constant challenge. Persistent, overlapping and rapidly changing factors routinely undermine the effectiveness of health and safety programs. With the number of safety hazards as vast as the number of industrial products and processes, how do you get ahead of HSE issues using equipment you already have?
Can agentic AI mitigate HSE risk?
Agentic applications use the unique and rapidly evolving capabilities of artificial intelligence to save lives and improve worker productivity, efficiency and product quality. The most impactful of AI’s contributions to the HSE field is almost certainly visual AI, a technology that uses a company’s existing camera infrastructure to autonomously detect and mitigate a wide range of safety violations and hazardous conditions.
Visual AI analyzes images and videos from existing CCTV cameras, automatically identifying and alerting HSE incidents, safety and security threats, and noncompliance situations. This infrastructure enables HSE managers to prevent accidents, detect security breaches and streamline day-to-day operations.
The Avathon Industrial AI Platform is a proven example of visual AI technology. From food and beverage manufacturers to oil and gas supermajors, industrial operators in more than 17 countries use this technology to detect and avert hundreds of hazards like failure to wear protective clothing, unsafe proximity to equipment like forklifts and assembly lines, unauthorized entry, weapons detection and more. The technology can also monitor product quality and equipment/worker productivity.
Unlike traditional camera monitoring tools that are primarily valuable for retrospective investigations, the Avathon Industrial AI Platform offers real-time alerts that can warn workers, notify managers, trigger door locks and machine shutdowns, and even summon emergency responders before hazards multiply.
Maintain complete PPE compliance with AI
Maintaining personal protective equipment (PPE) compliance is one of the most common reasons companies adopt visual AI. Failure to wear appropriate PPE is often a direct contributor to accidents and resulting injuries. This could be as simple as hard hats, reflective vests, safety shoes and gloves up to items like a photo-ID badge to ensure that only authorized workers enter certain areas. Perhaps it’s the use of an inappropriate tool for a specific job type. Outcomes from this 24/7 surveillance can include regular reporting on compliance instances (ranked by severity, location, recurring offenders, etc.), proactive alerts to affected people and their managers, or even shutting down equipment to reduce risk.
Working at height with a visual AI agent
Few operating environments are riskier than working at height, whether at the top of a wind turbine, an oil rig or a manufacturing facility. These environments often feature tight workspaces, narrow walkways and people working alone. In addition to PPE compliance, you need to ensure adherence to safety harnesses, secure tools and other height-related protocols. After all, a dropped tool is just as dangerous to the worker below as a slip for the person working at height. Visual AI watches continuously for all of these risk factors, alerting workers and managers whenever a risky situation develops and sending alerts to affected workers in real time.
As the renewable energy transition continues to gather steam, companies are building larger and larger wind turbines. Good for energy generation, bad for maintenance. These bigger machines are more prone to failures – larger rotor blades have more manufacturing faults – and inspections are more dangerous. Avathon’s Health, Safety & Productivity Portfolio is a significant partner in the continued upkeep of these new renewable energy assets.
Industrial AI stops hazardous interactions
One of the most common unreported incidents? Near misses – when a vehicle comes too close to a worker, even if for only a moment. This could be a car in a parking lot, a forklift in a warehouse or even a flight line worker near a running jet engine. In many of these cases, neither the worker nor the vehicle operator is even aware that they’ve experienced a hazardous situation. Visual AI technology can spot these interactions in real time, alert the affected individuals or even shut off the vehicle.
AI agents detect weapons and unsafe behavior
When active shooter events happen at a workplace, you can expect ample news coverage — but it’s all after the fact. With visual AI technology, you can automatically detect weapons well before an active shooter event unfolds, whether that’s in a locker room, a parking lot or even a moving vehicle. Visual AI captures even the most insignificant instances of safety compromise – the sorts of instances which human operators fail to notice or document.
Delivering successful HSE performance is about saving lives and avoiding injury. This is very challenging to achieve due to dynamic risk factors in fast-paced operational environments. Even with substantial investments in training and preventive measures, the complex operations of industrial work sites make it difficult to prevent incidents.
Avathon empowers businesses to move beyond static AI analysis to using agentic applications that accelerate human-centric decision support and improve worker safety. By integrating Avathon into HSE processes, industrial leaders can make sure those workplace injury statistics keep trending in the right direction.
Learn more about how AI enables HSE leaders to tackle common workplace challenges and ensure worker safety. If you’re at the Health & Safety Event in Birmingham, England, from April 8-10, come see Avathon’s visual AI applications in action at stand 3/M62.
