Is AI Going to Take Your Job?

[Music] Hey everyone, welcome to Intellect’s new podcast, The Safety Brief. In this pod,

we’re going to talk about all the hottest safety topics where all things EHS. Hopefully, you’ll leave this half

an hourish session with something to think about and maybe even something to apply. This is our first ever pod, so I

want to start off introducing myself and my partner here. Uh, I’m Trevor Bronson, the director of portfolio strategy at

Intellects, and I’m joined by Scott Gatis, our global practice leader for EHS. Scott, why don’t you go first, tell

everyone who you are and how you ended up here. Yeah, well, you can tell I have no hair

and I have a gray beard, so it it should uh let you know that I’m I’m the odor practitioner between us, between us

both. Um, I’ve been doing this for 36 years and uh, I I started life with GE

and then I I was a global leader for Kimberly Clark for a while and then the same capacity with Bristol Squib. I

joined intellects about seven years ago literally because I had data laying everywhere and I had people on my staff

that was trying to understand data. Uh, I was trying to figure out how to make decisions uh, in a timely basis and I

just lost. Right? Right. So I can see this on the horizon where technology was going to become very very important for

the safety practitioner and it’s one of the big reasons that I joined intellects is to uh I don’t know if I was

inflicting pain but certainly to give a lot of counsel to our teams about how important and what some of those areas

are that uh that I think we should we should really really go after. And Trevor, why don’t you tell a little bit

more about yourself? We’re lucky to have you Scott. We’re happy you made that decision to come to come help us and help the industry at

large. Uh, who am I? Trevor Bronson. I came to Intellects through a different maybe untraditional route. I went to

school for environment, health, safety, and sustainability. And I I was meant to be a practitioner. I worked a couple

practitioner jobs at automotive manufacturing company. I spent some time at Tesla. I spent some time at a utility

company called PPL. And I spent some time at Benjamin Moore. all doing a variety of EHS jobs whether they be

environmentally focused, safety focused, compliance focused, you name it. Uh even one is an admin for the firm I work for

now, Intellects. But right out of school, I actually went to an analyst firm called Verdantics and was

introduced to the wide world of EHS technology there, looking at all the the

software that helps practitioners actually manage this space and understanding what they’re able to

offer, what practitioners are looking for to help them do their jobs better was an awesome intersection. One that I

got really lucky by stumbling into. And I decided that the spot where I’m the

most excited about making an impact on this industry is that one that is the intersection of technology and the

actual application of EHS and that just so happens to be a software company and that so happens to be Intellects. Uh

I’ve been here for gosh it’s getting past six and a half years now. Feels like a long time. How about how about

you Scott? How long you been here? Yeah, I came right before that you joined. So about seven years. So, we’ve

uh we’ve got some tenure right with Intellects. Basically lifers. Basically lifers. When

Scott started, he had hair actually. I did. I did have hair and then working with uh you know 600 Gen Z’s and

millennials all day. Uh yeah, it just went away. Just went away. Tough job. Tough job. Somebody’s got to

do it. Tough job. All right. Well, let’s talk about our first topic. The reason people joined, they didn’t they didn’t join to listen

to to us chitchat about whatever. They actually listened to us talk about another topic that’s relevant to the youth and to everyone today and that’s

uh that’s AI. And the big question that everyone’s asking across all things AI but especially you

know or also in EHS is that is AI going to take your job? Is AI going to take

the job that you do today and render you kind of unimportant or irrelevant at worst? What say you?

You know, I I was thinking about this uh about this podcast and I was actually thinking about the dynamics of you and

I, Trevor, because you’re young, right? And I’m I’m a you’re younger and I’m an

older professional. Uh when I think about that, and I I speak about this a lot at conferences and when I write is

that uh when I look at myself, I’m this guy called the digital immigrant, right? Where I’ve kind of had to pick up on

technology as it was introduced. and you really were born almost with technology

in your hand, right? So, you’re a digital native, right? And and I think in in some realms of my thinking, it has

to be easier for you to adopt technology, to think about technology, about what technology can do. And for

me, you know, I kind of look at it with a little bit of with a vein of of distrust about what can it really do,

right? for for me as a practitioner because when I think about the topic, can it replace me, right? Can it uh u

can it do things for me that I can’t do for myself? I mean, it’s it’s like a a scale, right? And I I think about it

much differently because for the longest time, I I really had to lead my practice

of of safety and health from a gut, right? is that I had to look at something and I had to really critically

think about it and and I had to decide. Right? So the the thing about safety

practitioners is that we can’t be wrong very often. Right? And if we’re going to be wrong, it has to be things that don’t

matter as much, you know? So we’re on a manufacturing floor. We’re trying to make decisions that literally hinge on

being right or wrong and protecting the life of a worker, right? So it’s really, really important. And I can’t tell you

how many times that I’ve had to make a decision just based on my gut and experience and wisdom of leading. So

when we were talking about this this topic about doing AI topic because they go geez I said can AI replacement me

well they didn’t have a gut right they didn’t have any feelings they don’t have any emotions um they’re just a bunch of

algorithms right all mushed together and it’s just going to give me some kind of answer that may or may not be right

I was going to say is that is that good or bad because human error is a real real thing and a cause of a lot of

incidents so AI not having emotion not having a gut is that a that positive or is that negative.

Yeah. Well, that that’s on that scale, right? Is that uh now I I use AI quite

often to research, you know, and I’ll punch in something, I’ll say, oh, that’s that’s something to talk about. And

about uh I would say 70 80% of the time I’m okay with that answer, you know, but there’s that 30% where I’m going, well,

that’s not the answer that I would would think about. And now I’ve got this other dilemma of saying, well, is AI right?

And I’m thinking about this wrong. So it causes me to have to kind of think differently. So I I think your point is

is well taken is that well it’s not a bad thing to pull out all the emotion and just make a decision based on

totally factual information that’s kind of laying out there in the in the in the abyss. So I I see it from both sides.

Uh, I still like my gut though because, you know, when I think about how I’ve led safety, the thing that AI can’t do

is, and I’ll use, you know, just an example, Tom going through a divorce, Tom going through through bankruptcy,

Tom having a a a bad day, you know, poor Tom, right? Yeah. Poor Tom, right? But there’s many

times when I’ve been able to have a conversation with the Toms in my workforce and decide how I need to

manage or lead, you know, him that day based totally on my perception of how

how he is doing or or she’s doing. And I I don’t think AI can do that for for me

today. So again, it’s that scale of when to use it, when not to use it, uh when

is gut, you know, feelings are those paramount over what I can see on my

dashboard. So yeah, it’s kind of what I’m saying about it now. Well, so let me put your feet to the

fire then. Is it a yes or a no that AI is coming for coming for the jobs?

I I uh I’m asked this a lot. So I speak at a lot of conferences and the number

one question I am a traveling man. The number one question that I will get off

to the side or even during my my uh my question and answer sessions is that don’t you think AI is going to replace

us? And my initial reaction is is I don’t think we’ve got to worry about that today. Um but AI is happening so

quickly, right? The these I’m amazed how far we’ve come in just the last 18 months with AI. Uh my inclination is no.

I don’t think that AI is going to replace the safety practitioner. Uh, however, I think it will allow uh safety

teams to think about what their work is uh differently. And I’ll give you an example for that. When when I was uh

with Kimberly Clark and Bristol Squib, I had people dedicated to doing my analyst

work trying to get me information and putting it in a funnel so I could understand it. Right? So, I had those

people. I had compliance people that were always looking at regulation and

changes in regulation and what geographically you know we needed to look at for that regulation. So I had

those type of people that u that I would have that I would have liked to have

used for other activities but I couldn’t. Um so I I think AI really

starts taking some of that work away from us and allows but it allows me to

pivot those people differently. I don’t want to lose anyone and and I don’t think especially from a from a global or

or an organizational view. I don’t think teams necessarily get smaller because of

AI, but I think it allows us to think about what the work is differently. And I’ll give you a good another example of

that is that you know when I use AI, I mostly research with it, right? And it’s wonderful at organizing thoughts. So

when I put in a problem, these are the four or five things that you should think about, right? Or are these are our

answers. I don’t think I take those answers, right? But I take those statements as questions. Have you

thought about it this way? And I’ve got to say that that many many

times is that when I look at that information, I go, well, I really haven’t thought about number three or number four.

So it pushes me to think about problems much much differently. So I think that that’s the beauty right now of AI, it is

it’s pushing me to think about EHS differently than I have before.

So if I was going to ask AI to summarize that sentence or statement by you, I think it would tell me that it’s not

taking the job, but it’s changing the job. Uh there’s a real chance and and I’m totally aligned with this, right?

that some of the things done by EHS teams today, especially, let’s be

honest, kind of lower level or entry- level EHS employees, won’t need to be done by them to the scale that they’re

done today, right? Data acquisition, data cleansing, just trying to organize

things. is even trying to go out and aggregate um a bunch of kind of different types of data and and prep it

for analysis, understand compliance obligations.

Anecdote on my part, when I was back at Tesla, I spent about 100ish hours taking

a Title 5 permit and turning it into a a nice simple Excel sheet. 100 hours I’ll

never get back. um and AI could do that a lot a lot more effectively than I can

and it’s not going to get tired and frustrated while doing it. Right? So that kind of work that I did as an

entry- level EHS employee that’s exactly what I think AI can help with in large part or in large part. That’s not the

whole answer of AI, but that’s a big part of it. So it is going to be let’s be controversial here. It is going to

take that job, but the person that was doing that job previously now has a whole new task, right? They can be more

strategic. they can be more of a thinker. They’re going to be uh they’re

going to need to be able to be more strategic about what to do with that

data now that the problem of simply getting data, cleaning data, analyzing data is kind of being taken off your

hands. And I think that kind of opens the door for like what a what a a new EHS professional looks like, how AI

factors into the skill set you’re you’re really expected to have. Yeah. I I mean just to kind of add on to

that is one of the things that uh and Trevor you know this I I wrote a book right about

esteemed author everyone esteemed author where’s your book plug your book what’s the title yeah amazon.com just type in skatus

you’ll get my book u but thinking about that right the whole essence of that book was pushing safety to the front

line and and one of the the things that I always wanted my teams to do you know

is to get out of the office get out of the office, get to the front line, build relationships with the people that work

for us, right? And and and drive partnership. That’s really what you want to do. And I I still say that if you are

a safety professional, that is exactly where you want to be, right? But we get sucked into administrative work. And and

one of the reasons that I did join intellect is that I was at that time just trying to build efficiencies is

that what can we do right with a digital platform that that just collects all of

this information for you that gives you time right to to do frontline work. Now

we’ve even added AI to that and say well we should be able to do it better right but when I talk to seasoned

practitioners kind of like me you know one of their big things now is as younger professionals are coming into

the workforce that’s all they want to do right they want to go to the office they they want to get an answer through AI

and they get sucked into the administrative side of what we do and and they’re not learning how to build

relationships on the front line which is a danger and it is one of the reasons that I coach so much is that at the end

of the day our worth is is actualized at the front line whether you’re in service or manufacturing something or or you

know building things is that we really need to have those relationships established because you know now there

there’s a term we call psychological safety right and and really in a nutshell it’s more than this but in a

nutshell it it’s it’s every worker it’s every employee it’s every person feeling safe to share themselves right to share

the truth, to share things when it doesn’t go well, to to report things without reprisal. Right? So, there’s a

lot of things that kind of go into this when we’re trying to build an effective safety process. And AI, I’ve always

looked at it and even technology as a tool. It’s not my answer to everything, right? It’s not it’s not my answer. It’s

just a tool to help me get to the front line. Uh but now I I think you know what

I do see is especially a lot of younger professionals that already they they

don’t have a tremendous amount of social skill when they come into the workforce because of everything that happened to

them during COVID and and you know there’s there’s been so much technology in front of them. They need to learn

those skills, right? So we we got to continue to kind of push that. Uh but

even I go ahead. No, nope. Go ahead. love your I had a boss I had a boss that told me

uh as an EHS practitioner and we were talking and he mentioned that you know this is a this is a technical field

right there’s a lot to know if you want to be a successful EHS professional regulations ways to ways to mitigate

risk ways to implement things how to report how to use technology like there’s a lot of technical information you need to be privy to but at the end

of the day the job is mostly personto person the job is mostly social because

no matter what you know about EHS no matter what you think is going to help. Ultimately,

to keep people safe relies on people making safe decisions out there on the floor, right? People are going to be

faced with a decision, for example, when they could rush or they could take their time and do it the safe way. And you

know, you have a strong safety culture when people are faced with that decision and choose the actual safe pathway ahead

of them. But they’re only going to do that if you’ve effectively kind of communicated what they need to do. if

you’ve effectively quote sold to them the reason that they need to do it and they trust in you as a leader to

actually make the decision you you wish them to make and yeah when it comes to

the AI of that also AI can help you analyze data faster it can even recommend actions that you can take and

it can help you you know navigate your software like a with a with a conversational chatbot you know just

like the large language models you’re all used to but that’s still not going to be able to replace you talking to

that employee and helping them understand what the right thing to do is, why that’s the right thing to do,

and why they need to prioritize this over whatever else they’re doing. Cuz let’s face it, right, the people we rely on to to to perform safety, it’s really

not their number one job. It’s actually their second job. They’re out there to produce the widget or do the service or whatever, we’re hoping and expecting and

asking them, you forcing them in some cases to do it safely and giving them all the tools and the knowledge and the

PPE with which to do it safely, but it’s still going to come down to their actions. Um, and yeah, as good as AI is,

and it’s good and getting better all the time and becoming a real productivity booster, uh, and strategic advantage, it

doesn’t really replace that conversation. Uh, I’m not sure it ever can, or at least not in the near future.

You know, come back to me at 2050 and we’ll we’ll have my my EHS robot helper and see if he can go have the chat. But

it’s pretty far off. Yeah, I I think I think that as well, right? And whoever is listening to the

podcast, whether you’re young or or an older professional, is that we are here as gap fillers, right? And and how we do

that is at the very beginning, we write procedures, we write rules, right? We we

do a lot of things. We build out risk models, we build out management systems. And all of those things are designed to

fill gaps. But we also know that there are gaps within these gaps, right? So

there’s these small slices of space, right? Exceptions

that you you don’t you don’t recognize them or you haven’t dealt with them or they’re a very complex problem that

you’ve not been able to solve. So you you have to have that person on the service end on the manufacturing end

that’s able to critically think about something and make the right decision. and and I spent a lot of time, you know,

really teaching that concept as well is that you need critical thinkers at the end of of the the service opportunity

and and that requires counseling, that requires coaching, that requires mentoring, that requires capability

development. Even though technology certainly is being used to do a lot of those things, it cannot replace somebody

that’s seasoned that has seen these gaps before and can coach you through them. And so that’s that’s really what I what

what does keep me up at night and it’s what I hear from colleagues is that uh we’re even seeing the front line trust

technology maybe more than they should and you know their their big challenge when they think about AI and you know

they’ve got machines now that are making decisions on by themselves right so to speak is they’re slowing up or they’re

or they’re they’re getting faster or slower right they’re getting higher or lower you know in in this whole

production realm and they don’t even know how to train for safety, right, to stay away from that or to intervene with that or to

interface with that. So, there’s a tremendous amount of angst because artificial intelligence is really

starting to impact even the front line and having, you know, employees trust it more than maybe they should. So that’s

that’s kind of why I always kind of pull back and say you really need to critically think about everything you’ve got in front of you and and make the

decision based on not only technology but what you know what what what is in your gut, right? What’s telling you?

Does that feel, you know, right or wrong? And I I can tell you a story when um you know when I led Kimberly Clark,

my first paper mill, I had a plant manager that just hated rules. He hated procedures. He just hated all of that

stuff because he said there’s nobody that’s ever going to be able to do all of those things. You know, that’s those are hundreds of pages of stuff.

So he he said, “I just want to lead by principles.” You know, if you see something unsafe, shut it down, right?

If you see someone working unsafe, stop them. You know, if you can’t agree on those first two things, pull two or

three people together and decide what the best answer is. And believe it or not, when we just impressed those three

principles on everyone, everything became safer, right? Because we we were really driving them to critically think

about what they really needed to do in that environment. And I even think I look at that with AI is that critically

think about what you’re really wanting to do with that piece of technology. Yep. So, so let’s think about, you know,

if AI is not going to take your job, but it is going to change your job. And we know it’s an important input, but

certainly not the end all beall of the output of what it means to be a safety professional. You have hired a bunch of

safety professionals in your storied career. What do you expect a new employee that’s

just coming out of college, coming into the safety world, or maybe even someone coming into safety from something else? Right. We hear all the time about people

that end up in the EHS world from a chemical engineering background or a security background or a compliance

background. A lot of people actually don’t end up here from a safety track or an EHS track. But when when you think

about what you want someone to know about AI and how they can leverage AI and how they might stand out in an

interview with AI as a safety practitioner, what would you be looking for for them to say? Yeah, it it’s the

uh I sat on two advisory councils for a couple of universities for their Is there anything you don’t do? You

write books, you sit on advisory councils, you’re speaking at events. I don’t know how you found the time for this. Well, it just kind of tells you that

you’re owed, right? When you get old, you kind of do those those kind of things. And and I I kind of look at it as giving back, but maybe they look at

it as we can’t find anything anyone else to do this, so we’ll ask Scott, you know? And but I do I I sent on a couple

advisory councils for a couple of universities that have safety and health degrees. And this is one of those topics

is that you know today’s professional today’s EHS or safety and health

professional uh needs to leave college with understanding technology not just AI but technology in general because I

started noticing that I needed that at the end of of my career where I was actually leading you know some of those

manufacturing organizations is I I did need you know some some specialists that worked on my teams that were really good

that were really savvy with technology ology that’s only grown, right? So, they absolutely need to know about

technology, about what’s available. I mean, I’m I uh I think I was telling you Trevor earlier that I just put in a

speaking abstract, right, for the 10 top hacks, right, for chat GPT for safety professionals, right? That was already

accepted, you know, so that one will be done. But it’s just a very popular topic is that all of us as professionals, what

are those magic words that you type into the search bar, right, to get the answer that you need. I’m not sure there’s a

certain, you know, magic word, but we can get you closer there. Those are the things that I would really appreciate if

I had a young professional that could come in and get me closer to the answer. And I’m not sure it may be my age, but I

don’t think I’m I’m ever Well, I’m not at least today. I’m not convinced that I always get the answer that I need,

right, through Chad GPT or or AI, but it certainly gets me closer, right? If if

you can get me down to the two or three or the four or five things that I really need to consider, I can make that

decision much better, right? I can make it faster. I can make it more efficiently, you know? But but someone

my age, we may not know how to do that, right? So somebody that’s been doing this for a while, you know, we do need

young professionals and and I even think about the days where I was trying to find people that were savvy with Excel,

right? I mean, I go that far back, but it made a wealth of change in somebody that was able to do that. Now, you know,

take that up about a hundred notches. you know, somebody that has good AI

skills certainly would would be a benefit, you know, to any EHS team. And

and I say that because if we can do that well, it gets us back out to where the

work actually is is at the front line. So I I use it as more of an efficiency play is what makes me more efficient to

be able to do my job a lot better. Yeah. I you know, we we hear about this a lot at Intellects, right? Everyone all

of our our customers are asking almost a general question. what what are you doing with AI? What can you do with AI?

A lot of times they don’t know the answer that they want us to give them. They just want to know that we are

considering it and finding ways to implement it within our product to make sure it helps them do something better.

I I feel like that’s something to me kind of falls into maybe three highle categories. I’m a big fan of

alliteration. So I would throw them under uh acquire, analyze, and action.

Right? AI can help you acquire more information and specifically more quality information than you could

before. We hear all the time about I need to get information from my front line, right? The more information I have, the better analysis I can do, the

better analysis I do, the better my more consequential my actions will be. But a lot of times that data from the front

line sucks. It’s again, we talked about already, it’s not their number one job. They’re not trying to go into intellects

or any other system and spend any more time than they have to to put data in. And that’s where AI can really help

flush out a a better, fuller, more usable response. Right? So that’s on the

acquire part. On the analyze part, the cool thing about AI is you can just dump things into it and it can find patterns

or trends or anything of note that look a good EHS professional could and has

done, but it takes a lot of time where again AI is just a it’s a helper. It’s helping you arrive at some strategic

outcome quicker. And then action. Of course, it can help suggest actions, but ultimately unless you really give it the

power to to create trainings or schedule things or implement things or again in the year of 2050 go out and chat on the

floor, um you still got to as the EHS professional take that action, determine what you actually need to do here and

and hope that it mitigates risk based on all this better information. So the AI that the AI tools that actually do this

to to the point of what does the the emerging EHS professional needs to know, right? if they can come into an

interview or come into a work environment with like verifiable, provable examples of how they found ways

to use AI, whether it’s embedded in a tool like ours or the publicly available

tools that we all use today. Um, if they can show how, hey, I’ve managed to make EHS more efficient and more, you know,

importantly more effective with these tools, I think that’s a leg up. Just like I said, it’s it’s a new tool. How

good are you using the latest tools? you know, one it used to be Excel, now it’s this. Um, it makes a lot of sense.

Well, I I think and you know, and and Trevor with with your team, right? I

went through this about two or three weeks ago, you know, with the AI team that’s working on, you know, taking just

a paragraph, right, that somebody may have put into an incident report or through a procedure and giving them

nudges, right, giving them basically information that says, “Did you think about this, right? or did you add this

or did you forget about that? They were just simply nudges to get a better description of what we needed to

understand in that report. And I think the AI team thought I would be somewhat,

you know, says, well, that’s that’s not much. I thought it was immense. You know, understanding how things happen is

immensely important to what the conclusion is going to be down down a few steps, right? But we got to

understand how things happen. So for me, I was very excited to hear those helpful

hints that just kind of started coming into my boxes that I really needed to consider. To me, that’s how I want to

use AI, you know, and one day actually able to understand risk, right, deeper

uh without having to think too deeply about it. That that’s that’s incredibly, you know, helpful to me as a

practitioner. But so I I think and and uh I heard one of the team says, “Well,

you know, predictive analytics.” I almost kind of shy away from from that that totally right. I know it’s very

important, but I like the idea. Yeah. It’s a white well, and everyone says they’ve got it, but I kind of sit back and I listen even

to a lot of our our own competitors and say, “Do you really have predictive analytics for people?” Right? And that’s

the biggest variable that lays out. And any type of safety system are people. So

it’s the biggest variable. You never know exactly what they’re going to do. Their decision making is all based on

how they critically think about things. And you multiply that only by the number of people that you have in your

organization. So you may have 600 points, you know, or like me, you know, when I when I was leading Kimberly

Clark, 65,000 points, right? All making these different decisions. So I so I worry about that. So I am more

idealistic around prescriptive analytics, right? Get me down to the two or three things that I need to focus on

and I can I can take it to the field go, right? I I can I can get it across the line, you know, if I think about it that

way. So that I think that’s where we kind of are today, right? Let’s just get you closer to where you want to be. I

love the things that we’re doing with AI with our own platform. I like what I’m hearing, you know, in the rest of our

space. I like how other people, even our competitors are using AI, but I don’t

want to displace the the value of the practitioner, you know, that think that’s paramount for me.

Yeah, 100%. Well, I think speaking of immense, uh, the safety brief is becoming anything

but. So, we probably got to put a pin in it. Uh, sorry to our editors. This is our first time doing this. Um, cool.

Well, uh, any closing thoughts? AI, EHS, not taking your job, changing your job, a better tool. Any any outro you want to

put in here, Scott? No, I I think we’ve covered a a lot of ground in a limited amount of time. I

think that uh look at AI the way that I do. Look at it as a tool in your toolbox. Pull it out as you need it. Uh

force yourself to critically think about what your role is. Uh but like me, everything that we do affects the front

line. So, always kind of keep that in mind as you’re kind of going through technology or how you do your work.

You used a football reference there at the end. Football season is upon us. You got a team. Who you rooting for?

Well, I live in Kentucky, so we don’t have a pro team. So, the closest one I have the Tennessee Titans, and they

never quite get over the No, no matter how bad they are, they seem to beat my Dolphins, though. So,

that’s a problem. True. That out this year. Yeah. All right, cool. Well, thanks,

Scott. Appreciate it. Uh, thanks everyone for listening. We will see you next time. See you everyone.

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