Building AI on top of expert review rather than in place of it
For years, contractor safety in Canada's capital-intensive industries was largely a paperwork exercise. An incident happened, it was documented, corrective actions were closed out, and everyone moved on. That is changing, and the change is accelerating.
"There's been a shift from purely reactive, paperwork-driven compliance toward using historical incident and near-miss data to proactively understand the root cause of an incident," says Kim Ritchie, Executive Vice President of Canadian Operations at ISN. "Leading organizations increasingly want systems that flag risk patterns before an incident occurs and offer worker-level tools to identify potential hazards on the jobsite."
ISN, the global leader in contractor and supplier information management, has been at the leading edge of this shift. Its platform, ISNetworld®, connects Hiring Clients in sectors such as oil and gas, petrochemical, telecom, mining, manufacturing, and the public sector with contractors and suppliers. ISN’s Canadian team supports Hiring Clients and contractors across three Canadian offices in Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal. One current focus, Ritchie says, is "leveraging energy-based safety awareness and controls to help mitigate and understand the potential impact of serious injuries and fatalities."
Why AI is an aid, not an oracle
The most common misconceptions when organizations first adopt AI-driven safety tools is that the technology will do the thinking for them.
"A common misconception is that AI can replace human judgment and program review in the qualification process," Ritchie says. "In reality, AI is most beneficial as a support of expert review, helping teams gain efficiencies by surfacing patterns and prioritizing areas in need of attention, not as a standalone decision-maker."
The human-centric AI philosophy is visible in how ISN develops its tools and services. Its Review and Verification Services (RAVS®) team, a group of safety professionals established in 2005, manually verifies contractors' written safety programs against regulations and each Hiring Client's requirements. ISNetworld uses AI-driven analytics to benchmark contractor safety performance, such as serious injury and fatality (SIF) reporting, restricted, or transferred rates, against industry peers, and to flag documentation or training gaps before work begins. Hazard Assistant, a new tool in ISN’s Empower® app, uses AI photo analysis trained by the company's health and safety team to help workers identify jobsite hazards and match them to the right controls, always with human input on the final call.
The benefits, Ritchie states, reach well beyond preventing individual incidents. Organizations invested in safety analytics "often report improved contractor relationships, better visibility into supply-chain risk, more consistent safety culture across sites, and stronger worker-readiness," she says.
Getting the data and the ethics right
With increased focus on AI in contractor management, it is imperative to be transparent about what data is collected and why, limiting use to safety and qualification purposes, keeping a human in the loop for consequential decisions, and giving contractors visibility into and control over their own data."
The focus on data extends to what Canadian safety leaders should be doing now to prepare for what is coming. Ritchie expects the next two to five years to bring "more predictive analytics, models estimating risk before work starts based on combined safety, training, and historical data, plus deeper integration between compliance platforms and real-time field data."
However, predictive tools are only as good as the records feeding them. Canadian safety leaders, Ritchie says, should prepare "by ensuring their underlying data, incident records, training logs, and program documentation are thorough and complete."
The move from recording incidents to anticipating them does not start with an algorithm. It starts with detailed, connected, verifiable data, and keeping experienced safety professionals firmly in the loop.
