Why AI, supervisor liability, and change fatigue are the critical safety challenges to tackle in the year ahead
As 2026 approaches, Larry Jones wants safety leaders to look past the hype and focus on fundamentals – even when it comes to AI.
Jones, vice president of corporate health, safety and environment at Ledcor and the 2025 BGIS Safety Leader of the Year at the Canada’s Safest Employers Awards, says artificial intelligence will be a powerful tool in safety – but only if organizations are disciplined about how they adopt it.
“We're assessing the advantages in our organization because we see it can be a significant benefit,” he says of AI. “But it's really filtering through the many applications to see how is AI going to help us in our safety journey and making our workplaces safer.”
Jones is already seeing potential risks of using AI tools uncritically. Preparing for an internal presentation, he found there is a tendency with Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate incorrect data from time to time, which can be indistinguishable from valid information without a careful review.
“That’s the danger in it,” Jones says. “It can be a very powerful tool but always requires someone with the relevant expertise to fact check the result.”
For 2026, he believes safety leaders must continue to put governance and data quality first. With AI, “you have to have data,” he notes, and “if you want to make good decisions, you have to have good data to make those decisions.” Ledcor is implementing quality checks on its safety data so leaders can trust what they’re seeing before layering analytics or AI on top.
Re‑arming supervisors in an era of personal liability
Beyond AI, Jones says the supervisor role needs to be a top priority in 2026. Many experienced workers and leaders from the baby boomer generation “have left the work site or are about to,” he notes, and at the same time “supervisors are really being held to a high level of accountability.”
In that environment, he argues, organizations must ensure that they are not losing the valuable knowledge of retiring leaders, and truly setting supervisors up for success. At Ledcor, that’s meant rebuilding the entire supervisor training program from the ground up.
Your direct supervisor “is always the most important person in setting how your work will be done,” Jones says. Head office leads on building procedures, audits and systems, and it’s the direct supervisor “who is responsible for implementing those critical safety systems and making sure everyone goes home safety at the end of the day.”
The company is putting “a significant amount of effort into ensuring that we've prepared those supervisors, we're giving them the right information, and [making] sure they understand their roles and responsibilities related to our internal responsibility system.” It’s not just classroom training, he adds; Ledcor is actively verifying that supervisors understand the material and are practicing it with their crews regularly. After collaborating and consulting with the various businesses within Ledcor, the revamped program will be begin roll out across the company in January.
This approach “is about how do we get better,” Jones says. When supervisors “spend the time… working with [their people] to clearly understand what the expectations are, suddenly you are creating a culture of accountability where everyone takes responsibility for keeping each other safe.”
Managing the rate of change
Another pressure point for 2026 is the sheer pace of change hitting frontline workers. Jones says that when you stack up “all the things that we change in a year” – from new procedures and lessons learned from incidents to winter awareness, mental health week and safety week campaigns – “it's a lot” for people in the field.
In response, Ledcor is developing a calendar that maps out all safety‑related changes and campaigns across the year. The goal is to “manage the rate of change in an appropriate way” and avoid overwhelming the very workers who are most at risk.
For Jones, these themes – disciplined AI adoption, better‑equipped supervisors, and a realistic approach to change – are at the heart of what safety leaders should focus on in 2026. AI “is going to be a tremendous opportunity for safety,” he says, but only if leaders pair it with high‑quality data, proven processes and strong human leadership on the ground.
