Dancing Pods, Dodging Forklifts: How Companies Are Using AI to Make Work Safer

At Amazon.com’s EWR9 fulfillment center in Carteret, N.J., a warehouse near the New Jersey Turnpike, the workers don’t walk to and from shelves. “The promise of AI here is that you can actually just really up-level, by an order of magnitude, to the amount of data and the quality of data that decision makers have when they’re thinking about how they predict where the next injury is going to happen," said Josh Butler, founder and chief executive of CompScience, whose company offers AI-driven technology that feeds into a business’s existing surveillance system. Though a person or even a team would be hard-pressed to review all the surveillance footage produced by a typical jobsite, CompScience’s AI can sift through hours of footage to find potential safety problems. Logistics company Propak uses CompScience, which can catalog near misses between forklift drivers and other employees, to watch over a 100,000-square-foot warehouse in Mira Loma, Calif. Company officials determined they had far more near misses than they thought, even though employees were supposed to come forward to report potential accidents, said Michelle McCurry, Propak’s vice president of risk management. Asked about those concerns, CompScience’s Butler said his company’s technology doesn’t employ facial recognition and can’t be used to single out individual employees.