With a wildfire, an hour is everything. Caught early, it's a containable event. An hour later, it's an evacuation. The difference usually comes down to how fast someone notices.
That's the gap AI is closing. In California, a network of over 1,200 AI cameras now watches for wildfires around the clock. Last year it flagged roughly 3,600 of them, and in more than half, it spotted the fire before the first 911 call came in. Similar networks are already going up across Canada.
That's one of two stories leading Issue #006 of the IQ Safety AI Brief, alongside new AI weather models from Google that just added a full day of accurate warning before a major storm hits.
Also in this issue: heat-sensing armbands that caught 2,000 near-misses at one site in a single summer, ChatGPT can now read your medical records, and a prompt you can use to build a subcontractor prequalification questionnaire from scratch.
Every month I go through the latest AI news and pull out what actually matters for workers and the people responsible for them.
If you have workers, you are one, or you want a monthly rundown on where AI is heading and how it connects to workplace safety, the sign-up link is in the first comment. You'll get this issue right away and every one after.
