The Negative Impact of AI on Workplace Safety Training

00:00:03 Rob Day
This episode of the Energy Pipeline is sponsored by Caterpillar Oil and gas. Since the 1930s, Caterpillar has manufactured engines for drilling, production, well service and gas compression. With more than 2100 dealer locations worldwide, Caterpillar offers customers a dedicated support team to assist with their premier power solutions. Welcome to the Energy Pipeline Podcast with your host, Russell Stewart. Tune in each week to learn more about industry issues, tools and resources to streamline and modernize the future of the industry. Whether you work in oil and gas or bring a unique perspective, this podcast is your knowledge transfer hub. Welcome to the Energy Pipeline. 

00:00:52 Russell Stewart
Hey everybody. As always, thanks for listening. If you will be listening to this, it will be during the dog days of summer. Most everybody knows that that can be pretty tough here in Houston, Texas. So I'm actually, well, I was going to say glad maybe I'm a little envious or whatever to introduce my guest today, because my guest today is Rob Day, and Rob is the managing director for a company called Cognizance360, which we'll talk about here in just a minute. Rob, thanks for coming on the show. 

00:01:22 Rob Day
Not a problem. Thank you for having me. 

00:01:24 Russell Stewart
Well, now, the reason I said I was envious, we were talking offline before we hit the record button. And Rob, you're, you're actually in Vancouver, British Columbia, is that right? 

00:01:34 Rob Day
Correct. 

00:01:35 Russell Stewart
Not quite the brutal, quite the brutal summers there that we have down here in Houston. 

00:01:40 Rob Day
Not, not at all. You get a warm day, but I think our warm day is what you would want this time of year. 

00:01:45 Russell Stewart
So I'm curious, those who have listened to the podcast over the last. It's been nine years now. I can't believe it's been that long. But I have guests from Canada on from time to time. And of course I always have to tell them that when I was a teenager, I actually lived in Western Canada. You're in, you're in the pretty part of Western Canada. And I lived in the. What might be considered not so pretty unless you're a grain farmer. But I lived, I lived in the plains of Western Canada. I lived in a town called Lloyd Minster. Lloydminster is a border town. Half of it's in Alberta, half of it's in Saskatchewan. I lived in the, on the Alberta side. But the winters there were brutal. The first winter we were there, they actually, there was one week where the high temperature for the week was 25 below. Are they that bad in Vancouver? 

00:02:37 Rob Day
No, Vancouver is like, is the mild area, but as you go west, it gets a lot cooler as and minus 25 in the coldest parts of winter. Obviously it's not unheard of. 

00:02:49 Russell Stewart
No, no, absolutely not. And that doesn't take into account windchill factor. 

00:02:54 Rob Day
I've. I've actually convinced people that as far as it gets so cold in like Alberta where Lloyd Minster. As far as it gets so cold there, sometimes the smoke freezes as it's coming out of the chimneys and you have to go on the roof and chip away the smoke. And I've had numerous people believe that. 

00:03:07 Russell Stewart
Well that's not, that's not quite. I tell you what is true. The smoke coming out of your tailpipe, if you're parked and there's snow underneath, it will melt the snow and freeze just as fast as it melts. And that's a fact. I know that because I walked around the back of the car one day and slipped on the ice and cracked my tailbone. So which is, which is a good segue for what I, you know, obviously I wasn't being very safe. Rob, tell me about Cognizance360. 

00:03:36 Rob Day
Sure. As far as Cognizant360 is something that actually myself and a couple other people started actually not within the last 12 months here. I mean it's mainly the. 

00:03:45 Russell Stewart
Wow, I didn't realize. So you're startup company? 

00:03:48 Rob Day
Yes. 

00:03:48 Russell Stewart
Well, great. 

00:03:49 Rob Day
And the main thing is I'm at the tail end of my, my career is the best way to put it there. So I've done, I was a, you know, health and safety professional and working in refineries, worked oil and gas construction, both Canada, the States to Europe, even China and typing. So I did a lot of that through that work with you know, employers and standard setting bodies and you know, regulators. As far as. I had a very interesting career and so my last company actually we were involved with actually technologies that actually could help out and work with online assessments, work monitoring that. And at this point in time, as far as my. The goal of Cognizance is to create awareness and we're actually helping organizations just understand how to address the technical needs of doing training and online assessments. Why sorry? Doing online assessments and training. You know, in a world where there's, you know, as far as there's AI now and there's a lot of new, new threats. 

00:04:43 Russell Stewart
Well, you said the magic word there. Everybody wants, wants to talk about AI and so I was actually introduced to you from your PR firm which I think is called Crestview Strategy. So a little shameless advertising for, for Crestview there. I appreciate them introducing you to me. And what I was introduced to was actually an article that you posted on LinkedIn and it was entitled Online Safety Training in the Age of AI is Fall is Failing Workers and Fueling Risk. So let's talk about that. What do you, what do you mean? 

00:05:17 Rob Day
Sure. As mentioned and you know my background and I think a lot of your audience as far as I have working in industry where managing risk is probably the one of the biggest components to succeeding as far as to be able to succeeding both from a health and safety point of view, but also from a financial point of view as far as you can't have jobs that are actually not on time on, you know, on budget like that can be done without having regulatory problems or legal issues. But probably the biggest one is obviously without people getting hurt. And you know, as far as in order to do that there we have the hierarchy of controls. We have, sorry, you know, engineering, administrative and ppe. And the administrative is in a lot for a lot of organization training. And when you put in engineering controls, what do those require? Training. And when you wear ppe, what are those require? Training. So you can see as far as training actually permeates all aspects of risk mitigation in all these organizations and in the past as like I'm old enough to know that as far as when I started all my training was in person. I would look at an instructor, they'd make sure it was me to make sure I was awake and present and that I, I was, you know, doing what I needed to do. 

00:06:22 Russell Stewart
That you had your PPE on and. 

00:06:23 Rob Day
That sort of thing 100% and. And now it's far as when it's done online type of thing. You don't know, you can't. Well even the definition of training is unknown as far as like, is it training if you don't know that the person is there or that they participated in like, what is the cutoff for me issuing a certificate to you, Russell, as far as like, you know, if you pay me, is that enough? You know, it's like there's been jurisdictions have been where the employers and training organizations have in charge saying no, that's not enough. You need to be able to show that Russell went through and completed the training, that it is Russell that he did it and that was a something we everyone moved online, saved a lot of money very quickly. But the advent of AI actually just changed the world completely. 

00:07:04 Russell Stewart
So okay, so we're talking about. Actually when I read your article I said, well, I can't wait to get this guy on the on the show to ask him about what he thinks the real solution to this is because of the advent of so much online training. And I'm thinking this guy must really be against online training. Then I looked up your website. That's what you guys do, right? 

00:07:24 Rob Day
We don't do online training, but we do help organizations, safety councils, private organizations, multinational companies, as far as trying to figure out how to do online training so that it is compliant with. 

00:07:35 Russell Stewart
Okay, so it is. So that actually works and so compliant and that it's actually really happening, huh? 

00:07:41 Rob Day
100%. So. And let you. I'll take you back. As far as I was working, I was on retainer by a law firm helping out in a fatality situation. And. And as often you need to do is you look at other court cases. And as part of that research, I was a research one where there was three. Well, they were offloading hydrocarbons at a. At a facility. Sorry, they were loading hydrocarbons at a facility. And they were all supposed to have taken training on how to do it appropriately. And the training was done online. The unloading, the loading of these hydrocarbon was done improperly. And there was an explosion and two people, two of the guys were burned over the majority of their body. Yeah, you can imagine the employer in this case got charged. They ended up in court trying to defend themselves as part of their due diligence. They said. And here's the training that they did. And here brought the supervisor on the stand. And the supervisor on the stand admitted that he actually not only did his training, but he did the training of the other members of his crew, you know, again after the fact. 

00:08:35 Russell Stewart
So he took the online course for them. 

00:08:37 Rob Day
So the two guys that were burned never took the training at all. 

00:08:40 Russell Stewart
Oh my goodness. 

00:08:41 Rob Day
And you could see as far as. And they were missing critical knowledge. And as you know, when you're filling a tanker, as far as when the hydrocarbons come in, the liquids come in is displacing gases that are in there, which are usually like 100%, you know, l type of thing, not to mention toxic capabilities. And so as that's coming in, it's venting. And if that's not going out through a scrubber or anything else that can cause a plume and is basis for ignition. And that's what ended up happening. So then obviously the judge threw out in like any value as far as training had there. So it's. It lost its value from a regulatory point of view, from a legal due diligence point of view. But the biggest One, it lost its value as far as making sure those workers had the knowledge they needed to keep themselves safe. 

00:09:24 Russell Stewart
Wow. So do you think that's very common or. 

00:09:27 Rob Day
Oh, is it? I. Extremely common. Look, we often are what we do for organizations, help them design processes and help them test them. So if we were talking like OSHA 10, OSHA 30, would it surprise you that. And this is, this is not picking any one organization that does it as far as that it, you know that OSHA 10 was given to a dog in as far as. And so we have a dog that actually has gone through and has, has multiple OSHA courses. And you say okay, how is that possible? But the reality is as far as there is no requirement to actually confirm, you know, that the person, you know, that a person is first of all a person little less actually participating in the new world. And when a lot of these things went online, they did the best they can. But the problem is the world's changing rapidly. 

00:10:14 Russell Stewart
Wow. So cognizance exists to mitigate all this. 

00:10:19 Rob Day
We help organizations understand the threats. So when I talk about like O and having that going to a dog or fall protection and this and the dog, we have this thing, Phoebe type of thing. And Phoebe has over 200 courses, nuclear gauges, forklift. She's, she's gotten demerits off her driver's license, you know, into them, which she doesn't obviously have. You name it, she's gone through. And that, that's using older technology. That was the risk was Phoebe just the, the, the lack of the ability for most, for most systems out there to verify the identity and the participation of an individual. But now with AI, as far as it's changed. I was in a conference in the UK and was asked to do a presentation and I did 10 hours worth of assessments. This is high stakes assessments, bar exams, CPA exams. This was all on the exam side. And I did 10 hours worth of assessments on stage using a AI plugin that would automatically just complete any multiple choice exam quicker than the human eye could actually see. So it took me 45 seconds and oh, by the way, in three different languages, English, French and Spanish. 

00:11:20 Russell Stewart
Wow. 

00:11:21 Rob Day
Yeah. That's to say that Russell just, you know, and that in the world of AI you think it's like, oh wow, that's like, that's a big. But we go a couple months beyond and one of the things that we're. We actually finished in the last set 30 days was the newer versions of AI agents. That's right. And so you can imagine as Far as you going into your, you know, your AI tool with chat GPT or something like that and I'm not going to go into by purposely I'm not going to explain how to do these things. You can imagine. I don't want to make the problem worse by telling people exactly right. 

00:11:54 Russell Stewart
But I see what you're saying. So people if so here I am, you know and I gotta complete all these safety training courses. I'm in the refinery or I'm in the plant or I'm on the rig or whatever and so I can figure out how to just plug that into AI and it gives me everything and. 

00:12:11 Rob Day
You know, and that's where like it was as far as it would answer the questions. Now it'll actually do it. So give an example. I can type in let's say there's, I'll just call it ABC Safety Training a website. I can actually go into the prompt and say hey AI as far as go to this site, here's my username and password and complete any training that's required for me. So it'll go through scan the menu systems, click navigate, open try, you know, do the matching exercises. It'll drag and drop. It'll, it'll do long answer, short answer, it'll do the whole thing and then come out the other end with a certificate for you. That is is all that's the newest level that's out within the last 30. 

00:12:49 Russell Stewart
Days and so it checks all the boxes. Looks like you've been properly trained in all the safety issues and compliance and all that sort of thing and. Wow, that's staggering, isn't it? It is, it is. That's almost as bad as a. And I hate to admit this but I, and, and I and this has been years ago because I got a few years in the oil and gas business but, but when PPE requirements first came out I knew a particular mud engineer whose wife owned a T shirt company and he actually got her to put the PPE logos on his clothing but it wasn't actually ppe. I want to thank that doesn't happen anymore. But I really never thought about what you're actually exposing here. I'm really glad I got you on here to you know, expose this. Nobody in any company Jesse folks in any company or any of the sweet C suite because I tell everybody's. I say everybody should be an hse. I don't care if you just have the title HSE manager or whatever. If you're the president of the company, you're also the MANAGER OF HSE but to expose this okay, so how do we fix it? 

00:14:00 Rob Day
Sure. The main thing is I'll start at the top. Often where people assumptions they have is like oh well what we'll do is we'll go in there. If anyone answers it too quickly, we'll catch them that way. And I should say all the things I'm explaining are the ones that the leading organizations and I'll come back to as far as why organizations are not even attempting to do to this but the ones that are trying as far as they'll say well we'll track and see how quickly they do it. It does it too quickly. We'll catch them that way anyway. All you that needs to happen in the prompt is you just change it and say okay, answer it at the speed of a human being and it's like. And it'll slow it right down and do everything the way human would. It's like well if they get a perfect score near perfect, we'll catch it that way. Just answer the problem to saying make sure I want to pass, but make sure I pass. 

00:14:43 Russell Stewart
Really? 

00:14:44 Rob Day
Yep. And it'll go through and make some incorrect questions. It'll change answers. It'll do all these things. All these things it will just naturally can actually go through and do. So as far as you're saying like how to solve it. You know, as far as there is technologies and that's why we started this, you know, as far as with cognizance there's a lot that needs to be done here. In my background health and safety I wanted to be able to help with that. And you can't do it if you are selling a product like specifically it's like buy our products. So what we do is we review all the products on the market. And so you know, because you're going to want a different product and a different way of solving it. If you're say a crane doing crane companies as far as they're doing certification or training for cranes as you might want to do for a site orientation at two different levels. One you're really having to worry about like for example calculations the answers and the other one really you're looking as you know with the site orientation as far as you need to make sure they're awake and and paying attention enough to that they're getting the message because it's not high stakes certification but it is very important that they understand that when the alarms go off what it means how when to pull a permit and when the permit's no Longer, you know, valid. 

00:15:49 Russell Stewart
Okay, so I hear what you're saying. Like, like for example, a lot of people who have to. My wife has a professional designation where she has to have continuing education credits. So of course ever since COVID came out, you know, it's just online is everywhere. 

00:16:05 Rob Day
Yes. 

00:16:05 Russell Stewart
And so, so she, she turns the, she turns the thing on and of course the temptation is to let it run in the background while she continues to work. Which she, she's not bad about doing that I must add. But I've been around when that thing was on and all of a sudden it'll like stop in the middle of it or whatever and it'll make you answer three questions about what you just talked about in the last 10 minutes or something like that. Are these the kinds of things you're talking about? 

00:16:33 Rob Day
Those, those are things that people, organizations have done in the past and they create some interaction points. But all that can be done by AI just as simple as, you know, literally you can. She could just enter the prompt and walk away. Come back when it's done and it will spend the appropriate time on the page. Like OSHA 10 bars. That's supposed to be obviously 10 hours there. It took about, you know, as far as two months ago, it took about eight minutes to do a 10 hour course using the tools then. Now you can actually go through and do the entire course without a human needing to do anything. Even the humans never even seen the website. 

00:17:09 Russell Stewart
That's unbelievable. That's. That's actually kind of scary. 

00:17:13 Rob Day
Russell, I was just going to add as far as. Because your wife, you're talking about your wife and her like designation there. So there is organizations like it's called I said I A C E T that actually set standards for continuing education and training how to do it appropriately in so far as. And that's the type of thing we'll work with organizations like, like them to actually help. Okay, what should the standards say then? Help the organizations that are trying to hit the standard. So they have to, they have updated their, you know, it's the interpretation of their standards there to include. To make sure that a human is doing. It's authentically being done and probably the most interesting thing and impactful for anyone on the OSHA side. Anybody that's regulated by OSHA is the ANSI Z490 standard has been updated. And that new standard requires a couple different things. One, to verify the identity of the individual, whether it be in person or online. And all these things are in person or online. So identify that the individual ensure that that individual is the one that participates in it and that they do it without any. Like it's done authentically. It's, it's not done by AI. It's not a matter of just sitting there. It's not appropriate. And that ANSI standard is what OSHA's used for its citations in the past. It's. If you look at their, the documents they put out on as far as what it, what training employers should have and what's the best standard for it, they're all referencing back to the ANSI Z40 standard. So the question I'll we often throw it to other people organizations. As far as if you're doing training online and you're not verifying that why if you're not doing it for compliance reasons because it doesn't meet compliance. If it's not meeting legal reasons, legal benefit, as I told you in my example. And then it's like you're just hoping that it's the assumption. But even you mentioned your wife and yourself. We all know the cases. I know myself over the years. Do I pay attention to everything that I'm supposed to watch and everything else? No, I actually, you know, I definitely don't. I wait for the organization to cue me. If, if, you know, if I was in a classroom and in school and they allowed me to sleep, then you'd see people sleeping. The organization set standard for sure. 

00:19:07 Russell Stewart
And so that's what Cognizant helps organizations do then. 

00:19:10 Rob Day
Correct. We, we help organizations set that standard, attain the standard dep. Whether they're standard setting bodies. I would, I want to come back to this. As far as I would say though, the one thing is employers are often leave it up to the safety associations or the training bodies assuming that they are the professionals. They're taking on that this onus to make sure it's done appropriately and it means what it's supposed to mean. The only thing is actually when you look at osha, as far as there's no place in there that says that, you know, employer can offload its, its requirements to ensure workers are trained on a third party, it actually says the opposite. As far as the employers must ensure workers are trained. So they use a training organization. The training organizations, when I've talked to them, a lot of them, as far as, you know, the ones that aren't moving what they're saying, as far as until the employers ask for it, they're not going to do it. So you could imagine we're at a little bit of an impasse between those two groups. But the nice part is we work with the organizations that actually are trying to do more. They, they wanted to make sure they're in high risk industries and they, they know training is so important to how they manage risk and demonstrate the due diligence. And that's the ones we work for. And there's been some amazing organizations making some huge strides. 

00:20:18 Russell Stewart
Well, wow. I would hope so, Jen. I can't imagine anyone wanting to let something like this slip through the cracks. You know, again, I'm glad Crestview introduced me to you. This is, this is a problem I never, I never thought about. That's. It's very amazing to me. It's, it's very. Makes me feel uncomfortable. But I hope maybe having people like you on the show and, and exposing this problem, I hope everybody out there will, will be committed to solving it. So you guys, you do this with your own software or how do you, how do you do it? 

00:20:53 Rob Day
So the main thing is think about it similar as how organizations address any other kind of risk. As far as I've applied my background and you know, managing risk. So I mentioned ohs. I was a firefighters in the military. All the jobs I've ever had were risk mitigation, you know, managing risk in some way. And that's all we're actually doing is we're helping organizations to understand what their needs are, what they're trying to accomplish. We assess the risks associated with it and then help create a mitigation plan to actually address that. And we obviously help them more than just create the plan, but actually how to execute it. Is there technology somewhere in the world that'll do exactly what they need to do. And so for example, if your workforce are accessing your site orientation all from cell phones, like well that's a different. There's products out there that'll help that and we'll help find and set those things up. And as far as it's really just understanding what those, those and then coming up with that plan and that's been our key focus. And I should say one other thing you mentioned as far as being uncomfortable, what we're doing is as well is putting out now a newsletter to make people aware of, you know, all the changes that are happening. The issues that we're seeing in these different systems where it's in the news. And one that you'd be interested with when you said uncomfortable as far as that made me uncomfortable is one of the international airline. I'm not going to say which one as far as what's grounded out of the United Kingdom war wasn't allowed to fly in because they found 40% of their pilots, you know, did not take the training that they were supposed to have taken. 

00:22:16 Russell Stewart
Oh, my goodness. 

00:22:17 Rob Day
And you think of, you know, the, what happened with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and stock market and things, Enron and things of the past. As far as there's, you know, major accounting, you know, saying firms again, I'm not going to call names, but if you Google find out who was fined $100 million because of the fact that the, their staff were not taking the training they were supposed to or they were taking three pieces of training at the same time with the volume down, you know, like you're saying back to the beginning, as far as risk is being managed through the passing of knowledge, you know, through training. And if that's not an effective way of doing it, we need to either stop doing that or do it. Right. 

00:22:52 Russell Stewart
Yeah. Okay. All right. So this newsletter, you can find that on your website. Okay. All right. Well, I believe, if I remember correctly, that was cognizant360.com we'll put that, we'll put that in the show notes. We'll put your, I'm sure you're on LinkedIn. I'll put your LinkedIn URL in the show notes so people can reach out to you. So you guys are, you just, you're not just in Canada, you're all over North America, you're all over the world. Where can you do this? 

00:23:21 Rob Day
Correct. We actually work all the way around the world. So as far as, as far as even Australia, because there's been interesting, you know, cases over there where the regulator actually closed down training organizations for issuing fraudulent documents to people that hadn't completed. And obviously in the States you get organizations that were trying to address after the valor in New York City where that training company got indicted, criminal indictments for issuing training certificates, people didn't complete training. So the regulators, the courts are acting differently in different areas. But yeah, globally. 

00:23:50 Russell Stewart
Okay. All right. Well, Rob, this has been, this is, I'm glad there are people like you out there who recognize problems like this because it is the theme of this show that, that everyone comes home safe and we know how important it is to be properly trained so that you can be safe. And I'm really glad you took the time to come on and, and talk to us and keep up the good work and maybe we'll check back in, in a few months or whatever and get a progress report. 

00:24:18 Rob Day
Sounds wonderful. 

00:24:19 Russell Stewart
Okay, well, thanks Rob and as always, to everybody out there listening, thank you. Post us on LinkedIn, tell your friends to listen to us, leave us reviews. We always appreciate that and that always helps us and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to oggn, the world's. 

00:24:34 Rob Day
Largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. Don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of. 

00:24:49 Russell Stewart
The oil and gas global.