In this article, Cam Stevens, Managing Director of PKG Safety Innovation™, explores how safety leaders can align technology, data and innovation with organisational capability to deliver meaningful and sustainable change.
The question leaders in high-risk industries ask me most often about digital safety transformation is some version of this: how do we get started? Are we moving too fast, or not fast enough? Behind the question there is usually a board that has asked about AI, a vendor pipeline full of demonstrations and a safety function already at capacity.
My answer is that speed is the wrong variable to start with. After supporting hundreds of technology deployments across high-risk industries, I have learned that the organisations that create real value from technology are the ones that understand their current state and the honest answer to that question is harder to reach than most leaders expect.
Understanding the current state
When I look across the organisations I work with, I see the same few situations repeating and they have little to do with sector or size.
Some organisations are moving faster than their people can absorb. The technology arrives ahead of the problem it is meant to solve, procurement runs ahead of adoption and the programme is measured by the number of technology pilots rather than by what has changed. From the outside these organisations look like innovators. Inside them, the people expected to use the technology are still waiting for someone to explain what problem it solves.
Some are frozen. Their organisational strategy acknowledges that technology is a major focus, but nothing moves and the stated reasons are often time and budget. In my experience those stated reasons are rarely the whole story. More often the function does not yet have the capability or the confidence to begin, and stillness feels safer than starting poorly.
Some safety leaders have already decided the technology does not work. Often that judgment was formed years ago, on an early tool in its weakest period and has never been revisited. Hello virtual reality! A related group holds the view that safety is human work and technology has no place in it. I understand the instinct. The conclusion troubles me, because its practical effect is that the question of where technology could genuinely help never gets asked.
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, I watch readiness split into two parts that almost never move together. I meet safety professionals doing remarkable work with AI tools in their own time, on their own devices, who return each morning to blocked platforms, unclear rules and mixed messages from leadership. Their AI use does not stop. It moves into the shadows, informal and inconsistent and the organisation carries exposure it cannot see while its most capable people grow restless.
The reverse is just as common. An executive mandate arrives, enterprise AI tools are rolled out at speed and the transformation programme charges ahead while most of the people it depends on remain unsure what is approved, what is safe and how any of it fits real safety work. The investment struggles to translate into anything practical. Readiness, I have come to understand, is the product of individual capability and organisational support and the distance between the two may be the most useful thing a leader can measure, because it points to exactly what to build next.
The relationship with IT sits underneath all these situations. When digital safety work is framed internally as an IT upgrade, it attracts an IT upgrade’s budget, governance and executive attention and the broader change it was meant to carry never gets resourced.
There are also organisations that know their own pace. They are rarely the first to adopt anything. They watch what others deploy, learn from what fails elsewhere and move when a clearly defined problem tells them to move. Being a deliberate fast follower is a legitimate strategy and for many organisations it is the right one.
The work that underpins strategy
What separates the organisations that progress from the organisations that stall is a set of capabilities that most safety strategies assume already exist. The ability to identify and define a problem worth solving. The ability to design a use case around how the work is done and that workers will trust, and to build a business case an executive can fund with confidence.
Early engagement with the people who will live with the change. A working partnership with IT, approached as a collaboration between functions that need each other. Very little of this is about technology and all of it can be learned.
This is why I believe that a human-centred and strategic approach is non-negotiable; the pace and magnitude of the change is what flexes. Integrating data, technology and innovation into the design of work and safety must be done on purpose, with a clear view of the destination. Some organisations are not ready to move quickly even when the technology is up to the task, and that is a finding to act on rather than a verdict. Readiness sits with the organisation and its people and it can be built through capability, through small problem-led experiments run with workers and through the discipline of starting with the question rather than the tool.
If I could offer one litmus test to determine your likelihood of success, it would be this. Ask whether workers are part of the transformation. Are they helping to define the problems, shaping the design, testing the solutions? If the answer is no, the organisation is not ready, whatever the roadmap says. Enabling change means designing with workers and the organisations that skip this step pay for it at (lack of) adoption.
Locating yourself
There is a message in this for SafetyTech suppliers as well as buyers and it is a shared one. The customers that vendors succeed with are always strategic buyers: organisations that arrive with a defined problem, engage their workers early and move at a pace they can sustain. A market with more of those buyers is better for everyone selling into it.
For safety leaders, the starting point is honesty about where you are. Moving too fast, frozen, persuaded the technology has nothing to offer or constrained to the pace of the wider organisation: each position calls for a different next step and none of them is fixed. The organisations I have supported to create durable value began with a real problem, the people who do the work and a deliberate decision about the pace and magnitude of the change. Everything else followed from there.
This article was written by Cam Stevens and first appeared in the International Health and Safety Journal on 13 July 2026. Read the original article.
