It’s no secret that companies around the world are turning to artificial intelligence and automation to help drive efficiency and reduce costs. While technology can streamline operations, we risk underestimating the value that people bring to the table.
This is especially true in the world of Process Safety Management (PSM), where organizations are rapidly adopting digital tools to improve performance.
According to Sphera’s latest Process Safety Report, 64% of 300 senior safety professionals surveyed said they’ve realized measurable gains from technology and 42% are already using or plan to use AI in their PSM programs.
Yet despite this progress, incident prevention and confidence in managing major accident hazards (MAH) are not improving at the same pace. Those “very confident” in their ability to manage MAH exposure dropped from 35% in 2024 to 27% in 2025. The data suggests a growing gap between digital capability and real-world safety performance.
Technology alone cannot close that gap. PSM systems are only as effective as the people who use them. Without meaningful human connection, organizations risk losing engagement, training depth and frontline competency. As experienced professionals retire, critical institutional knowledge is disappearing faster than it can be replaced, creating dangerous gaps that current training programs struggle to fill.
Half of global organizations and 71% of those in the U.S. and U.K. identified training and competency as their top challenge, up from 41% in 2024. Engagement with frontline workers also rose as a concern, cited by 36% this year compared to 25% last year.
These trends reveal an industry at a crossroads. AI has the potential to transform visibility into foresight, helping organizations identify and mitigate risks earlier. But it cannot do so effectively without keeping humans firmly in the loop. Machine intelligence must be combined with human experience, context and judgment.
Executives must balance automation with oversight, ensuring that digital systems and AI tools are designed to support, not replace, operational decision-making. When organizations align people, process and technology, they can improve both confidence and safety performance.
The goal is not necessarily to deploy more digital tools. It’s to use them in strategic ways that strengthen human judgment, standardize best practices and prevent incidents before they occur.
The next era of process safety will belong to the organizations that turn data into discipline, technology into trust and employee insight into sustained prevention.
