EHS On Tap E170: How AI is Transforming Safety

On episode 170 of EHS On Tap, Barry Nelson, founder and CEO of FactorLab, talks about how AI is transforming safety.

Barry Nelson is a seasoned entrepreneur and currently serves as the President and CEO of Factorlab, the provider of the popular and rapidly growing safety leading indicator application SmartTagIt, which has been used by field professionals across dozens of enterprises more than 2 million times in the last 30 months.

With more than 20 years of experience at the intersection of incident prevention and technology, Nelson and his teams have helped hundreds of companies, including Fortune 100s and startups, to utilize emerging technologies, organizational science, and machine learning to significantly reduce accidents and injuries in the workplace. As a thought leader and researcher, Nelson is actively working with industry leaders on the opportunity to use workplace conversations, combined with computational linguistics and natural language processing, to identify early indicators of unplanned, potential catastrophic events in the workplace. He has been researching leading safety indicators for two decades, across dozens of organizations and tens of millions of field observations and daily planning conversations.

He founded Predictive Solutions in October 2001 and, as President and CEO, he pioneered the use of mobile devices and enterprise data analysis in the safety industry. He and his team worked closely with leaders in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon to build the first reliable safety incident prediction models in the workplace. Nelson sold Predictive Solutions to Industrial Scientific in 2008 and continues to work closely with industry leaders on change initiatives, risk management, and human performance in the workplace.