06 Oct Should HR Teams Be Using AI to Prevent Workplace Injuries?
Most of us think of AI as solving the problems that are locked squarely within the computer: handling laborious data analysis, combing through eye-watering spreadsheets, proofreading 100 pages of corporate manifesto. The idea that an AI could prevent workplace injuries sounds like two different (and very mismatched) worlds coming together.
But the trick here is to view workplace injuries and risks differently. We think of risk in terms of the world around us: wet floors, precariously balanced stock, chairs with no lumbar support, dangerous machinery, the list goes on…
But workplace injuries ultimately come down to one very quantitative thing. Data. And AI excels at analysing data and spotting patterns that most of us lack the time, attention to detail, or cold, hard processing to find for ourselves. At least, not as quickly as AI can.
So, should HR teams be deploying AI in this area?
The Cost of Workplace Injury
In 2024, the total cost of workplace injuries climbed above $180 million, including productivity losses and medical expenses. Larger businesses can, for the most part, shoulder these costs – although each injury creates its own ‘butterfly effect’ that can continue to sting the company for years into the future, particularly if compensation is involved.
For that reason alone, a business of any size should consider workers compensation insurance to represent a vital lifeline, no matter how positive their workplace incident log book looks. Even if AI can be deployed to reduce the risk, the risk will still be present, and protecting against those snowballing costs is fundamental to continuity and scalability.
The Most Common Workplace Injuries
The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 2.5 million cases of workplace injury and illness in 2024. Between 2023 and 2024, it was found that the most common causes of injury were contact incidents, which can include anything from being struck by falling equipment to coming into harmful contact with animals or other people. Contact incidents are followed by overexertion and bodily conditions, then falls and slips.
A workplace doesn’t need to be overtly dangerous in order to represent a threat to your employees and, by extension, your business.
How Can AI Change Things?
No single thing represents a ‘magic bullet’ to workplace injuries and, as mentioned earlier, there’s no methodology for totally eradicating the risk. Even an employee in a cottonball-lined room can become injured in some way.
But AI spots patterns.
In June of this year, Texas A&M reported on research out of its Department of Construction Science, where assistant professor Dr. Namgyun Kim found that workers on active job sites can grow desensitized to the alarms and moving equipment around them, tuning out warnings to focus on the task in front of them. That’s the exact blind spot AI is well suited to catch. Kim’s team used eye-tracking and EEG sensors and found that while workers could still physically hear warning alarms after repeated exposure, their brains devoted less attention to processing those sounds as actual warnings.
Rather than just flagging the problem, Kim’s lab built a fix: an AI-powered augmented reality system where a worker photographs their own work area, and an AI model scans it for hazards before generating safety scenarios specific to that site. It’s a small shift with a big implication for HR because AI doesn’t just log injuries after the fact, it can catch the moment attention starts to slip, before an incident happens.
That’s likely where AI’s real value to HR teams lies: sitting quietly in the background, watching for the patterns human attention is prone to miss.
No Comments