We Surveyed EHS Professionals About AI. Here’s What They Said

By Phil Molé, MPH

What do EHS professionals think about AI? We wanted to find out, so we conducted a survey of your peers in EHS management to find out not only what their current attitudes about AI are, but whether and how they’re using it in their daily EHS management tasks.

In what follows, we’ll break down the background of our AI survey and highlight some of the major takeaways from it.

The Background of the AI and EHS Survey

VelocityEHS created a “pulse survey” to assess EHS practices and perceptions regarding AI and sent it via email to contacts in our database. 206 people responded in total, with 131 responding to every question.

The respondents most commonly identified their industry sector as manufacturing, although there were small numbers of respondents involved in storing and processing chemicals, chemical manufacturing, pharmaceuticals & life sciences manufacturing.

Most respondents had job titles reflecting “safety” or “EHS,” but there were small numbers with titles indicating roles in “finance,” “operations,” “engineering,” “executive leadership” or “plant management,” which reflects the reality that many people with academic or professional training outside of EHS, still play significant roles in EHS management.

The AI Survey Results

We collected a lot of data from EHS professionals like you, but at a high level, here are the major takeaways.

EHS Professionals Are Curious About AI

The most common self-reported sentiment about AI was “curious,” which corresponded to 89 respondents. The next most common were “excited” (52 respondents) and “hopeful” (44 respondents).

After that, we start to see fewer positive sentiments represented. 42 respondents said they were “skeptical,” 28 said they were “worried,” and 9 reported feeling “threatened.” 20 said they felt “empowered” (another positive sentiment) and 6 said they were “resigned” to it, a sentiment that we can probably rank as somewhere between negative and apathetic.

These patterns also generally hold up across age groups. All told, the big takeaway is that there were far more EHS professionals who self-reported positive sentiments about AI than negative sentiments. In fact, if we include ‘curious’ as a positive emotion, all age groups feel more positive about AI than negative at a ratio of about 7:3!

Most EHS Professionals Are Either Not Using AI or Consider Themselves “Novices”

Nearly 75% of respondents indicate they are either a novice or beginner with AI tools

. In practical terms, this means that they’re at the beginning stages of using AI in their role, but most of them are not yet regular users and are still learning.

There’s an age trend in the results. The older a respondent, the less skilled they self-report they are in using AI tools.  Still, the trend is not as pronounced as you might think. In statistical terms, there’s a weak negative correlation (-.277) between age and self-reported AI skill level, with a p-value of 0.0012, which indicates that the correlation is “significant,” i.e., due to a real trend and not chance alone. In other words, the inverse correlation between age and self-reported skill level is real and statistically significant, but not very large.

Most Respondents Aren’t Exploring Specific Use EHS Use Cases for AI

30% of respondents indicate they are not actively using AI in their role.

Of those who are using AI, most respondents (57) indicate they are using either a freely available AI tool, like ChatGPT, or built-in AI functionality within a platform they use for general tasks, like Copilot or Gemini. A much smaller number (14) report using purpose-built AI for specific use cases such as ergonomics assessments, job safety analysis, root cause analysis, or identification of potential for severe injuries and fatalities (PSIF) risks, in EHS software platforms. Very small numbers reported using internally built AI capabilities.

For those respondents who reported they don’t use AI—why not? We asked that question and got interesting answers. Over half of the respondents who aren’t actively using AI indicate it is because they’re unsure how to use AI or where it fits into their workflow. There was an age factor observed here, in that 70% of respondents in this group were 45 or older.

Key Takeaways from the AI Survey

We can boil down these survey results into a few key takeaways:

• Most respondents have a positive view of AI, and are curious to learn more about how it can support their roles;

• Even so, nearly a third (30%) of respondents are not using AI at all in their role, and of those who are using it, most are using general AI tools rather than purpose-built EHS software applications, so they aren’t getting the full benefits of AI.

• Many respondents who aren’t using AI report that they don’t see the relevance of AI to their job. We can infer from this that if they could understand the relevance of AI to their job, they would be open to adopting it.

Together, these survey results indicate that most EHS professionals still aren’t making the most of AI as a generational opportunity to break old cycles of reactive safety management, some of the symptoms of which are stubbornly high rates of serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) over the last two decades.

EHS professionals who take the initiative to learn more about AI use cases will be in a position to lead not only their organizations, but also to lead their field. AI in EHS is here, and at VelocityEHS, we want to help you learn what you most need to know to fulfill your potential. In fact, we’ve developed Vēlo, powered by VelocityAI, to give you the next-generation AI capabilities you need to supplement your own expertise and build safety management maturity.

Looking for More Information About AI and EHS?

Check out our ongoing AI and EHS blog series, where you’ll learn more about AI, specific use cases for AI in EHS management, considerations when evaluating EHS software and vendors, and more!

In the meantime, you can visit our AI Glossary & Learning Hub to continue learning on your own. There, you’ll find a curated list of resources covering various aspects of AI and EHS, as well as definitions of common terms.

We also invite you to download and read our new white paper, “Why EHS Professionals Can’t Afford to Ignore AI.” We dive deep into all of the reasons why EHS pros like you have a generational opportunity to use AI to pivot from a reactive safety management approach to a proactive approach that reduces injury rates and fosters a positive safety culture. From there, you can also get some guidance on what to look for when selecting an EHS software vendor with AI capabilities with our new AI vendor evaluation checklist.

Let VelocityEHS Help!

If you’re ready to jump to the part about how Velocity can help, we’re standing by to talk!

Our capabilities include AI PSIF Insights, and several AI-enabled enhancements. For example, AI is helping us improve root cause analysis, strengthen incident descriptions and JSA job task descriptions, and support better controls selection in ergonomics assessments and JSAs. It’s also enabling the auto-processing of contractor documents. And that’s just the beginning.

In fact, why not see for yourself how we can help? Get in touch today to set up a meeting so you can see our software in action!