From curiosity to confidence: Using AI to transform enterprise-level environment, health and safety

This paper draws on EY teams’ industry experience, research into practical use cases, client discussions, and EY multidisciplinary expertise to provide practical insights for organisations seeking to move from AI curiosity to confidence.

Environment, health and safety (EHS) functions are at a critical turning point. The scope, complexity, and scrutiny of EHS risk has expanded significantly over recent years, while the capacity of organisations to oversee that risk has not kept pace.

Increasing regulatory complexity, exponential data growth, and rising expectations from workers, regulators and the community are placing greater demands on EHS functions. At the same time, EHS teams are under pressure to deliver more, with less.

Against this backdrop, artificial intelligence (AI) has entered the EHS conversation with a growing urgency. AI can help organisations make better sense of the vast volumes of unstructured data which is now experienced throughout the work environment. These systems can also support the interpretation of regulatory complexity more efficiently, and support a shift from reactive incident management toward more proactive harm prevention. More specifically, a shift to agentic AI offers a way to support more automated, data-informed decision-making and dynamic workflow redesign, going beyond traditional automation to transform entire business processes.

For many leaders, AI provides not only a mechanism for the EHS function to be more efficient, but also a tangible enterprise-level enabler of EHS improvement.