Robot rise lifts safety for Kiwi crane company

McLeod Cranes hires artificial intelligences to take heat out of safety incidents

When things go pear-shaped with a 350-ton crane — and operators are under intense pressure — it’s imperative for cooler heads to prevail.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now pivotal to McLeod’s enterprise workplace health and safety processes.

Stepping up as virtual safety officers at McLeod Cranes to defuse complex situations, AI integrations in Slack help rewrite deidentified safety reports while providing instant advice to on-site workers.

Liberated from the tyranny of flaring emotions, operators at the New Zealand crane hire business get projects back on track more quickly than they would have prior to using Slack, said its managing director, Scott McLeod.

When on-site operators entered incident reports into Slack, the platform rewrote them to remove blame and offered ideas on how to stabilise matters. The AI also notified relevant people such as safety managers of the incident and provided recommendations. This allowed McLeod Cranes to simultaneously improve its safety response and productivity.

“Slack is immediately telling the operator, ‘Right, these are the next three things that you should do right now’,” said McLeod, whose business operates around the Bay of Plenty about 200 km southeast of the North Island capital of Auckland.

“In the past, someone would raise an event and that would generate an email. That's very fast now because it goes straight into the AI [which] rewrites the event without blame and makes recommendations.

“So what the operators should do right now to make the event safe, what steps they should now take and what steps should the health and safety team now take? That's a massive improvement.”

‘Conversation in a box’ a game-changer for McLeod Cranes

Slack greatly streamlined communications between McLeod’s 170 staff, and simplified tracking issues between field workers, despatchers, customers and the company’s management.

Previously, if a dispatcher was talking about a job, they may have forgotten important information from the site inspection. But now with Slack, if a dispatcher were to mention a job address, Slack would remind them if there were a site-inspection note for that job. The dispatcher could then access the full details including videos and photos.

“So having the same conversation with the people actively involved on site, and then making some really key decisions to stabilise the situation, slow it down, make it safe, work with our customers to resolve whatever the situation is so that everyone's happy,” McLeod said.

Encapsulating information in a channel as a “conversation in a box” was a game-changer for McLeod.

“And once that conversation’s in the box, you can be part of it —notified about new things put in the box — or you can leave the conversation if it's not relevant to you.”

Having converted to Slack, McLeod could now see other areas in the business ripe for renewal.

“I could see major problems [where] communication was getting in the way of the job. And that [Slack] would make communication front and centre and add value.

“So it was quite a big change.”

Slack democratises AI transformation for the masses

Salesforce technology evangelist Derek Laney said AI in the workplace has rapidly progressed from science fiction to an everyday reality for McLeod workers.

“You would imagine that is something that's still off into the future, but Scott is doing it already in the classic way of taking a tool and making it his own by finding how to apply it to his use case,” said Laney.

He said business leaders can implement powerful tools such as AI in house for minimal cost, time and complexity.

“We don't need to implant highly complex solutions to do some of these things. These are simple solutions that everyone can do. And he's achieving incredible improvements in productivity and safety.”

You can hear the full interview with Scott McLeod at the iTnews podcast [published podcast link] at itnews.com.au and click on the podcast tab at the top.