Veracity assured
Ross Moloney, CEO of LEEA, sees an important future for AI in the Lifting industry, but if you want valid guidance with assured veracity, you need LEEA.
LEEA’s team of experts not only provide responses to our members’ technical questions but they also write our guidance documents based on global best practice. The team comprises experts hailing from numerous experience backgrounds, bringing together a variety of skillsets. This combination means that when LEEA produces its guidance, it is academically correct, legally valid and practical in the sense of the way it works in the real world.
This is an important point to remember in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where the technology is developing at an accelerating pace and bringing dramatic productivity improvements to key areas of industry.
The ability to process immense amounts of ‘big data’ at lightning speed is impressive and extremely valuable. The technology is based on very fast and very clever algorithms, following logical pathways devised by humans. But be warned: when you search for guidance using AI, it will simply harvest material others have written – the veracity of which cannot be assured. AI, therefore, cannot provide authoritative guidance for using lifting equipment in the same way that LEEA can.
When you engage with LEEA materials, you can rest assured it has gone through the robust and thorough process of being written by experts in consultation with members and is only signed-off and published after it has been approved by the technical committee – again made up of LEEA members. This process ensures that our information is always fully validated, and offers best practice that we are happy to share.
AI will of course play a vital role as one of the key technologies modernising our industry. We all know that many lifting equipment tasks and inspections take place in challenging environments, such as rough seas in oil fields, and often at height. Like most engineering sectors we continue to face skills shortages, and those skilled people we do have are likely to be less than thrilled by the prospect of carrying out inspections two hundred feet up a wind turbine. AI and other technologies may assist in guiding a drone or other remotely controlled vehicles and may well be used to help interpret the results. Machine learning may have a role in working out inspection and maintenance programmes that ensure compliance but minimise disruption and downtime.
AI-based systems can also alleviate a lot of the cost and burden of manual record keeping and analytics, not to mention eliminating, or at least detecting, the errors that inevitably arise in manual administrative systems. It may be able to ‘learn’ how to get data from one IT system to another rather than having someone laboriously write code for every eventuality.
Our recent research suggests our industry is still too often perceived as a Victorian-era, grease-based heavy industry. However, a further positive consequence of a growing adoption of AI – along with other technologies such as virtual reality, RFID and the Internet of Things – is helping to create a high tech make-over of our industry’s image that will help attract the attention of much needed younger new recruits.
What’s more, prudent deployment of AI may make it easier to retain our good people. AI has the potential to not only reduce risk when undertaking tasks at height and around lifting gear in the field, but can also relieve staff from carrying out the kind of laborious, repetitive tasks that can leave them feeling both fatigued and under-valued.
So, there are many AI benefits to reap, but AI should not be allowed to over-shadow the irreplaceable merits of human expertise and experience. The work that LEEA’s very human Technical Committee carries out is crucial and of significant benefit to members, the result of which can be seen in our industrial best practice guidance documents and publications, available to download for free from the leeaint.com website. The most popular of these is the LEEA Code of Practice for the Safe Use of Lifting Equipment (COPSULE), which is actually free for non-members as well as members to access – and I would recommend everyone to read it. In addition, we are providing more bitesize information, via social media, which is equally valid in helping to make people’s behaviour safer.
AI will increasingly become an intrinsic part of our industry’s activities, but we must look carefully at where and when we rely on it.
