Aligning Business & Digital Strategies to Drive EHS&S Performance Excellence in an Age of Emerging AI Technology
Assessing and aligning business process maturity aspirations with your technology strategy is a best practice for achieving Environmental, Health, Safety and Sustainability (EHS&S) performance excellence. Ensuring compliance, improving performance, minimizing risk and creating value through your EHS&S program are all achievable goals with the right approach and tools.
Experience demonstrates that organizations can optimize their EHS&S performance by:
- Engaging with key stakeholders and evaluating EHS&S business processes using best practice maturity assessment tools to determine improvement priorities.
- Evaluating current use of technology/systems and their respective maturity in supporting EHS&S processes and prioritizing enhancements in concert with process improvement priorities.
Obtaining higher value from EHS&S digital investments often relies on progressing on the continuum of analytical capability: raw data → cleansed data → standard reports → ad hoc reports → self-service Business Intelligence (BI)/Agile visualization → predictive analytics/machine learning → prescriptive analytics → autonomous systems.
While many organizations eventually achieve self-service BI/Agile visualization by leveraging commercial BI tools such as PowerBI, Tableau, etc., to gain insights from their EHS&S solutions, they often fail to cross the chasm to predictive analytics and beyond.
The Rise of AI: Revolutionizing EHS&S Digital Solutions
The rapid emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents an opportunity to help more companies cross the chasm. In the EHS&S space, Environmental Management Information System (EMIS) software vendors are beginning to incorporate elements of AI into their user interfaces and analytics capabilities, and a select few start-up disruptors have AI technologies as a foundational element of their platforms.
More broadly speaking, the increasing usage of AI in many facets of business and everyday life is undeniable. For example:
- The percentage of companies using AI in at least one business function has gone from 20% in 2017 to 78% in 2024. – McKinsey & Company
- 93% of Gen Zers use AI at work – and it’s giving them a huge advantage. – Business Insider
- ChatGPT had 1 million users within the first 5 days of being available. – Statista
The key to leveraging AI successfully requires a shift beyond the legacy approach to developing a well-defined EHS&S digital strategy. AI unlocks the possibility of EHS&S insights far beyond the constraints of EHS&S focused software packages. Many leading voices see AI as the path forward in digital technology:
“The business logic is going to these AI agents. They’re not going to discriminate between what the backend is. They’ll update multiple databases, and all the logic will be in the AI tier.” – Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, Dec 2024.
Given the nearly endless possibilities to employ AI to develop EHS&S related insights, figuring out the path forward can easily become overwhelming and lead to paralyzing confusion.
Embracing AI in Your Digital Transformation
So how do we harness AI to move the needle on EHS&S performance? The key is to determine what you really want to accomplish. Upon determining what challenge(s) you want to overcome, it’s time to get to work on developing use case scenarios. Some initial steps may include:
- Commercial Software Selection
Define your core requirements and investigate and evaluate commercial solutions to fit your needs while gaining insights on how vendors are incorporating the latest AI technologies. - Benchmarking
Engage EHS&S professionals in peer companies and discuss how they may be thinking about using AI. EHS&S tends to be non-competitive across companies and we find that peer companies are often excited to share their solutions to common challenges. - Internal Engagement
Involve your internal EHS&S professionals and other stakeholders, those who are working daily on EHS&S on the shop floor, dealing with operations, for their thoughts and insights on how AI could be helpful to them. Be prepared to be impressed!
After developing some reasonable use case scenarios, identify the data required to generate insights. It’s important to expand your thinking beyond what’s managed within your EHS&S solutions today. Remember Satya Nadella’s insights: AI agents will not discriminate what the backend is. Upon determining what data is required and where it resides, evaluate those systems for the volume and quality of data (remember, garbage in garbage out). While AI technology is a remarkable innovation, it requires human intervention to design models in a way that generates useful insights. Be sure to plan for “human in the loop” and do not expect success immediately. Savvy ChatGPT users will attest to the fact that the quality of the question asked has a critical impact on the quality of the results. Finally, optimize investments, start small with simple use cases, expect failures and iterate.
The time is now to take advantage of these leaps and learnings to improve EHS&S performance!
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