If you run safety for a large company, you've probably had some kind of AI safety software for a while. These systems cost a lot. They need a whole team to set them up. And they're built for firms that already have piles of data sitting in a computer to feed them. They work well enough. But they were never built with a 50-person fabrication shop in mind.
That gap has always bothered me. It's one of the main reasons I started Rivisio.
Here's how it really is for most small and medium firms in high-risk work. The person in charge of health and safety is usually in charge of five other things too. They might be the operations manager, the contracts manager, or often the owner. Safety doesn't get its own team. It gets a folder on someone's computer, and a spreadsheet last updated three months ago.
That's not people being careless. That's just what running a lean business looks like, where everyone is stretched. But it builds up risk, and not only the risk of an accident on site. It's the risk of breaking the rules without knowing, of missing an inspection, of jobs that get raised in a meeting and then forgotten when the next problem lands.
The rules alone are a lot to carry. In construction, manufacturing, logistics or engineering there's a mountain of law to work within, and it keeps changing. The main ones like CDM, COSHH and PUWER, plus whatever your own trade adds on top. Keeping on top of all that without a team or proper software is hard graft. Most small firms end up dealing with problems as they pop up, rather than heading off the risk that caused them.
This is exactly where AI can help, and the technology has got to the point where you no longer need a big-company budget to use it.
So what does that look like in practice? A tool that tells you which safety jobs are due and when. That flags an inspection that's overdue, or a machine coming up for a service. That takes what's in a near miss and compares it with what's happened before, so you know if it's a one-off or the start of a pattern. That lets a busy safety manager type a plain question and get a straight answer, instead of digging through a cabinet full of PDFs.
The time it saves is real. Smaller firms spend far more time, for their size, on safety paperwork than big ones do. Take the repeat work off their plate and you free people up for the part that matters, getting out on site, talking to the crew, and building a place where people speak up early instead of hoping nothing comes of it.
There's also the insurance side, which doesn't get talked about enough. Insurers care more and more about how you manage safety and whether you can prove it. If you can show you're on top of your risks, with trends, closed-out jobs and a clear inspection history, that's a very different conversation than turning up with a lever arch folder and hoping for the best. Good AI safety tools build that proof for you, just from doing the job day to day.
I started out as a scaffolder. I've spent 30 years in work where getting safety wrong can cost someone their life. For a long time the tools to manage that properly have been out of reach for the firms that need them most. That's changing, and it's changing fast.
If you're in high-risk work and still running safety on spreadsheets and gut feel, the gap between what you're doing and what's now possible has never been bigger. And it's never been easier to close.