Using AI to help keep our people safe at work

08/09/2022

At Downer, keeping our people and communities safe is our number one priority – and we are constantly looking for new and improved ways of achieving this goal.

In FY22, we partnered with Microsoft and IT services specialist, Crayon, to build an AI-powered Zero Harm management system that will help keep our people safe by providing faster access to Critical Controls than ever before.

When a Downer employee is logging information about the day’s work, or looking retrospectively at incident reports, the Microsoft Azure machine learning natural language processing model can take these input documents and automatically identify the risks our employee might be exposed to and the control that will mitigate those risks. The purpose of the AI is to identify such risks and therefore our people can eliminate the exposure to hazards for frontline workers.

This is not only aligned to our Safety Pillar, it is also a great example of our Thought Leadership Pillar. It is an innovative approach that helps keep our people safe, while also saving time on the job and making our data work harder for us.

“Our vision is that the work we do will, over time, feed into frontline decision support systems that help our teams decide on the best way to do their work when they need to do it, and give them up-to-date best practice and consolidated lessons learned on how to do it well,” Downer’s General Manager of Zero Harm Risk, Mathew Hancock, says.

“We learn an incredible amount every year, and smarter systems will help us consolidate these lessons and get them to the people who need them, when they need them.

“We also want it to be really easy to keep track of what is and isn’t happening, and to check if what is being done is working. If we can learn which things work really well in an easy and unobtrusive way and share this efficiently with others doing the same work in real time, we could see amazing benefits in Zero Harm performance and productivity.”

This approach also allows Downer to fast-track the outcomes of the Communities of Practice we have established around particular risks and work activities.

This initiative demonstrates Downer’s contribution to achieve the following Sustainable Development Goals: