Thought Leadership

Our founder and CEO Tane van der Boon recently joined Dave on the Keep On Moving podcast (part of the NZ Trucking Media family) for what turned out to be a pretty wide-ranging conversation. They started with how inviol works and ended up deep in the philosophical weeds of AI, automation, and what the future of work actually looks like. If you work in logistics, warehousing, or transport (or anywhere people and machines share space, really), it's worth a listen. Dave asks the

There's a statistic that comes up again and again in workplace safety research: the vast majority of workplace injuries are preventable. Not theoretically preventable. Not "if we lived in a perfect world" preventable. Preventable with better visibility, better training, and better systems for catching risk before it turns into harm. The numbers support this consistently. The US National Safety Council classifies workplace deaths as "preventable" when they result from identifi

When safety teams evaluate AI monitoring platforms, the pitch they usually hear sounds something like this: "Our system detects unsafe behaviours in real time and sends alerts so you can act before an incident occurs." That is not a bad pitch. Real-time detection is genuinely useful, and most of the platforms that deliver it do so well. But there is a question that pitch leaves unanswered: what happens after the alert? Because alerts, on their own, do not change behaviour. Th

When we started building inviol, the idea of using existing CCTV cameras to detect safety events in real time felt like a stretch for most of the people we spoke to. Computer vision for workplace safety was a niche concept, the market was small, and most EHS teams were still managing safety through spreadsheets, periodic audits, and reactive investigation. That was only a few years ago. Today, computer vision AI for safety is a category. The global AI workplace safety market

Commercial aviation has roughly doubled in safety every decade since the late 1960s. An MIT study found that the risk of a fatality from commercial air travel fell from 1 per 350,000 passenger boardings in 1968-1977 to 1 per 13.7 million in 2018-2022. IATA data shows accident rates declining from 3.72 per million flight sectors in 2005 to 1.32 in 2025. The FAA reports that US commercial aviation fatalities decreased by 95% over two decades. Now compare that trajectory to ware

Walk into any warehouse or distribution centre and ask who owns safety. The answer is almost always the EHS team. Ask who owns throughput, layout decisions, delivery schedules, and traffic flow. That's operations. Now ask who owns the intersection where a forklift nearly hit a pedestrian this morning. Suddenly, it's less clear. In most organisations, safety and operations are managed as separate functions with separate reporting lines, separate KPIs, separate budgets, and sep

I want to talk about one of the most counterintuitive truths in workplace safety: a good safety record can be the most dangerous thing in your organisation. Not because good performance doesn't matter. It does. But because sustained good performance creates the conditions for complacency. And complacency, in a mature organisation with established processes and experienced teams, is almost invisible until something goes catastrophically wrong. SOURCES The BP lesson: when good

I've had a front-row seat watching EHS managers adapt to new technology for years. And I can tell you that what's happening right now is different from anything that came before. Previous waves of safety technology (EHS software platforms, mobile inspection apps, digital permit systems) made existing tasks easier. They digitised the paperwork. They moved the clipboard onto a screen. Useful, but incremental. Computer vision AI does something fundamentally different. It doesn't

I've sat in boardrooms where the CEO proudly declared a zero harm target, and I've stood on warehouse floors where workers rolled their eyes at the very same words on a poster. Both reactions tell you something important about the state of this conversation. Zero harm is one of the most divisive ideas in workplace safety. For some, it's an essential moral commitment: no worker should be harmed, and anything less than zero as a target is an acceptance of injury. For others, it

The safety walk is one of the oldest tools in workplace safety. A manager or supervisor walks the floor, observes conditions, talks to workers, checks that equipment is maintained and PPE is being worn. It's simple, it's personal, and it's been the backbone of site inspections for decades. It's also, increasingly, not enough. That's not a criticism of the people who conduct safety walks. It's a recognition that the tool itself was designed for a world where a human walking th

In 2025, global venture capital investment in AI exceeded $500 billion for the first time, according to KPMG's Venture Pulse report . AI-related companies attracted 61% of all venture capital globally, more than doubling their share from just three years earlier, according to the OECD's analysis of VC investment through 2025 . The numbers are staggering, and they keep climbing. But where is that money going? The vast majority flows into large language models, generative AI, a