SafetyCulture’s AI push to trump outdated corporate training

A start-up founded in a Townsville garage has released what it believes is one if not the first AI tool for tradespeople and other frontline workers.

SafetyCulture founder and chief executive Luke Anear.

SafetyCulture is building out the capability for tradies to become like influencers, allowing them and others across various frontline industries to build their own training modules on its platform with the help of AI.

The Queensland start-up founded in a Townsville garage will on Thursday announce the new features at its inaugural ­SafetyCulture Next event, where a new platform that’s been in the works since 2019 will be launched.

The company is looking to ­increase its number of users to 100 million by 2032. For now, ­SafetyCulture has 1.5 million members and 75,000 businesses using its platform.

“Our claim to fame was we built the world’s most used checklist app in the workplace, and for many years, that’s what the Safety Culture business was built around,” founder and chief executive Luke Anear said.

This new platform, he said, was SafetyCulture 2.0, one that would attract about 15 to 20 times the current number of users thanks to the company slashing the price of the product to $5 per month for most features.

“All of our customers will get a lot more value from us than just the checklists that they have had in the past. They can pretty much do everything except our premium inspection experience,” he said.

SafetyCulture’s new AI tools will be able to take information uploaded via documents to create checklists and personalised training content with the help of some aggregated data from the company. Mr Anear said while SafetyCulture’s AI product had been trained on the company’s data, ­ parameters had been put in place to restrict it from using or identifying customer-specific data.

The new AI products weren’t given a fancy name. “SafetyCulture AI is the name of the artificial intelligence part of our platform, and we keep it pretty simple as our users are everyday people, so we don’t get too hipster with our names,” Mr Anear said.

SafetyCulture is also pushing toward a new future in which it supported users and businesses to develop and sell their own training courses on the platform.

Today, there are around 1000 courses already available, some of which have been certified by different bodies, including HACCP Australia and the American ­Society of Safety Professionals.

However, Mr Anear wants to continue to develop the ability for more users to build out mobile-first tutorials and training. “The biggest training platform in the world today is YouTube,” he said.

“The days of learning and development departments pushing out corporate training that then goes across distributed teams are the days of yesteryear. That’s been the problem with training. It has been mostly boring content created by the head office.”

Most workers found content created by colleagues far more engaging, Mr Anear said: “This is a new era of training where the kind of big corporate model or institutional training is being surpassed by much more relevant and localised training.”

Induction training for the construction industry, which makes up about 18 per cent of SafetyCulture customers, is a key area for the company but it also wants to be able to develop tutorials when ­circumstances change quickly.

“When something changes on site, that’s the opportunity to make sure that people are aware of the new risks, or the new way of doing things,” Mr Anear said.

“What we want to do is to be able to deliver short-form training very quickly when those circumstances change.”

Originally published as SafetyCulture’s AI push to trump outdated corporate training