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- Marc Smith on Keeping Safety Human
How a former army technician built AI to handle paperwork, so safety can get back to the conversation.
“The most important part of a tailgate meeting is not documenting the tailgate meeting and putting it on the form. It’s the actual discussion that takes place.”
Marc Smith built an AI tool that turns a recorded safety meeting into a finished field document, so he doesn’t have to. He is his company’s de facto AI lead and teaches the tools to other safety professionals. But he is quick to tell you the tools are not the point. The paperwork never was, and neither is the software that now writes it. What keeps people safe, the way Smith sees it, is the conversation the forms are meant to capture. He is more interested in what a worker will tell him than in what any form will say.
Smith is the Health, Safety and Environment Manager at Integrated Sustainability, a Calgary-based, employee-owned firm. It builds sustainable infrastructure and runs water-treatment operations across Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean. He holds his CRSP, the Canadian benchmark certification. By his own count, he is the single safety person for a business of roughly 160 people across five countries. He got there almost by accident. Leaving the Army with two years to fill and no plan to go into safety, he walked into the registrar’s office at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and asked what they had. The registrar pointed him to an occupational health and safety diploma and called it perfect for ex-military people. The “discipline, following orders, working in team environments” he had learned in uniform mapped cleanly onto the work. And the timing was good: all 28 people in his graduating class, he says, had jobs straight out of school. He ran crane and rigging safety up north at Kearl Lake, then built his own consultancy helping startups earn their COR and SECOR. One of those clients was Integrated Sustainability, which he joined as its HSE manager in 2014, back when it was an eight-person shop.
One size fits nobody
Ask Smith what matters at that scale and he doesn’t reach for a system. “It really comes down to culture,” he says. “Health and safety culture isn’t siloed. It is part of your company culture.” Early on, he admits, he was more focused on “making excellent forms” than on anything else. Working across so many jurisdictions changed that. A hazard assessment built for the oil sands in northern Alberta, he points out, might not work the same way in Barbados. “I have a human first approach to health and safety,” he says. He reckons 90 percent of the job is psychology and human-centric communication. What keeps one person safe is rarely what keeps the next one safe. A worker with a young family looks after themselves to get home to it; a new grad ready to take on the world needs more coaching to get there.
Let the machines do the paperwork
This is where Smith is furthest ahead. He is “bullish on using AI to tackle the mundane documentation side” of safety, but with a hard condition: “as long as it drives better discussion and better culture.” Before his people head to the field, the company runs an onboarding meeting to plan the work. Smith records it and feeds the transcript to the tool he built. “You drag and drop the transcript and it just outputs the field onboarding document.” A few years ago he would have fussed over the layout. Now the tool hands him a gap table. It tells him plainly what the meeting missed, so he can go back and have a sharper conversation to fill it in. What he is doing by hand, the wider industry is racing to build into its tools. But the reason he bothers was never tidier documents. “Humans see things that AI doesn’t,” he says, “and AI sees patterns that humans don’t.” What draws him to the tools, and to voice tools especially, is the belief underneath everything: “dialogue and conversation is actually where the value is, not filling out the documentation.”
Don’t be the safety cop
For all the technology, Smith’s most durable lesson is the oldest one in the trade, and he traces it to his first days on a job site in a white hard hat. “Ask questions, ask good questions,” he says. Walk up to someone doing their work, ask them to walk you through it, and be curious. “Do not be a know-it-all. Do not be a safety cop.” Do it right, he says, and you stop being the white-hat know-it-all and start being “a coach and a mentor for the people that are on site.” His rule is blunt: “Trust is earned, respect is earned.” Don’t quote occupational code at people. Show them you are there to help their work, not impede it.
Good news in bad numbers
Ask Smith where his team is strongest and he points to something he built deliberately: a reporting culture. The proof is a figure that would make a lot of safety leaders wince. Reported incidents went from around ten a year to about 65 last year, he says. Some of that is simply more work, since the company took on around-the-clock water-treatment operations. But much of it, he argues, is that people now report things they would once have kept quiet. He reads that as a win, not a warning. That Rising count is the one number most safety leaders are hired to drive down. Smith was glad to see it climb. “First step is reporting,” he says. “Now what are you doing with the reporting?” A report, to him, is only the beginning. What you do with it is the rest of the job.
It comes back to people, the answer he gives when you ask what drives him. He likes working out what makes someone tick. And he is fine with safety being the quiet function in the background, as long as everyone goes home whole. The forms will get filled out either way. What Smith is protecting is the part that never fit on a form to begin with: the conversation where a worker finally tells you the one thing that keeps them safe.
