How contractors are using AI and analytics to reduce risk and improve safety

Innovation in engineering and construction continues to grow, particularly around artificial intelligence and use of data.

In some organizations, however, when management looks to improve jobsite safety, decisions too often are made based on best practices, personal experience, and intuition instead of using a data-driven approach.

That said, they also need to understand that accumulating data alone won't solve everything. The key is to employ analytics that combines seemlingly unrelated data sets that provide actionable insights.

In a recent webinar now available to watch on demand, two industry experts offer clear, concise insights into why the trend toward going digital is becoming more and more urgent. Titled “Using analytics and AI to reduce risk—The Contractor’s perspective,” this fast-paced webinar reveals how leading US builders The Boldt Company and Suffolk Construction have implemented an observation-based safety program including analytics and AI to manage safety risk and reduce incident rates across their companies.

The webinar is hosted by Josh Kanner, product strategy lead for Oracle’s Construction Intelligence Cloud and the former founder of safety AI company Newmetrix. Industry experts Jit Kee Chin, executive vice president, chief data and innovation officer at Suffolk, and Scott Frazer, vice president, corporate safety at The Boldt Company, share their thoughts on implementing the observation-based processes and technologies to move from reactive approaches to a proactive predictive safety risk management program.

They also touch on broader topics of making analytics initiatives successful with operations within their companies and the potential for expanding this journey to evaluate schedule risk.

“Every one of our operations professionals have intuitive senses of what matters for safety,” Chin points out during the webinar. “We could go around and collect all these intuitive understandings based on years of experience. But what they lack that technology provides for them is a place to put it all in and churn out insights that can systematically improve our safety outcomes.”

Adds Frazer: “People are skeptical at first but once the data starts proving itself you get a lot of buy-in and credibility for your safety program. It’s opened the eyes of our project and field leaders to all the components and factors that can create the conditions for a safety incident or injury. We show them from a predictive standpoint what we’re seeing trending on the project that’s setting the stage for the opportunity for a safety incident we didn’t fully consider in the past.”

After you watch the webinar, learn more about how construction firms proactively address worker safety with predictive analytics. And also check out how owners can use AI to reduce project delivery risk.