AI panel speakers preview Canadian Safety Summit 2026

Organizers have confirmed the full agenda for the Canadian Safety Summit 2026, running October 22 at the Automotive Building in Exhibition Place, Toronto, as part of COS Live, the two-day event that also includes the Women in Safety Summit and Canada's Safest Employers Awards. The day's most closely watched session may be an early-afternoon panel on artificial intelligence. Jimmy Vassilopoulos, director of national health and safety at Purolator, moderates the discussion, joined by Roshan Varghese, senior director of environment, health and safety at 4Refuel, and Chamath Harischandra, strategy solutions manager at Powerfleet. The session, titled AI at the Operational Edge: Proactive Safety in Action, runs from 1 p.m. to 1:40 p.m.

Ahead of the summit, Vassilopoulos and Varghese spoke with Canadian Occupational Safety about what they plan to bring to the panel, and what still concerns them about how the profession is talking, or not talking, about artificial intelligence.

Adoption, not implementation, is the real challenge

Vassilopoulos, who has led health and safety at Purolator since 2022 after 12 years running the function at UPS Canada, said the panel will open by asking each panelist to describe how they have already built artificial intelligence into their safety management systems before moving into generative and predictive analytics tools.

The workforce question, he said, is the one panelists should not avoid.

"The elephant in the room is always going to be what does that do for employment," Vassilopoulos said.

Rather than sidestep the topic, he argued panelists need to confront it directly. "We're really increasing the risk of anxiety here, and anxiety is a huge psychological risk," he said.

He compared the moment to the arrival of the excavator, which replaced the manual labour of digging trenches with pickaxes and shovels. "Does that mean that thousands of employees that were involved in manual labour all of a sudden lost their jobs? Probably not. They pivoted into something different," he said, adding that Purolator's own three years of artificial intelligence adoption, spanning on-road driver technology and in-building systems, has created new roles rather than eliminating positions.

Vassilopoulos was blunter about who is actually at risk. "The problem isn't the implementation of AI. The problem is the adoption, and strategizing around the adoption," he said. Professionals who do not keep pace with new safety management tools, he added, risk becoming obsolete in the same way any professional falls behind without continuing to develop.

Varghese pushes back on AI as a surveillance tool

Varghese, who oversees safety for a company running more than 300 fuel tankers across Canada, brings a different entry point to the panel: five years of experience with AI-enabled dashcams built around driver trust rather than driver monitoring.

"I see AI as an enabler, a complementing technology to achieve our objective, instead of just a tool to either monitor or to get certain things done," Varghese said.

When 4Refuel's dashcams detect unsafe driving behaviour, the system flags a short clip to a supervisor for a coaching conversation rather than automatic discipline, and the company has since added real-time in-cab feedback that stays between the technology and the driver. Varghese said that design choice matters because artificial intelligence entered the safety profession through monitoring and surveillance applications, which left many workers assuming the technology exists to catch them out.

"If you talk to workers about AI, you can feel a kind of skepticism among a large extent of the workforce," he said. "Let's see workers as a solution, and let's work with them to identify the right technology to help them do their job in a safer and better way."

Canadian Safety Summit 2026's full confirmed agenda

The AI panel sits inside a day built around four themes: the shift from compliance to risk-based intervention, workplace violence, legal exposure, and what Vassilopoulos called a more profession-focused summit than in past years. Dr. Kaleb Dahlgren, a bestselling author and mental wellness advocate, opens with a keynote on resilience, followed by a panel on risk-based safety featuring Nick Sampath, senior manager of environmental health and safety at Ingram Micro Inc., Shilo Neveu, executive vice-president of health, safety and environment at Valard, and Virginie Tremblay, national director of health and safety management systems at Canada Post. Breakout tracks through the day cover legal investigations, demographic shifts on the front line, workplace violence, and the debate between Human and Organizational Performance and traditional management systems.

The afternoon carries two more breakout sessions worth flagging for readers tracking Canada's 5-Star Safety Cultures going predictive with AI: a near-miss reporting session led in part by Sanofi's Vicki Choy, and a legal update from Jeremy Warning, a partner at Mathews, Dinsdale & Clark LLP, that will unpack the Ontario court's recent Greater Sudbury due diligence ruling and what it means for employer liability. Larry Masotti, chair of the Board of Canadian Registered Safety Professionals (BCRSP), closes the day with a session on whether Canada's safety profession needs formal regulation. The event carries five hours and 25 minutes of continuing professional development (CPD) hours, which delegates submit directly to the BCRSP. Full session details are available in Canadian Safety Summit 2026's full confirmed agenda.

Sponsors and exhibitors back a profession-focused day

Veriforce Canada returns as VIP lunch sponsor, with Avetta, MSA, OK Alone and Powerfleet as gold sponsors. The exhibitor floor includes the BCRSP, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS), Brady, Novara, Voxel, Shirley Parsons, Becklar, Briotix Health and Levitt-Safety.

Registration for the Canadian Safety Summit 2026, along with the full agenda and speaker list, is available now.