AI in Safety: Are We Using It Well?

AI can produce a convincing-looking risk assessment in seconds.

And people are already using it to do precisely that. But the problem isn’t just that AI sometimes gets things wrong; it’s that when it does, the answer can still look authoritative, comprehensive and professionally-written.

In safety, an AI output can be 95% impressive – while quietly missing the 5% that really matters – and the UK Health and Safety Executive is paying attention. Recently the HSE explicitly recognised the growing use of AI in health and safety management – including risk assessment, incident analysis and training – and made it clear that existing health and safety duties do still apply when AI is involved.

Perhaps more interestingly, the HSE is also investigating “cognitive offloading” and human performance in AI-augmented safety decision making.

Cognitive offloading is essentially what happens when we hand part of the mental work to a tool – to remember, to analyse or to make sense of information – rather than doing it ourselves. That’s nothing new; calculators and satnavs have been doing this for years. The concern with AI is what happens when we start outsourcing parts of the judgement as well.

The evidence isn’t keeping pace with adoption

For all the enthusiasm around AI in safety, there’s a rather awkward problem: adoption is racing ahead of any evidence that it actually makes people safer.

A recent systematic review examined research into AI-based occupational health and safety tools. Researchers initially identified 1,255 papers. But only two actually measured whether AI improved workers’ health or safety – and neither provided high-quality evidence that it did. The researchers concluded that we are still at an early stage in understanding the benefits of AI in occupational health and safety practice, and that widespread adoption may be premature.

“Despite advancements and proliferation of AI within the working world, our understanding of how the technology may actually benefit OHS practice remains very limited.”

That doesn’t make the case against using​​ ​AI in safety. It makes the case against using it indiscriminately​.

The wrong question

At First Option, we’ve been quietly developing AI tools for over three years – long before asking ChatGPT to generate something that looks like a risk assessment became the latest shortcut. And that experience has increasingly led us away from asking AI to make the judgements for us..

Risk assessment isn’t fundamentally a document generation exercise. The document records the process of identifying what could go wrong, understanding the particular circumstances, making judgements about risk – and deciding what needs to be done.

Automating the document​​​​​ is easy. Automating the judgement​​​​ is something else entirely.

So we’ve concentrated instead on the things AI can be exceptionally useful for: interrogating large amounts of information, making connections, finding relevant knowledge and asking a deceptively valuable question: what might we be missing?

Introducing SCOUT

That thinking is at the heart of SCOUT, First Option’s new operational intelligence tool for production planning.

SCOUT starts long before the risk assessment stage. Give it information about a proposed production or event and it interrogates the wider operational picture – from activities, location and logistics to authorities, specialist competence, permitting and emergency arrangements – looking for factors that could materially affect the production.

It might identify an authority that needs to be involved, a permit that needs investigating, specialist expertise that may be required, or an interaction between activities that deserves closer attention.

And when it encounters something potentially serious, its job isn’t to make the decision. It’s to spot it, flag it and put it in front of the right person to decide what happens next. And that distinction is fundamental.

A different model for AI in safety

The debate about AI in safety shouldn’t be reduced to whether we should use it or not. That question has already been overtaken by reality. AI is here and people are using it. The more important question is what we ask it to do. Used badly, AI can automate the production of plausible-looking safety documents while quietly skipping parts of the thinking that paperwork is supposed to represent.

Used carefully, it can broaden the picture, challenge assumptions and identify issues while there’s still time to do something about them. That’s the model behind SCOUT. Not AI replacing professional judgement, Not AI replacing professional judgement, but helping people recognise when they need to seek it.