Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam welcome to AI Today, the show where we explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the way that we live, we work and thrive. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Badot. And we're tackling a topic that every business leader, you know, can relate to. And it's risk.
You know, for, for many of us, you know, risk feels overwhelming.
You know, one wrong decision, of course, can derail everything.
One bad incident at a job site can, can really cause you to have, you know, some, some long term effects to your business.
And so we've brought on this week a guest that is an expert in this field. And so Joining me is Mr. Christopher Taney. He is the founder of Taney Insurance and Safety Solutions.
For more than a decade, Chris has been helping businesses move forward beyond traditional insurance sales to build safety risk management programs that really help protect people and it helps protect your profits. And so for the audience this week, you got to pay attention. You know, his work focuses on elevating conversations around risk compliance and, you know, employee benefits. And today he's here to share how AI is helping, you know, his team as well as other leaders that he's working with, you know, take control of the unknown, because that's what we're trying to do. Chris, I'm so glad you could be here. Welcome to the show.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Thank you for having me, Dr. Allen. I appreciate it.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: So, you know, Chris, as we, you know, look at risk and, you know, we look at the tools and the, and the, you know, the techniques that are out there, you know, why does it feel like it's really too big to manage, you know, on your own when you're trying to, when you're trying to go about these things.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Sure, I, you know, we, I can speak for, we have some clients that are smaller scale and those that are very large companies and, and every company has some area they need to improve and, and any of us, if we're looking to scale our, our team, you have to look at, do I need to invest the money in that person? Do I need them yet?
You know, risk is a really, a lot of folks are not even necessarily educated on the risks that they have at the organization because the bad thing just hasn't happened to them yet.
So, you know, usually people, we will get a lot of phone calls to work with us after a bad injury happens and then OSHA citation happens and then there's these regulatory items that have happened and we get the call and then those are clients we keep forever because once they figure out, oh, you have fixed this problem, but we Also uncovered, we didn't realize we weren't doing these trainings that were by law supposed to do by federal law. And they may not know, you know, large organizations may know the rules, may have really good regulatory staff in place, but they're short or they're missing a certain segment of their employee population or their new hires aren't appropriately being trained.
And then they're like, well, why are we having an increase in workers comp claims in the first six months of employment? Well, they're uneducated workers and we maybe haven't done a good enough job on the front end training them. And on the, in the same token, they might say, oh, you know, our 50 plus workforce is our most profitable workforce, our most educated. Been in the, been not to be ages, but you have been in the industry longer, you know, operate equipment, maybe better yet, some of those folks have been around so long that these new regulations and rules have come along and they maybe choose not to follow those, which can put the employer in hot water as well. So, you know, we have had clients across the board that need some support in some capacity of analyzing their risk and, and, and going forward.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so it sounds like there's thousands of different risk, you know, compliance issues, laws, new things that come out all the time, new regulations with the thousands of them, it sounds like that are out there. From an AI perspective, how do you think AI would be able to help, you know, business owners sort through some of those things?
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Well, it sure would help me find out what, what new ones come up that maybe we don't know about. Right. You know, every state has their own rules and regulations. You know, if, if we've got a client that starts performing operations in North Carolina or South Carolina or Nevada or wherever, there's a whole host of additional things that they have to do in that state. I think AI, you know, just being able to pull down data from the entire Internet just for research purposes for our team has been really important. So, you know, I probably fall in the category of the maybe let's call it like normal small business owner that is trying to figure out how best to harness this power and move forward. We're nimble enough where we can change with AI, but you know, obviously it is evolving all the time. But I think that just from a data standpoint, to protect our clients, finding out what new rules and regulations there are that we have to look out for on top of, you know, the federal government moves kind of slow with OSHA regulations. So, you know, you usually have Plenty of time that, you know, here's a proposed rule that's open for comment. And then it, it trickles. I think the state by state work that is a little bit harder to corral and that'll keep us, that keeps us, you know, in compliance. And, and one easy example for us is just language models, the language barrier.
You know, I don't employ Spanish speaking safety professional, but we have a lot of Hispanic population working on our job sites and we've been able to harness AI and different programs to create trainings that will translate in different languages. And I know for folks like you who are very technological and savvy, the general population out there building our country isn't.
And so we're bringing those things that have already been built. We're just using it. And so, you know, one of the biggest challenges I have to my team is use what's available to us today.
Because if we have all the AI on the planet, and if we don't, you know, study it, look into it and see how to best apply it, then we're wasting our money too, you know, on, on those services and products.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's good. And, you know, one of the things that you said, I think, you know, earlier is you talked about how oftentimes customers will, will come to you after the fact and you, you have to deal with the brunt of, oh, here's a, here's a new claim, here's a new incident, those kind of things, you know, that scares the, the stuffing out of most business owners. Right. And, you know, it's really hard to be proactive without that kind of, you know, knowledge and those kind of tools. And so as you're looking at, you know, the different AI technologies that are available and you know, even, you know, whether it's for yourself to help or whether it's for them, you know, what kind of a, you know, example could you share with our viewers around?
You know, here's an AI tool that could help you do a little bit of forecasting, whether it's safety stuff or, you know, things that will help it make a little bit more predictable.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: Yeah. For us, an example of company we use that is enhancing their AI model is Safety Culture.
It's an app that we use to create our inspections. So we are using technology and AI. So we create an app and we can create, we have the app, we didn't create the app, but we create a template for each client based on their work and their scope of their work and what with regularity, we're going to find in the field. So we go and do spot inspections for our clients. And the reason for that, you talked about proactive measures.
A client that hires us to run their safety program knows that they're going to get a up to date safety manual, policies and procedures. Then what is required to then train on those policies and procedures. Which means you have to go out in the field, talk to the employees, then you have to inspect regularly. Right. Because if you have that bad thing happen still, even after you hired us and we didn't do the proactive inspection, okay, the, the federal government or whoever, regulator or a legal team or whatever, they say, well, what did you do to try to help your people in the field? Yeah, you gave them a piece of paper. You had one training, but what did you do? So with our regular inspections, we are now able to harness that data and we can create AI immediately inside of that app will create for us a training based on what we found wrong that day.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: That's.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that's so we can then go immediately and say, hey guys, we had some timeout. We had, there's some bad stuff. We have stop work, give me 20 minutes. We need to have a quick refresher on trenching because if a trench falls in on you, you're dead.
It doesn't, there's no coming back from that. And then the back end of that is that employer then also too, their company might be dead depending on how financially aware they are and then how good is their insurance product. So cover them and then who's fighting on their behalf? Because most insurance companies, they don't make money by paying out claims. Right. They make money by keeping their money and keeping it, investing it and not having to pay it out. And so you know, the proactive measures and how we use that and how we're using AI within that, just even that one singular product pays huge dividends. Because I can't say that we have clients that still never get in trouble by osha, still never have an employee make a mistake, still never had it, have a bad injury. It still happens. But whenever we go to, you know, that informal conference negotiating fines and violations with the federal government and we can provide them with this list of all the proactive measures we took and all the things that are, that are, you know, if it's not documented, it didn't happen. Right. Well, when you can go in and create with your phone, your iPad or whatever device, and it'll gps, it'll give you the timestamp, it'll give you the Weather, it gives all these details. Well, that shows.
And it's all created by, I didn't build that. You know, someone else built that. But we're using it effectively in the field and that's what's proactively helping our clients. Because we know something bad might happen. We're trying to mitigate the problems in the event if and when something very negative does happen.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And that's, that's great. And you know, for everybody watching, stick around. We'll be right back. You know, up next we're going to look at why safety so often, you know, gets attention only after an incident. And we, we just started to touch on the topic and we're really gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna see how AI is, is flipping that narrative. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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So I'm here with Mr. Christopher Tawny and you know, in this segment, we're going to dig into why safety often doesn't get the attention that it deserves. You know, usually until something goes wrong and then everybody focuses on it. And for a lot of companies, safety still feels like it's an afterthought. And unfortunately it takes a serious incident to, you know, change things and then it gets real, as we always say. Right. And so, you know, Chris, thank you again for, for being here. And we want to look at really some, you know, why is it that we have a mindset that it's not going to happen to us and so we're, we're not going to put the resources in that we need to. And then all of a sudden you've got to flux and surge everything that you can in order to, you know, to, to, to help after the fact. So what sort of, you know, advice do you have to some companies so that they don't do that?
[00:14:03] Speaker B: Sure. Clay Medley, my president of Safety Services, he says we are all inherently lazy and we are all inherently, we have optimism bias. So you said you don't think it's going to happen to me? We're not looking around Saying, oh, when's the next thing going to come and hit me? We generally think, like, I'll be all right, like, we're okay, you know. And then when you get into higher risk industries, you deal with a lot of people that have been doing really dangerous stuff for a long time.
And, you know, it's. They still haven't gotten hurt. Like, yeah, a couple people got hurt here and there, but stuff happens. And, and so, you know, safety as an afterthought. You know, we're really, we've kind of. We haven't created the safety industry, but safety kind of became a title more so than work involved. And what happened was, you know, a lot of large companies, you know, when I first started the business, I started in 2007, you know, selling insurance and, you know, is net world came out. It's called is Net World and large. And you know, now it's ice in and everybody's bought and sold all these tech companies. But. But that was the first time that we heard of someone who had to upload their safety safety manual online in order to work for Exxon or Shell or any of these huge companies. They started managing their contractors, you know, with this. Well, they've got rooms full of attorneys, right? The tons of risk management professionals. And they say, hey, let's start making folks sign these, you know, contracts that they're going to do, you know, all OSHA violations and they're going to do all the OSHA required training, plus they're going to do our training. They're going to have our employee, you know, they're going to follow our required specs in order to work for us. That's kind of how my first touch point was we had a couple contractor clients on the insurance side that needed this work.
And, and what happened from that is you had to designate a safety director.
You just had. But so I could say, Dr. Allen is my safety director. And that's fine because I just had to designate a person as my safety director. Didn't necessarily require college education, not that it should. You can learn a lot of these things didn't require a master's degree.
So what happened was we had a lot of folks with the title and rewind the clock. I was, you know, 2005, 2007, you know, 20 more years have passed. And what has happened is even though there's a title, well, a title doesn't mean. Is no better than the words that are put together. And so bad things still did happen. Legal action still happened. People lost contract. You, if you've got 20 million of work with year with Exxon and all sudden they say you're out.
That wakes you up and, and maybe someone didn't get hurt, but you lost business.
And so that's. That evolution has came to have the need of this expertise. You know, if another, another thing will say is like if you, if you're a suspect in the murder trial, you're not going to hire a tax lawyer. You know, you're going to hire someone that does this stuff every day, that does it at a very high level because it's really important.
And the industry, especially those in high hazards, they're usually owned by folks that are comfortable with the hazards. They're, and they're like, you know, it's what we do, we do roofing and it's, it's, it's difficult work.
And so opening the eyes to folks ahead of time has been a little bit more difficult. But mostly I think there's been a lack of resources available. Companies like mine available to provide the resource. You know, if you need your car fixed, there's a lot of places to go take your car, right? And there's a process procedure. When you buy the car, they say, hey, here's where you go. But this really puts the onus on a business owner that may be an expert in roofing or, or gas drilling or, you know, whatever they're, they're doing it's, it's, or you know, excavation.
But maybe they're a very successful business owner, but they were just an expert really in their field and their eyes were up to this. So, you know, I think that's why it's been on the back burner. And the other bad thing is because those contractual requirements, everybody's websites are full of safety, right? Every contractor's got a big safety tab on their website. We are the safest company of all time. And we, and we find in reality that's not really true. And, but they have to put that on there or else they're not going to get hired type of thing. That's a mentality.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: So, yeah, and one of the things is, I was researching a lot of the things that you all are looking at. You guys seem to be ahead of the game when it comes to looking at technologies and trying to apply different sorts of technologies, you know, to the safety industry. And you know, that correlates to a lot of the other things that you're doing. So from an AI perspective, you know, looking at, you know, combining it with sensors or combining it with other wearable devices or even some of the, you know, the, the translation, you know, services that you guys are working with. You know, how do those sort of things help you spot risks before those sort of things happen? Which is, you know, as part of your preventative spot checks and site checks that you guys are doing. How does that help?
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Oh, gosh, it's, it's a. Now, I can't say that we're doing it to the level we want to because these things are still coming together. Right? But you know, for example, wearable, you know, gas monitors, you know, if you're digging holes, you want to know if there's hydrogen sulfide coming out.
And, you know, you, you already have that wearable.
We haven't got to the point where we are harnessing that data on Internet.
It's, it's still on the device, you know, at that specific spot. So that's important. Gps, it's simple. But GPS coordinates on all your vehicles.
We have a whole lot. Clients have a whole lot of vehicles.
They're just starting to measure, you know, even the app I talked about earlier, safety culture, they're, they're starting to do fleet and you can tie their app into your GPS app and it starts to aggregate that data along with your safety data so you can see where all your vehicles are. How long are they idling, you know, are they being ran too long? Then that trickles down to fuel economy. And you know, if you've got a hundred pickup trucks idling an extra hour a day, that adds up pretty quickly. And then me being a business man, I'm telling my team we need to harness that data and then we need to talk to our clients about it because then we're always justifying the money that we make to our clients, right? We come at a cost.
And there may be someone out there that, that's like, hey, I don't know what you did for me last year. And then I pull up our, pull up all of our stuff. Like, oh, I really didn't really realize that, you know, our, our CFO didn't tell me all that, you know, so, you know, it's not to, to combat anything. But I've always told my, my, my team we have to document everything we're doing in one area or in two areas so that I can quickly and easily access that information to help me talk to their.
And really, if we could put, if you think about wearables being used now, also you look at like monitors in manufacturing facility wearables as well as posted up, because we Want to monitor noise that's required.
You could have moisture sensors in the air, like in a, in a, in a, excuse me, in a sawmill environment, measuring combustible dust or the accumulation of combustible dust, which is a direct OSHA issue.
I can guarantee you the, the, the worst ran sawmill owner really would have wished he invested three or four or $5,000 other than a sawmill burning down.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: And, you know, thermography, that's important in the, in the natural resources and, you know, in the wood and wood sciences industry remains. Where is the hot, where's the heat? How are we managing heat so things don't combust near these motors, you know, near this electrical panel, you know, lockout tag out. You know, if you could have a sensor on every time the lockout tag out box is opened, that's probably a good thing to have because that should be open for a good reason. And then we should shut down. Right? There should be something that got shut down after that.
I look forward to how, like, these are our goals now as we're coming out. So you said, I told you, we're in our infancy. We're using what is easily used. But these are all things I'd love to be able to harness. And it's really hard for, if you own a business to tell your safety director, hey, go figure all this out.
Like, give me a report back. Well, the first thing on the report is going to be, well, yeah, it's cool. We have to spend another $83,000 because we have to buy this, buy this, buy this. And then they're going to look at their guy and say, well, are you going to manage all that? And he's like, yeah, well, next thing, you got to hire me two or three more people and then we can do it. And like, wait a minute. We all know the cost of people, and we're trying to minimize the cost of people by harnessing this technology that's available and do more with less.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's. That's really, that's really the important part of anything. Right. Because safety is, you know, it's like many other parts of other businesses that it's probably one of the first areas that gets cut from a funding perspective, because, you know, let's save a little bit of money and we'll get rid of the, a couple of the safety guys. We don't need all those safety guys. Right. We haven't had an incident in a while and then starts to. Stuff starts to happen. So, Chris, you know, if Viewers want to, you know, get a hold of you and learn about you and how you're helping other businesses, especially around using AI. What's the easiest way they can find you?
[00:23:49] Speaker B: The easy way to Find Me is LinkedIn to see what we're doing. We're pretty active on there, you know, with our videos. So find me on LinkedIn. Chris Tawny, Chris with a K K R I S and via email, Chris krasnyinsurers.com T A W N E Y I N S U r e s dot.com and, and you know, we, we do a whole lot of different setups for companies and our flexibility, I think, is what really kind of has set us apart. We, we've got a lot of smart people in our team, but we're not so big that we, you know, can't move along with the changing winds of business, which is what's exciting about AI and the work that we're doing with you too, and trying to create, we're trying to create more connectivity.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I want our audience to stick around because coming up, you know, we're, we're going to explore why risk management feels so darn complicated and, you know, how AI is the one thing that's going to really be able to make it more simpler for all of us. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
SA again with Chris Tawney.
And now we're tackling something leaders constantly struggle with is complexity.
You know, risk management can feel like you are drowning in paperwork and it doesn't seem like you can ever get ahead of it. And, you know, you're trying to find real solutions and it's so hard because you don't have enough people and you get very quickly, you can feel overwhelmed by, you know, everything that's taking place. And so, Chris, I want you to explain to our viewers, you know, how AI can really simplify the, you know, the risk management process, the governance, all those things by automating, you know, some of those tasks and really helping sort out some of those priorities.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: Sure. You know, AI and even just using tech that available prior to AI that now will connect to an AI service.
You know, you have to find, I think, the most repetitive tasks that, that can be easily, you know, just used by AI. And I think what we've, we started to do too, in our firm is give more employees within our clients access to what we're doing and training them on how to use it.
So what we're doing now as example, we do regular site visits on construction sites for, for our construction clients or, or manufacturing clients.
We are going to start giving shorter templates of questions and answers that need to be filled out and backed up with a photo every day.
And as we have discussed, there are AI services that can tell you what's wrong in a photo.
Right? And you know, you can, you can take a photo of something and, and it say, hey, you know, this machine doesn't appear to be guarded, you know, or this doesn't, this fire. I see a fire extinguisher, you know, have you checked your fire extinguishers? You know, we want to create it where it'll ask leading questions, you know, leading indicators of bad things happening. Right? So, so we want to, I want to start to harness that for our clients. How can people do on their own in safety? I think it depends on the people that are driving it. I really have to have a forward thinking safety director or, or staffing.
I think that's where a company like ours really comes into play. We're able to work with your existing team to try to implement these strategies because the odds are you're not overstaffed in safety.
So your people are already spread out pretty thin. If they're not spread pretty thin, they're probably not working hard enough for you. Because our experience is there's a lot of work to be done out there. So you know, for AI and I think these tools are going to continue to be important. I mean there are already tools within our, our contractors, tools that, that they use today, you know, with their software. You know, every software just about now has an AI component. Microsoft, QuickBooks, you know, whatever they're using.
So I think harnessing, trying to help harness what they already have.
And then you know, the, the services that we offer, we're kind of harnessing on their behalf what's available and then us training them how to use it to their most, to their benefit. I think it's the best model for us at this time with our clients because like you said, AI, a whole lot of folks right now are like, what is this AI thing? Why should I even be worried about it?
And the end game is it is going to disrupt, I believe for the.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: Better.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: Most segments of the, the workforce.
You know, I think it was Mr. Farley, CEO Ford that said AI will replace 50% of white collar workers at some point.
White collar workers are generally doing very repetitive tasks, although they are some high end tasks. They're generally done on a computer. Right. With some of the Same text and the same check boxes and the same, you know, you know, whatever their metrics are.
I, I think it's, I think it's increasingly important and that's why it's at the core of all the decisions that we're making with what we put out there. What can we track, what part of it can be done and automated without a risk at this point.
And I think in the insurance industry especially, you know, we are not going to build our insurance piece the same way people have built their books of business for the last 100 years. It can't be done that way.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: Right, right. And now what? Let's, you know, let's, let's not kid ourselves because we know insurance companies are using these AI tools, right. And so, you know, are you seeing or have your clients started to see, you know, insurance companies maybe push back based on them looking at or using AI to predict, you know, some safety risks that a company has had in the past where it used to be too hard for a human to dig through all that data, now AI can easily dig through that data. And so is that, is that starting to drive premiums? Is that starting to, are they starting to feel the pinch that insurance companies are starting to raise, you know, rates or even, you know, not even provide that for, for some of their customers now?
[00:30:51] Speaker B: I think they're probably, I don't think my clients are seeing it and I don't think that our prospects are seeing it. I think it's being done when they get a non renewal. Right. Because the process is generally you're just going to get a non renewal letter.
One of the major issues and the single biggest issue that AI is going to solve and this is there'll be a whole lot of insurance people not happy to hear this is killing the insurance broker. Like that part, the human part of the broker is to be a salesman, right. And is to sell the product of the insurance company to the client. So everyone's to say, hey, we're client first, we're client first, we're client first. And the philosophy is to say that, but really your client is the insurance company. You have metrics you have to meet on loss history and loss ratio. You have premium requirements that you have to meet. So like my agency, our philosophy is we don't do direct contracts if they have a premium requirement. Because you know why that then is going to incentivize me to push a certain insurance company over another.
And I believe that the broker is probably, it's has been the insurance company's Best friend forever. And I think it's their worst enemy now because that broker is now in between every decision you make with that insured. Right. And we all know Travelers, Hartford, Zurich, these huge companies have massive books of business. They can't effectively, you know, in the next five years say, hey, we're going to cut the broker out and still keep that business. The broker still has some control, they have a relationship, they have an understanding of that. Unfortunately though, in our industry that's all you've had to have to have success is know the guy, know the lady that owns the business. And, and they're like, yeah, we'll buy from Bob, that's cool. So what we're doing now is raising the bar on what should be expected from the broker.
Right. So we look at it as a full, full client first model where I'm, what I just told you, you know, probably will be on the Internet. Right. For my clients to see.
We're not, we're not, we don't play into that incentivization to build up a book of business with a particular insurance carrier. And it's helping our business because we're one of the few having this conversation.
And, but what you have to look at in the insurance industry and your, your question originally was are the, are, are our clients feeling the pinch from AI?
There has been so much merger and acquisition activity in the insurance world in the last 10 years, that large, you know, PE backed insurance agencies have continued to just gobble up.
Yeah, right, yes. There's like, you know, Alliant Assured Partners, USI Access, there's all these huge brokerages that have, through acquisition, you know, made themselves bigger. Okay. But they're all still separate little companies underneath the big umbrella. Okay. They are going to start doing the weeding out themselves because those companies are now just as big as the insurance companies whose product they sell. So I do think it will get there.
Everyone that is in the insurance industry knows our average age in the sales force is in the mid to upper 50s. It's just, you know, demographic data and there's not people coming up under it, you know, to take those roles. And I believe if I'm the top, you know, traditional brokerage outfit, I'm looking for ways to, you know, cut the bottom percentage of my sales team so that we make more revenue, invest it back in AI. And, and you know, and, and the insurance companies are going to do the same thing. Like you said, the insurance companies, they already have satellite data and weather data and they already have all these data Points, so it's going to trickle down. The. I, you know, when I first started in business, 2007, you know, scanning and emailing a PDF was like a thing.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: Like it was a new thing, you know, and I'm 40 years old, I'll be 41 at the end of the week. But I've been in this business nearly 20 years and we're still like the young kids, you know, so that, that's empowering to us. And, and I, you know, I, I'm trying to look 20 years down the road, but there's going to be a huge segment of the insurance sales population that are not going to be existent in another 10 years.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, and I think just real quick because we're going to have to go to break here in a second. But you know, if, if, if you were giving advice to somebody starting, you know, a business like yours, you know, what would you, what advice would you give them about AI? Where to start, you know, how do they maintain oversight, Those things?
[00:35:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean the first thing I would say is try to take, try to take the most the things you have to read out. Reading takes time, it takes, it makes you make mistakes. You may not comprehend what you read or not recall what you read. So comparing policy documents as an example, try to find a service that, there are a number of services that do that, that'll compare documents, you know, PDF documents, word documents and highlight the differences. Because most insurance policies have a, you know, a kind of a form set they go through. You know, when you, you read your homeowners, it's read the same for a long time.
You know, workers compensation, I think you take advantage of, of, you know, Scorm and AI for your marketing.
You know, now, you know, now they're saying if you don't have a YouTube channel, so you don't, and you don't have a lot of words out there and then you're, you know, that's all coming in it because AI is pulling from the Internet. So you've got to have that. I think that, you know, I've always said this, today's 20 year olds are, you know, in 20 years or 40, another 20 or 60. And so, you know, if the buyer today, it's 35 years of age, you know, that buyer is going to be around a while and that buyer is going to adjust over time. So I, I try everything I can to say, okay, how can I be more efficient? How can the data be more readily available? How can everything your client want. I would try to do everything that my client wants, have it at their fingertips so they can get it. I think there's been a segment or a fear of like, well, if they can get at their fingertips, they're going to cut me out. They're not going to cut you out if they value your advice.
[00:37:00] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: And, and you also giving them access to information just strengthens you. That, that is a, that is insecurity. And I used to have that myself. Like, you know, until we got really to where we have been in the last four or five years. You know, I had that same insecurity. Like, you almost don't want to give your clients all the data in the event that they take it and use it to fire you and got to accept it that these are out there.
You're better off knowing what's around the corner or knowing what the questions they're asking than just being completely in the dark. So, you know, I think just, I would just do research on what's available and it all comes up on the Internet.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's a great segment actually into the next, into the next part of the show. So I want to tell the audience, stick around, we'll be right back. Because up next we're going to look at some of the hidden costs around accidents and how AI is saving businesses from, you know, those surprises that they never saw coming. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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So in our final segment, we're talking about things that businesses are, you know, they always fear it's everybody's worst nightmare. It's, it's going to be the costs of an incident or an accident that takes place.
And, you know, beyond the obvious damage, you know, accidents drain resources, they hurt morale, they derail progress, they slow things down. And it's really, you know, it's, it's like I said, it's everybody's worst nightmare. And so AI though, is giving companies, you know, the tools that they can predict and oftentimes prevent these costly mistakes. Now, granted, you can't prevent all of them, but you can prevent some of them. And so, you know, Chris, from, you know, a hidden cost of accidents perspective and in businesses that they don't think about and stuff, you know, how is AI or how can AI help with that?
[00:40:16] Speaker B: Just for us, it's overall data. So, so we're looking at, you know, we look a lot at leading indicators and lagging indicators of, of, you know, from an incident or leading up to an incident or post incident.
Most of the insurance world is on a lagging indicator system. You know, they look at what claims you've had in the last five years, you know, and what were the costs of those, and that's how they determine your cost going forward. Right. Well, that, that is a really bad way to do business. I'd rather try to control that on the front end and limit the costs of those instance. So when you're looking at insurance companies as an example, and that's where our expertise comes from, because that's the money. These guys are spending a ton of money on these products.
When we look at eliminating the claim to begin with or minimizing and knowing how the claim system works, we can control the cost of that claim. A work comp claim is a prime example. Someone gets injured, they can't come to work and they go to the doctor and they just tell the employer, hey, yeah, I went to the doctor. And the employer's like, okay, well what'd they say? And they said, well, they said, I gotta come back in three weeks.
So now that person's off claims for three weeks. And we didn't really know that. Well, you know, insurance companies have, you know, a system where you can log in and look at all that. You know, the insurance company knows what's going on, right.
But they've gotten overloaded too, and they've shrunk their snaf down. And, and so, you know, it's really on employers to educate themselves because if you're not the squeaky wheel and you don't take some control of these things yourself, you're, you're going to have, your costs are just going to go up. And the insurance companies never lose. Right. So your claims are worse than. They increase your premium even more on the back end. Right. Or cancel you altogether. And so when we're looking at how to prevent claims from happening, turnover is a leading indicator of whether your risk. Right.
Leadership that's inexperienced. So, you know, we have talked to our clients, we've got six crews that don't really have a good leader, have that discussion. So it's still a lot of soft skills. Like you were an athlete. Right. You know, if you didn't have a good coach, you weren't gonna reach your potential.
So, you know, we've looked at all these little things and, and then we start looking at the data from our crews who will stay together a long time. And, you know, the AI can help us pull, you know, pull the, the data and generate reports and see where, you know, what regionally, where were we, you know, you know, when the weather was worse, you know, did we have poor performance, you know, early in the morning, later in the day, if they added a Friday, like we're reproductive and we can tie into the, to their other production systems.
Back to asset tracking. How long has that machine been running? You know, since the last time it was, it was checked. You know, you'll have a lot of people, if they don't own the equipment, they're not really concerned about servicing it. Right, right. So you overrun a piece of equipment, it breaks. That creates an injury.
Right. So we can use AI and we can use tracking to, to see where our equipment is, you know, how much and where is it idle, you know, is equipment idle and, and, or, you know, meaning not being used idle, you know, do you have a lot of equipment not used in this, this segment, but you're behind on this job over here, you know, so if we're even tracking equipment, you know, we can start to track other business expenses that will make them be okay with investing more in safety and, you know, and in some of these things before an incident happens. So, you know, leadership turnover, you know, the HR type things, we're taking all that into account too, with our team. So we're tracking, you know, we're tracking employee rosters, you know, we're tracking, you know, simple things like getting cell phone numbers so you can text them.
They're all looking at their phone at some point throughout the day. It's, it's happening.
So it's, you know, AI is, is a huge, I don't think it's gotten to us yet, you know, larger companies sitting on the perch. And I don't mean in my industry, you know, banks obviously know, insurance companies know, you know, major CPA firms are figuring out how to do this. IBM, Apple, all these big companies. But I think it's coming down. It's going to trickle, you know.
[00:44:28] Speaker A: Right.
Yeah. And one of the, one of the interesting things is if you look at you know, some of the worst, you know, construction events that have, that have taken place over the last 50 years.
Oftentimes it boils down to human error.
You know, oh, we didn't, you know, attach something the right way or you've got a giant crane lift that is supposed to take place today and nobody bothered to check the weather, for example, that it's a high wind day. Right. And so, and then, you know, bad things happen from, you know, from there on it seems like. And so, you know, from a ease of access, from a, you know, a reliability perspective, you know, how can AI help to prevent some of those just, you know, simple things that often get overlooked because like you've said, they're experts, they've been doing it a long time. And so, you know, how can, how can it help warn them that, you know, there are high risk conditions and don't do it? What do you, what do you see that technology and how that, how that will play with, you know, field type, you know, activities.
[00:45:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I. So here's things that are on our mind. We want to get in with our clients and their architects, like when the, on the planning stage, you know, how long is this project going to be? And you know, generally you build a building in the same way, right? You got dirt, you move the dirt, you put in, you put in the water, you put in the storm drain, you know, then you set footers, then you start putting up block walls, you know, and then electrical. It all kind of works in the same. You know, when you're set in steel, that's when your crane comes in. You know, you have all these things.
So I believe that, that the future will be and what we're trying to.
We're in an industry, we work a lot of industries that don't like to plan to begin with. They don't plan very well anyway, regardless of AI. I think by being able to upload all these plans, actions, whatever on the front end into an AI model, it'll say like, if you start a project today, well, maybe that means steel work starts on January 10th, I don't know.
So it's going to alert you, like, hey, it looks like you're going to be starting steel this week.
It's going to be two degrees.
[00:46:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: If you address that. Or did your product get delivered? You know, we have a lot of delays. I mean, Covid hit. Right. And, and the delays in just shipments and shipping and product getting, getting. You know, we had projects delayed by a month waiting on door frames.
[00:47:04] Speaker A: Right.
[00:47:04] Speaker B: Only lay block up to the door frame. And then, you know, but all these things, they then hurt morale because guess what happens to the contractor if you can't lay any more block? They lay those guys off for a few weeks. Well, they just lost three or four people.
They've got to now spend a bunch of money to rehire them. Now their risk goes up. Well, why'd that go up? Probably project planning and that in that the masonry example would be someone who's working on a, a job as a subcontractor. They're not running the job.
Right. So how do we help defend them and prepare them to move those folks to another project if that's coming and plan ahead of time. They plan, try to plan on their own. But, but usually like you said that, that catastrophic event, four or five small things went wrong in secession to create that catastrophic event. It wasn't just that it snowed that day. That's right.
We had a young or a new leader in the field. Sometimes there's leaders that come from that have a lot of experience, just not in particular field, like you know, to know what questions to ask. So you had someone that wasn't trained, you gave them a newbie employee that week when that was probably not the right week to give them a newbie.
There's a lot of different things that happen in succession to create a catastrophic event. Usually four or five things have to happen.
[00:48:23] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. And so you know, Chris, I, I, I hate to cut the discussion off because I know we could talk about this for another four or five shows, but you know, I think this has been incredibly valuable to the viewers out there. And so again, where can, where can people follow your, your work and you know, really continue the conversation on their own?
[00:48:44] Speaker B: Yeah, the easiest place to find us is on LinkedIn. So Chris with a K K R A S Tawny T A W N e y on LinkedIn.
Tawny, in terms of safety solutions, we're really active with our post by the easiest way to find me, obviously my email, my contact information is on my LinkedIn profile.
And you know, we, we do a lot of work in a lot of different arenas. So it just, just depends on, on what the questions are.
[00:49:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, and that's, that's great. And you know, Chris, again, you know, thank you for joining us. You know, today on AI today I think your insights into risk and safety and AI and you really leading the charge to bring all of those together is a powerful way to really reframe those challenges that we feel oftentimes are just overwhelming. And so rethinking your approach, rethinking how to prevent accidents and even changing the conversation dynamics, I think is huge. And it's really about empowering leaders to make smarter and safer decisions. And so, you know, to our viewers, remember, risk doesn't have to control you. It doesn't matter what industry you're in. You know, you can control risk, plan, pay attention, pick the right tools, and you can take control of it. And so, you know, I hope everybody got that message from this show. And until next time, you know, I'm Dr. Alan Badot. This is AI Today. And we are going to continue to explore the future and how AI is reshaping all of us. So stay, you know, we'll see you next week. And, you know, stay looking at new technologies.
