On World Day for Safety and Health at Work, a nudge to reflect on the theme of "Revolutionising Health and Safety: The Role of AI and Digitalisation at Work"
It’s a reasonable conversation to be having — but one we can't just talk about; we need to look honestly at how prepared we are to act.
To highlight the importance of this shift, I revisited one of Australia's most significant recent safety reviews: the 2019 Brady Review into fatalities in Queensland’s mining and quarrying sector.
The Brady Review is powerful, uncomfortable, and necessary reading. It makes it very clear: Fatalities are rarely caused by freak accidents. They are overwhelmingly the result of systemic, organisational, training, and supervision failures.
But when it comes to the role of technology? the Review leaves a glaring gap.
What the Brady Review says (and doesn’t say) about technology
The Brady Review rightly calls out that:
- Too much reliance on administrative controls leaves workers and their organisations vulnerable.
- Industry must move beyond "tick and flick" safety paperwork.
- The Regulator and industry must foster stronger early warning systems through High Reliability Organisation (HRO) principles.
However, when it comes to how technology could enable these changes, the Review barely scratches the surface; in fact that's being generous. It's fundamentally absent.
Here’s what I found:
✅ It mentions that the incident reporting system should be modernised — proposing a simpler, mobile app–based system.
✅ It recommends better incident data analysis — suggesting the Regulator set up a dedicated group to identify trends.
❌ No exploration of how technology can strengthen critical controls — like automation, real-time hazard detection, machine health monitoring, or proximity detection systems.
❌ No vision for how real-time monitoring could actively support HRO behaviours — such as early identification of drift into failure.
❌ No mention of how predictive analytics or AI models could disrupt the fatality cycle by identifying hidden precursors earlier than human systems alone.
These systems have been in play for the majority of my career so there should have been dialogue in the report in 2019 - and look how fast things are moving...
While the Brady Review exposed the systemic human and organisational roots of fatalities, it missed the opportunity to fully explore how AI, digitalisation, and new technologies could be leveraged as proactive safety systems.
So let's change that thinking... TODAY.
A call to action...
If we truly want to move beyond fatalism — beyond the idea that certain industries are "just dangerous" — we must expand our thinking.
Technology isn’t a silver bullet. But ignoring it is no longer an option.
- AI and predictive analytics can augment human decision making.
- Real-time monitoring can detect control failure (and co-confirm capacity and resilience)
- Automation and remote operation can remove workers from the line of fire entirely.
- Smart reporting tools can reduce administrative burden, freeing frontline leaders to spend more time coaching and supervising.
- Computer vision, IoT, and digital twins can give us a real-time view of work-as-done, not just work-as-imagined.... And can support work redesign which is critically important for psychosocial risks as well as fatal risks.
I encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and be bold enough to ask:
How could technology disrupt the fatality cycle?
How could AI augment human risk decisions to identify drift, not just after an event, but while risk is present and dynamic?
How could better digitalisation make High Reliability Organisations truly possible, not just aspirational?
What got us here won't get us to where we need to be
The Brady Review challenged the mining industry to rethink how it views risk and responsibility. Today, I believe we must go further:
We must view technology and digitalisation as strategic enablers of fatality prevention. We must design our critical controls, reporting systems, and operational oversight with humans + machines working together. We must invest in technology-supported assurance, learning, and decision-making.
The future of health and safety won't be built by technology alone — but it absolutely won't be built without it.
This article from Cam Stevens was posted on LinkedIn on 28 April 2025.
