Podcast 2025-06-23 - Will AI take your job

[00:00:00] If you've been watching the tech news lately, then you know that one of the biggest stories out there is about artificial intelligence and the realization that many of today's jobs. Are going to disappear over the next decade and be replaced by ai. It is going to be something to watch, but how will this AI revolution impact safety management?

[00:00:29] That's what I wanna dive into today, so let's get to it.

[00:01:06] Hello, hello, hello, my safety friends. I hope you are having an amazing week. Now, you may not know this about me, but I am a lifelong learner, I am insatiably curious. About everything. When I learn a new fact or hear about some new thing, I truly just dive in to understand it.

[00:01:30] Not necessarily to become an expert, but I wanna make sure that I understand it thoroughly and I am the type of person that. Make sure that the resources that I use or to learn about something, that I diversify them. So I'm hearing from all different opinions. I'm listening to different people, and I come up with that understanding that is a little bit more complete.

[00:01:55] It's kind of a weird fact about me. It's really, really funny. [00:02:00] And my kids are the same exact way. And a great example of this is. I don't know if you remember several years ago, HBO released the docuseries, Chernobyl. And it's a very good series. If you're not seeing it, I would 100% recommend it.

[00:02:15] It's amazing. It's well filmed. It's just so good. And my daughter got obsessed with Chernobyl, and she did the same exact thing I did. She literally went out and bought five or six different books about Chernobyl. She was watching YouTube videos about it. She's reading blog posts about it.

[00:02:33] She gets all of this different information and just learns. Everything she could about the event. And that's how I am too. And it's one of the reasons why I am filled with so many useless facts as well. My friends tease me because they're like, oh yeah, Brye knows the stats on that because I literally have all these little like trivia bits of information because I research things and like I don't [00:03:00] listen to music.

[00:03:00] I listen to. Educational things. I spend a lot more time reading than I do watching tv. It's just something about me. So why is this important? The same thing happened when AI came onto the scene way back in 2022, and I looked into AI back then and tried to figure out how useful it would be and if anybody used it back then, you know, it was,

[00:03:26] novelty and it was interesting, but the results just were not very good, especially when it came to safety management. The results coming out were just very generic and I just had this like love hate relationship with it. I could see where it was going, but it wasn't there yet and I just hated it and I could really tell when things are AI generated as opposed to somebody creating it themselves

[00:03:53] I hated that AI was popping up everywhere and everywhere I turned it was AI this and AI that, and AI, whatever. [00:04:00] And every tool that I was using in my technology stack required an extra charge to use the AI feature, which wasn't even that good. And I was getting very frustrated. So about where are we?

[00:04:15] We're June right now of 2025. So I would say that this was probably November or December of last year. So this is 2024. So two years after Chatgpt was officially released, I sat back with my love hate relationship with AI and said, look, if I don't. Learn this thing, I'm gonna get left behind because now it's gotten to this tipping point of where everyone's doing it , and I would become less marketable on the job scene, or I would have this misunderstanding of how things worked.

[00:04:58] So I [00:05:00] made a concerted effort to study and learn ai. And what you have to realize in my world today, I spend all of my time coaching and training workplace safety managers just like you. So I am not managing. A work site safety program like you are, but I work with people who are, and I have a business. The Safety Geek is a business.

[00:05:27] I have employees. I need to pay, I need to support myself. I have expenses that I need to control, and I needed to use AI to look into how I can run my business. More efficiently so I could get more out there and do more with less time. And my employees I do have, could work on better things than.

[00:05:52] Little minor tasks of setting up project management, right? Those things. So I made this concerted [00:06:00] effort to learn ai and that is what I've been doing probably for the last six or seven months every night. And I am doing something else and learning it and playing around with it.

[00:06:11] And I wanted to do this episode about how it's going to impact our jobs because right away when I started messing around with it for my business, I all of a sudden saw, I don't need to hire another person, which is what I was planning on doing. I can have AI do it, and what I recognized was that. A lot of people are scared about robots taking jobs, right?

[00:06:41] They go into the grocery store or the McDonald's and they see the computerized kiosk where you have to put in your own order or the self-checkouts, ? And they get angry that that's someone's job that is gone. That is a minimum wage job that is gone. That is a job for an [00:07:00] uneducated person.

[00:07:01] When I look at ai, I. The jobs it's going to take are the $50 an hour jobs. The a hundred thousand dollars a year jobs, it's those jobs that will be going away. And that scared me. 'cause we're in that type of job. We are in a high skill profession. So how is AI going to affect us?

[00:07:26] Now we can go on and on about computers taking over the world and taking jobs. But historically, what has shown in every industrial type of revolution that our world has seen is that when these things happen, other jobs come to the surface. We just have to shift our knowledge.

[00:07:44] Our training and the jobs just transform and it actually grows the economy in the long run. So I'm not concerned about that. I'm just concerned about us keeping up with this [00:08:00] change in the job market. And that's what I want to talk about today. So let's dive into it. So the first thing that I know is that we're already seeing some of this in safety.

[00:08:10] We've been seeing it over the years, think about the wearable technology that came out, I don't know, 10 or 20 years ago. That was like the first version of AI in our workplace, right?

[00:08:22] So that wearable technology is now going to be smarter and more accessible and easier to use and actually might be a better tool for us. We're already seeing smart PPE or PPE detection. Think about also in the workplace, like computer vision. As those augmented reality glasses get even better, we're seeing these things in our workplace already, and when we're thinking about ai, that is part of it, right?

[00:08:51] Because AI is running the technology that is making these things work, or there's AI built into that technology, [00:09:00] but. Yeah, there are things that AI can now do that have changed just over the last two months. This is how quickly it's evolving. That will impact your work. So the future for safety management is going to look different, but it's not gonna make safety management disappear.

[00:09:21] At least that's my opinion. So let's look at some advantages. The way that AI works is they have these large language models. The way my son puts it. I love this, analogy is he goes, it's a perfect memory. So there are people in our society that have perfect memories that can remember everything, like every book they've ever read and everything they've ever done, and they can even put it in data and all of that.

[00:09:46] It's just really interesting to me. So AI is like a perfect memory, right? So you're going into it and you're prompting it and you're using it, and it's giving you responses that are [00:10:00] smarter than even you, or smarter than, you would expect it to be. So the advantages of using it is that we can use it to streamline our data collection.

[00:10:11] AI can now be automated to maybe even collect some of this data for us. And it can give us better data analysis. So in the past, I would create Excel spreadsheets or Tableau dashboards or Power BI dashboards and it would show us all of the data. But the story that data was telling you, it was up to me to tell that story to my executive team.

[00:10:39] So now you can put that data into AI and it will actually. Give you a better story, right? Because it can identify patterns as well. And what's really interesting is it can actually identify risks quickly and things like that. And the way that it works now, you can literally take pictures of things, put it [00:11:00] into the chat, and it can identify different.

[00:11:03] Issues for you if you prompt it correctly. And some other advantages are that you can automate some of your more routine tasks. So think about like claims management. A lot of that now can be automated. Or in the future it'll be able to be automated even better, or creating training. You can create a system of AI that will do that for you, or compliance programs.

[00:11:31] So all that time that we were spending, creating training, creating compliance programs, or updating them in the future, AI can do that for us. Or generating reports and distributing reports. Any time you spent doing that. Can now be eliminated or will be able to be eliminated so that way AI can do that for you.

[00:11:56] So this is how your role is going to [00:12:00] change. Once AI becomes more prevalent in your workplace, a lot of these things you can do now. I would say one of the things that might be holding you back from doing it now is budgets. 'cause a lot of times, companies, especially smaller companies, that maybe.

[00:12:19] Aren't using AI right now. They might not want to invest in the tools to do these things for safety, or if they invest in these tools for sales or marketing or merchandising, they won't necessarily think about sharing them with safety as well. The other advantages that AI is going to bring to you is it could be another set of eyes.

[00:12:45] It can shine a light on things that you never even thought about. So if there's a new process or a new product or a new equipment, you can feed ai, all of that information and have discussions [00:13:00] about what those hazards are to make sure that you're thinking about everything when you are developing your SOP, which it can then create for you as well, which is pretty amazing.

[00:13:12] And AI can end up being a safety manager in everybody's pocket. Anybody with a phone can now look up compliance rules or what PPE is required for certain tasks, or you can even make a custom AI for your work. Where people could look up what your policies or procedures are, or have a chat with an expert for your company and be able to hear what the SOPs are, or the job hazard analysis and all of that.

[00:13:43] So AI then becomes. Partially the safety manager, right? If these are the things that you are currently doing, if you're spending all of your time right now managing claims, creating training, creating compliance programs, [00:14:00] sending out reports, answering compliance questions and PPE questions, a lot of that's gonna be eliminated in the future.

[00:14:09] And AI can start identifying risks before they become issues. So the way I envision this to be used in the future is that it can be that second set of eyes, like you're doing an inspection and maybe you take a bunch of pictures and you load all of that in and you load in your findings and then you just ask, did I miss anything?

[00:14:31] And it would be able to help you identify that and it also track and trend any of your coaching and observations and all of your findings to identify those patterns and identify gaps or issues before you actually see them. Now with ai, we're gonna end up with some workforce issues as well, right?

[00:14:54] That we're going to have to mitigate. So once AI becomes more prevalent in the [00:15:00] workforce. I expect that we're gonna see some resistance that some employees are not going to want to use it. Just like how I hated it in the beginning. There's a lot of people that don't understand ai, that don't like ai, that will not want to use ai.

[00:15:17] So we're gonna have to deal with that. And the way I look at this is. Like when computers first came along, there was a lot of resistance too. But then there were the people. That said, no, I'm gonna embrace this because if I don't learn how to use a computer, I'm gonna become obsolete.

[00:15:35] . It reminds me of that movie, hidden Figures, where computers were actually people that did the mathematical calculations. They were computing until the IBM computer came along and then that was doing the calculations for them, and there was a group of people that. Did not embrace it and did not learn it.

[00:15:57] And then there was this one lady that was like, I'm gonna learn it. And she [00:16:00] became the master and that saved her job. I believe there's going to be resistance in your workplace of this. And like I remember also I had this worker, he was. A 72-year-old truck driver, and we actually made his jobs that he didn't have to climb the ladders anymore.

[00:16:18] He literally just shuttled. Tankers and that was it. But when we went on to electric onboard recorders where he had to record his hours of service on a computer, he resisted it. And it became one of those things like, you cannot do paper logs anymore. You have to use the EOBR. And he fought it and it was like, you're going to lose your job over this.

[00:16:42] And that was finally what made him want to make the switch. And strangely enough, what he ended up quitting over. Was steel toed boots when we mandated, because they worked on farms a lot, and when we mandated steel toed boots, he was like, I'm not wearing 'em. And he literally quit [00:17:00] over steel toed boots, but he learned the computer.

[00:17:02] But anyway, we are going to face some resistance as AI gets implemented into the workforce. And then you're also gonna face some employee disconnect, right? Like employees. May feel like they're being watched because AI is constantly there reporting on them. This is how I feel about that wearable tech.

[00:17:23] Whenever I have tested it out, the employees just felt watched and it hurt the culture a little bit. So I could see that happening with AI as well. And the bigger problem is that AI will give people a false sense of security, that they think that they're safe because AI would catch it.

[00:17:43] And a great example of this is me in my car. I have a Camry, it's old now. I bought it brand new because I had all of these neat safety features, including collision, avoidance, and lane change warning systems, and all of these things that tell me [00:18:00] everything that's going on.

[00:18:00] That makes it safer for me to drive because another fun fact, I am not a very good driver and I need all the help I can get. But it does give me this false sense of security. Like, I can't rear end anybody 'cause my car won't let me. But that's not really true because if I'm going fast enough, my car can't react quick enough.

[00:18:22] It, has stopped some rear end collisions thinking I was gonna rear end somebody on it. So I wasn't going to, I promise you. But it gives you that false sense of security. So I can see us fighting that in our workplaces that they think AI will catch whatever the issues are and make them feel like they don't have to look out for it.

[00:18:42] Like maybe they don't have to be as diligent. They don't need to have that extreme awareness. The other thing that AI is gonna end up doing is reducing our workforce. So going back to where. People are going to lose their jobs as AI gets implemented. That's an advantage to the business 'cause they [00:19:00] can reduce their head count.

[00:19:01] But for the people that end up staying, the workers that are there, they're gonna end up doing the jobs that AI can't do, that the robots can't do, which a lot of this might be very simple jobs. So several years ago. I was in the interview process with the Kroger grocery stores and the new Kroger grocery stores are all run by robots, but every warehouse has a handful of employees, and I know that the job was like one safety person for eight locations or five locations, like literally one safety person for the entire East Coast, because each warehouse only had this handful of employees

[00:19:42] when we were talking about the job itself, the robots did most of the work, but there were still some tasks that the robots could not do that employees had to be there. It was more like delicate stuff and things like that, putting them in the grocery bags. So there's always going to be work like [00:20:00] that and that type of work , it's either going to be really low level, easy type of work, which builds complacency.

[00:20:09] That we have to fight or it is high level work, and then those employees tend to get overworked. 'cause now you have this reduced head count, and then you have two types of employees that can't cross train because they're two different levels of work people end up overworked, and what happens when people are overworked?

[00:20:31] They get tired, they get complacent, they make mistakes, and accidents happen. So that's gonna be something that we're gonna have to address as well when it comes to safety. Now the other thing about AI that I wanna make sure that you have on your radar is the ethical and the legal considerations.

[00:20:48] Because when it comes to safety, there's a lot of personal information that we are privy to, that we are responsible for protecting. It's why a lot of times we have to have a locked door or a [00:21:00] locked filing cabinet and we have to have systems that are secure. So there's privacy issues.

[00:21:06] That we have to make sure that we're protecting, especially when it comes to medical information and claims management. The other thing you need to watch out for is bias in the models. So the models are trained on certain information and if there is any biases that could end up resulting in decisions that are biased as well.

[00:21:25] So you have to look out for that too. And the biggest thing is that AI makes mistakes. It's prone to hallucinations. And a lot of people don't recognize that those are mistakes or that the information coming out of AI is not real. So understanding that AI helped, but now we need to verify and make sure that it's true.

[00:21:47] So what does the future look like for safety management? With AI in it, or what is the future of your position or our profession? [00:22:00] And I just think that the role of safety just needs to shift a little bit. A lot of times, and this is the problem I have always seen in our profession, is that there's this strong focus on compliance and regulations when if you really just looked at the human side of safety, compliance and regulations always fall into place.

[00:22:22] But in the future, AI is gonna take over that compliance and regulations. So it's gonna leave us with this workforce that has spent their entire careers focused on regulations and not building up those soft skills that actually make you valuable in the workplace. So where AI is gonna replace you is being that regulations encyclopedia.

[00:22:45] You're no longer gonna need to memorize the compliance regulations. You could just put in a prompt or ask AI to make sure that compliance is met or what are the compliance regulations for whatever, and then move on to [00:23:00] your higher level work. So people whose entire job has been focused on regulations, they're going to be impacted, but those who actually expand their safety skills to be honestly more of what we teach here at the Safety Geek, to be more about the softer skills, about understanding behavior change and leadership and the impact on the business and human motivation.

[00:23:26] And those people are gonna thrive in a world of ai. Because those are still going to be needed because AI cannot replace the human element in the workplace. We're still going to have humans in the workplace. Even, like I said, the Kroger warehouse, it's all robots, but there are still humans in there, and AI is never gonna replace decision making.

[00:23:49] It's gonna augment decision making to make it better and easier, but you're still gonna have those humans making those decisions. And you [00:24:00] as the safety manager influencing those decisions. It's not going to replace leadership skills and it definitely is not gonna fix human behavior, which is one of our biggest issues in the workplace.

[00:24:14] It doesn't matter what your safety program is, it doesn't matter what regulations or compliance say if that human being does not behave. In the manner to follow the safe work practices. And that is where we excel in changing human behavior by influencing their beliefs and their thought processes and their decision making.

[00:24:41] So I just believe that the role of safety in the world of AI is just gonna shift. You're going to. Not have to do the compliance stuff as much. Your job may not have a lot of admin tasks anymore because AI can automate it, or it can make it quicker [00:25:00] and faster. Instead of spending a whole day developing a training, it can now be done within a couple of hours.

[00:25:08] Right, or even an hour. So. If that is the future of safety management, how can you prepare yourself? Because that's what I'm all about here. I don't want your job to go away. I wanna make sure that you excel at it and that you are the one that bubbles up to the top and becomes valuable. So first and foremost, you need to learn the skills and you need to learn AI and you need to stay adaptable.

[00:25:33] You can't be that person that didn't like the computers were coming along. You actually have to embrace the tools and use the tools. Maybe even become the expert before your company brings it on. Maybe you could be the voice that says, Hey, did you know AI could do that? And then they see you being more valuable because there is still, even though I am buried in the tech world and [00:26:00] learning all this stuff, there's a lot of people that aren't, and your company may be one of them.

[00:26:06] And as you learn this stuff, you become more valuable in the workplace. One of the biggest things you need to learn is prompt engineering. I remember that term, prompt engineering. This is how you talk to ai. Because one of the problems I had with AI in the beginning was that everything coming out of it was garbage.

[00:26:26] Until I realized that I was giving it garbage. So garbage in is garbage out. The prompt, what you actually put into AI is super important to make sure that what you get out of it is accurate and useful. And that comes down to prompt engineering. And what I really love about all of this is that if you embrace this and learn these skills.

[00:26:51] You become more marketable. Think about applying for a new safety role, and you can now say that you [00:27:00] are skilled in prompt engineering and AI automation, you use those skills to help you identify risks, to make sure that your program is catching every gap and that you are. Providing the decision makers with many options that would work for the business and give a return on investment that makes you a lot more marketable in the workplace.

[00:27:24] So as you're learning these skills, I want to warn you about free training. The Safety Geek offers. A ton of free resources, right? Like you go to my blog, there's lots of free stuff out there. I have my all access pass, I have my free course, and there's a lot of companies out there that give you a lot of free training, but I want you to understand that free is never free.

[00:27:52] You are paying with your time and your attention. So there is [00:28:00] a cost to free training, and I actually experienced this as I was learning ai. This is why I wanted to bring this up because when I first said I am going to learn ai, I immediately went to YouTube and free blogs and started watching everything that I could.

[00:28:22] But what I found was that I was spending a lot of time, there was so much watch time going on. All of my time was being taken up watching videos. So when you. Invest in training, you actually get back time. So think about like a book. This is why I love to read books as opposed to listen to podcasts a lot, which I love.

[00:28:50] Podcasts, don't get me wrong, they're filler. But when you read a book, it's a whole system. It walks you through the entire [00:29:00] thinking and learning process from start to finish. And even if that book is on audible and it's like an eight hour book. It's taking you through the whole process where free training ends up being piecemealed.

[00:29:13] You get a little bit here and a little bit there, and then it's up to you to piece it all together and figure it out. And a lot of the free training gives you the what, like what you need to do, but not how you need to do it. And that results in a ton of trial and error. So I just want you to remember that free is never free when you pay for training.

[00:29:41] Whether it is in a book, whether it is in a course, whether it is with a coach, whatever it happens to be, it will be a lot more cohesive. And you will learn quicker. And the way that AI is [00:30:00] evolving, you need to learn these skills quicker. If you have not mastered influencing, or if you have not mastered the systems and processes that, organically build culture and change management support you can't spend 10 years piecing that together because our industry's gonna change just in the next couple of years.

[00:30:21] Right. So great examples of this that I have seen with my clients and what I've seen in my life that I wanted to share about free versus paid. One is my learning ai. I was spending so much time on YouTube and reading blogs, and all of a sudden a friend of mine mentioned the free versus paid, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is what I am doing with ai.

[00:30:47] And then I immediately went to find a course, and the one I'm currently doing is through Vanderbilt University. But you can find courses out there and the [00:31:00] learning in that model is so much better because starts you off building one lesson after the other builds on the previous one, and you actually gain the skill instead of just having an idea of what it's about.

[00:31:15] I've also seen people do this with safety programs where I need a hazardous energy control program. So what do they do? They go to the internet, right? And they find a little bit of a program here. They watch a video over here.

[00:31:27] They read a blog post over here, and then they have to piece it all together. And for them to put that program together, likely is gonna take them a couple weeks. But if they just bought the program from a reputable source that maybe had an option with customer support or customizing it to their, company, like using a consultant, right?

[00:31:52] Buy it from the consultant that comes with hours to customize it to your company. You could have that program in days, right? That's [00:32:00] the difference between free versus paid. And to put this on a different note. I am obsessed with furniture refinishing videos.

[00:32:07] I just love them. I would love to learn how to refinish furniture, but I know I just don't have the time right now. But for me to learn how to do that from a YouTube video, it would take me forever. But if there was. A course or a person that would teach me the step by step that would outline, these are the chemicals that you need, and these are the steps and these are the things you need to look for.

[00:32:31] I would learn it very quickly and then I can start I don't know, getting furniture off the side of the road, refinishing it and reselling it and making it beautiful. But you see this everywhere in your life. So think about in your life right now. Where are you relying on free information? What is the result that you're wanting to get from it?

[00:32:50] And how quickly do you need to learn it? Is it gonna become obsolete? So maybe you're better off investing in yourself to learn that information? And [00:33:00] that was what I came out with ai when I started seeing like this could benefit my business, this could benefit my coaching. I'm gonna go invest in it and learn more about it.

[00:33:12] So hopefully you guys got a lot out of this today. I find it an extremely interesting topic, but it is an ever evolving topic. So I will likely do future updates as I learn more and as the industry is changing. I do know that there are some safety companies coming out with AI tools, so I do find that to be very exciting.

[00:33:37] But. I would love to know your thoughts, so head on over to the show notes. Leave me a comment, let me know. What do you think about ai? Are you scared about its impact on our profession, or are you excited about it? And what steps are you gonna take to protect your job in the future? All righty, my safety friends, [00:34:00] that is what I have for you for this week.

[00:34:01] I will chat with you again next week. Have a safe day. Bye for now.