Two days of practical safety insight from the people who’ve lived it and led it.
PKG will be attending the Workplace Health & Safety Show in Melbourne.
Reach out to set up a time to connect.
Website: www.whsshow.com.au/agenda-whss-melbourne/
Date: Wednesday 20 May to Thursday 21 May 2026
Location: Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre
Post-event reflections and key takeaways
I’ve been heading to the Workplace Health & Safety Show for about ten years now, watching how technology gets integrated into safety practice in this market.
A decade is long enough to see patterns. The dominant conversation has shifted a few times in that period, and the phases have bled into each other rather than cleanly replacing what came before.
Tracking the dominant conversation
Cloud SaaS was where it started, when safety software vendors migrated from on-premise to cloud.
That moved into early-stage location services, IoT, and lone worker monitoring as smartphones matured.
Virtual reality took over the floor from 2017 to the early COVID era. Psychosocial risk management solutions emerged as a discrete category in that same window.
Computer vision was the dominant AI play before large language models took over. AI is now the dominant conversation from a SafetyTech™ perspective.
What’s receded
Connected wearables have dropped off a bit, but they’re still there.
Exoskeletons are nowhere near as prevalent in the Australian market as they are in Europe.
PPE vendors are far less prolific than at Asian or US safety expos.
The computer vision bubble of 2023 to 2025 has seemed to burst a little.
What’s encouraging
It’s encouraging to see technology integrated a bit more into daily ways of working, rather than sitting on the side as a bolt-on.
The base level digital literacy of the safety profession has significantly improved from the 2015 era.
What’s still missing
Practical application. Success stories. Battle scars.
Vendors are confident in what their tech does from a feature and functionality perspective. The conversation about use-case value, and what good (and bad) integration actually looks like in the field, was notably absent again, including from the conference program.
