Rewiring Risk

What happens when safety stops being treated as a compliance checkbox and starts being managed like the rest of the business? Andrea Peterson, Health, Safety & Environmental Director at Trystar, joins host Marc Juaire, Senior Director and Head of Product at VelocityEHS, on this episode of Rewiring Risk to explore how EHS leaders can connect safety to operational performance, earn executive buy-in, and prove the business value of prevention.

Andrea shares how watching the news coverage of 9/11 as a junior high student set her on a path toward prevention, then explains why the compliance mindset has persisted for so long and what it leaves on the table. She makes the case that a safety gap deserves the same line-stopping response as a quality defect, walks through practical leading indicators like near-miss-to-incident ratios and inspection trends, and shares how a capital request for machine guarding taught her to frame risk around potential serious injuries and fatalities, not just the injury rate. Marc and Andrea also dig into what it takes to build an authentic safety culture, why cross-functional alignment matters before you walk into the boardroom, and what an EHS leader can accomplish in their first 90 days.

Quotes

“When there’s a quality issue identified in a product, the line stops until that quality issue is corrected… When you’re talking about getting to the root cause of a quality problem, nobody questions it or gets nervous about it. That just is the way that business is. But really, a safety gap, whether it’s an issue or an incident, is no different.”

“I had a senior executive say, ‘Oh my God, we’re having all these near misses. Like, what’s going on here?’ And my comment was, ‘No, actually, they’re reporting.’… I would rather have 1,000 near misses reported than a serious injury or fatality.”

“We can have all of the support in the boardroom, but when the employees on the front line have that trust of their direct leaders that they can bring up safety items and it leads to action and not blame, that’s when that change starts to take place.”

Time Stamps

[0:36] Welcome to Rewiring Risk & Introducing Andrea Peterson

[2:04] Andrea's Why: From 9/11 to a Career in Prevention

[4:18] Why the Compliance Mindset Persists and What It Costs

[5:27] What Triggers the Shift From Compliance to Proactive Safety

[7:35] Asking Better Questions: From "Are We Compliant?" to "Do We Understand the Exposure?"

[8:14] Leading Indicators: Start With the Data You Already Have

[12:40] Why More Near Misses Can Be Good News

[14:32] Stop the Line: Treating Safety Gaps Like Quality Issues

[16:21] Earning Buy-In From Operations Leaders

[18:59] Safety Is a Team Sport: Aligning Before You Ask for Capital

[21:30] When Executives Become Safety Champions

[23:23] Proving ROI: The Machine Guarding Story

[29:44] Building an Authentic Safety Culture

[33:13] Culture as a Recruiting and Retention Advantage

[35:06] The First 90 Days: Focus on One Business-Critical Risk

[39:17] Rapid Fire: Future EHS Leaders, the Safety Program of the Month, and SIF Exposure

[44:02] Closing Thoughts and Outro

Links

Connect with the guest and host on LinkedIn!

• Andrea Peterson, Health, Safety & Environmental Director at Trystar
• Marc Juaire, Senior Director and Head of Product at VelocityEHS

Learn more about:

• VelocityEHS
• Trystar

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What does it actually take to separate AI hype from AI that saves lives? Dr. Julia Penfield, Chief AI Officer at VelocityEHS, joins host Ashley Emery, Chief Marketing Officer at VelocityEHS, on this episode of Rewiring Risk to unpack where artificial intelligence is genuinely transforming environmental health and safety, and where it's just noise.

Julia breaks down the difference between AI, machine learning, neural networks, LLMs, and agents in plain English, then turns to the data: the rate of workplace fatalities in the US has stayed flat for over 20 years, and a worker dies from unsafe conditions every two hours. She explains why she believes it's “amoral not to use AI for worker safety,” and walks through where AI is already making a measurable difference, from job safety assessments to industrial ergonomics to post-incident root cause analysis. Julia also makes the case for why safety AI can't be built the same way as ChatGPT or Gemini, why VelocityEHS has spent 10 years building its own proprietary models, and why humans stay firmly in the loop no matter how capable the technology gets. They close with a rapid-fire round on AI myths, what AI will never replace, and Julia's own path from a hydroelectric powerhouse in northern British Columbia to leading AI strategy in EHS.

Quotes

“Every two hours, a worker is dying from worker safety conditions in the US. It hasn't been going down. We haven't been making progress... I believe it's amoral to not use AI for worker safety.”

“Safety is, ‘Hey, I have this person that I love. Can you help them be safe when they're going to do this job?’ ...in safety, we can't tolerate bad advice.”

“I don't think AI is going to, at any point, impact the necessity to have EHS professionals and safety managers... We're gonna need EHS professionals one way or the other forever.”

Time Stamps

Links

Connect with the guest and host on LinkedIn!

Learn more about:

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What does it actually take to fix a fragmented, decades-old approach to environmental health and safety? Ken Lupo, Chief Technology Officer at VelocityEHS, sits down with Matt Airhart, CEO of VelocityEHS, on this episode of Rewiring Risk to unpack why so many companies are still stuck on outdated, disconnected EHS systems, and what it really means to modernize.

Matt traces his path into EHS back to his early years in unautomated chemical and steel manufacturing, and explains why VelocityEHS's mission to make workplaces safer and more sustainable resonates so deeply across the company. Ken and Matt dig into the hidden costs of disconnected systems, why change management (not technology) is usually the hardest part of modernization, and how AI - when built responsibly, kept private, and never allowed to make decisions on its own - is starting to transform everything from injury prevention to ergonomics to reporting. They close with a rapid-fire round covering the biggest myths in EHS modernization and where the industry is headed next.

Quotes

"It's not just the software, it's how we implement it, how we service them afterward, how we help them discover what they can do next within the platform. We're a results company. We're not a software company.”

"I spent the first six or seven years of my career in some pretty dirty, unautomated, high-risk industries... our mission is to make workplaces safer and more sustainable, and it has a massive, measurable impact on injuries around the world."

“Everything we do is designed to put what AI sees in front of a person, and that person can either agree with it, modify it, or disagree with it. We never have any decisions happening in a black box."

Time Stamps

Links

Connect with the guests and host on LinkedIn!

Learn more about:

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Each episode, we sit down with executive leaders and EHS professionals for the kind of real, honest conversations you don't usually get in a conference room. We talk safety, AI, operational strategy, and what it actually takes to build organizations that don't just survive complexity. But thrive because of it.

Rewiring Risk is brought to you by VelocityEHS, the global leader in EHS and Sustainability software.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.