Changing perceptions of AI amongst EHS pro's key takeaways

Webinar Summary

On our most recent webinar, we spoke with Darren Moppett, Procter & Gamble's HS&E Director, Neil Lennox, Founding Director of Bede Safety Consultants, and Elisa Lynch, K4 Consultancy's Head of Organizational Learning & Performance about the findings from a survey we carried out in October with nearly 400 EHS professionals from around the world. All of the panelists shared their expertise on the subject matter and provided diverse viewpoints on the key findings. Check out some of the key points discussed below:

Adoption of AI

Post analysis of our survey findings related to the adoption of AI, our panellists firstly discuss the adoption of general technology and online systems to manage EHS data and how this adoption level has evolved over the last 10 years. Our experts then focus on the adoption of AI and highlight that the understanding of the concept is still quite uncertain amongst EHS professionals. However, there was an agreement that adoption of new technologies is crucial in order to help EHS professionals meet their KPIs, especially the reduction of incidents.

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Trust In AI

Darren offers his thoughts on AI trust. He believes that the workforce is undoubtedly concerned about GDPR and PII data. He feels that in order to acquire the trust of the workforce, extremely clear case studies and success stories on how the data will be used would be required, to demonstrate that the AI is not being used to breach someone's privacy, but rather to protect them. Elisa agrees, and believes that successfully communicating, managing, and governing the adoption will help the workforce trust the shift. Neil believes that it is not so much trust in AI as it is trust in the transparency of the process of adopting AI software. He shares his own example of success stories with Sainsburys.

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C-Suite Buy-In & Budget Allocation

Elisa mentioned that funding allocation has always been a major concern for Health and Safety. C-suite, in her experience as a consultant, pushes to achieve more with less. P&G, on the other hand, is on a big digitization journey, and the C-suite is embracing AI adoption because they believe AI is the future, according to Darren. Neil, like Elisa, believes that one size does not fit all. He believes that EHS managers attempting to express that we can do something to prevent something from happening in the future will always be a difficult argument, but it is an issue that EHS managers face on a daily basis. He demonstrates how he was able to construct an exceptional business case in order to obtain management approval.

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Future of AI

The future of AI has endless possibilities in the EHS space. Our panellists delve into some of the future use cases that were highlighted in our recent survey in more detail. The general consensus was that no matter what, forward thinking EHS professionals need to be looking at whatever means possible to help reduce risk in their workplace. There was also an agreement that AI can very much help them with this task.

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