BIS Safety Software’s 2026 Readers’ Choice win shows why frontline adoption, not curriculum, drives AI literacy
Plenty of organizations still treat AI literacy like a training problem: run a session, walk the floor through the tool, then wonder why adoption has quietly stalled a month later. The training usually isn’t what’s missing. What moves people is a tool that takes one annoying part of the week off their hands, because the understanding tends to follow the habit rather than lead it.
BIS Safety Software, an Alberta-based safety and compliance software provider serving more than 1,600 organizations across Canada, has straightforward advice for safety leaders: get the data in order, then build AI literacy across the team.
Marc Hurtubise has spent the past year and a half listening for how that second part actually plays out. The safety insights lead at BIS Safety Software and host of The Safety Spotlight podcast has logged more than 50 hours of interviews across mining, fleet, construction, healthcare, and heavy industry. When he asks what technology is actually changing the job, his guests rarely answer with the technology. They answer with the task it took off their hands.
“People connect to AI when it fixes a problem they already had,” Hurtubise says. “Before that, it’s a word they keep hearing.”
The gap between having AI and using it isn’t unique to safety. IBM’s study of 2,000 chief executives found 86 percent believe their employees already have the skills to work with AI, yet those same executives put regular use at barely a quarter of the workforce. If skill were the real barrier, those two figures wouldn’t sit this far apart.
A win decided by the people doing the job
The Readers’ Choice credential from Canadian Occupational Safety matters less than what it proves, as it’s voted on by the frontline workers and supervisors doing the job, not a judging panel. Those are exactly the people who decide whether an AI rollout survives contact with a real shift.
Hurtubise sees the same test play out again and again in his interviews with safety professionals. “Something can look right on paper and still fall apart the moment a crew has to use it. The people doing the work are the ones who decide that, because they are the experts on how the work actually gets done,” he says. The rollouts that survive tend to share one thing, he says: a tool that saved people time on a task they were already sick of doing.
Removing the friction, not adding a step
Luke Koop, the company’s head of product, points to its AI Form Assistant as the clearest proof. It’s built for the worker filling out the form in the field, not the administrator designing it: describe an incident by typing, speaking, or photographing the scene, and the system fills in the fields and flags what’s missing, all while staying SOC 2 Type II compliant.
“The worker knows the job better than the software does, and they make the final call on every report,” Koop says. “What the tool does is shorten the distance between what they know and what ends up on the record.” In internal testing, that shorter distance cut form-completion time by 71 percent – from roughly 11 minutes to just over three.
Why trust decides whether a tool sticks
Speed alone doesn’t explain adoption. Every field the tool touches is flagged for the worker to review before submission, and any AI-driven change needs their explicit sign-off.
“The leaders I interview say what happens to a report after it leaves the worker’s hands can be a source of hesitation. Being able to read and approve every line before it becomes part of the record settles some of that,” Hurtubise says.
Koop is candid about where most rollouts fail before they ever reach that trust question. “The instinct is to demonstrate the most advanced thing the platform does, because that’s what looks good in a room,” Koop says. “The rollouts that hold start with the practical wins first. Get one form off paper, let people see it worked, and you earn the right to the more interesting capabilities by first proving the tool is on their side.”
For safety leaders, that sequencing matters more than any sales pitch. Prove the tool is on the worker’s side before asking for anything more, because adoption compounds from there.
