AI In The Fire And Life Safety Domain

By Bartholomew Jae
From the August 2024 Issue

Every generation has seen the advent of new human-machine collaborations. Although the first seeds of artificial intelligence (AI) were planted in the 1950s, it wasn’t until this decade that developments in generative AI led to a meteoric surge in the technology. AI has became so normalized to the point of radically transforming our daily lives and work. Thanks to its ability to process enormous amounts of data, compute at an unprecedented level, and learn as it goes, the technology is expanding the boundary of possibility across nearly every industry. Fire and life safety services are no exception, and leaders in this domain are cautiously optimistic about how AI may be used to improve public safety across the entire fire and life safety industry.

The Spectrum Of AI Adopters

As is true with every innovation in technology, workers will have varied degrees of eagerness and comfortability when it comes to integrating AI into their workflows. Some will embrace it with open arms, while others may be more reserved, or even outright against it. This hesitancy may stem from a fundamental lack of trust in the technology, a desire to stick to traditional ways of doing things, or even a fear that it will replace their roles. However, this last concern is largely unfounded, as fire and life safety services (and the skilled trades overall) are uniquely human industries that will always require the human touch.

For the foreseeable future, it’s unlikely that AI is going to replace trade workers’ jobs in the field or that the responsibility for the safety of others will be turned over to a machine. With that being said, there’s no doubt that the AI train has arrived, and workers who resist this digital transformation will lack the competitive edge of their peers who don’t. From this point on, workers who add AI to their existing tool belts will have the advantage in terms of hiring, collaboration, efficiency, and more.

Promising Applications And Benefits

Like other sectors, fire and life safety has a lot to gain from implementing AI. While some of these benefits are industry agnostic, like improved efficiencies and more powerful data analysis, there are plenty of applications specific to fire and life safety services. These applications range from fairly mundane to aspirational but all serve the purpose of improving safety outcomes and augmenting the work done by people.

Starting with the basics, AI can create efficiencies in daily tasks and speed up processes. For example, contractors can leverage AI when reviewing building plans and sprinkler designs to ensure code compliance more quickly and easily. They can also use it for administrative tasks like scheduling or writing policies, freeing up staff for more hands-on tasks. While these use cases aren’t overly exciting, they can help resource-strapped organizations make the most of their time, people, and budgets.

Additionally, public safety agencies have been collecting large amounts of data for decades, but it has been siloed within departments or organizations, reducing its overall utility. AI is bringing these previously disparate data sets together, making more comprehensive analysis possible and surfacing correlations, patterns, and insights. By ingesting, sorting, and learning from more information than humans ever could alone—not to mention much faster—AI is enabling fire and life safety workers to connect the dots in new ways.

The biggest potential yet for AI in this sector is identifying fire or life safety hazards before they become full-scale issues. A prime example of this was a small wildfire that sparked one summer night in 2023 in the Cleveland National Forest in California. The fire started small, deep in the forest, and would likely have been missed if not for the AI-powered cameras trained on the landscape, monitoring for visual signs of developing wildfires. These AI cameras learn to distinguish between benign visual disturbances and real threats over time and can scan around the clock, eliminating gaps in human monitoring and alerting.

To some degree now, and certainly in the future, AI will assist workers in modeling safer building designs and predicting how future scenarios may play out. 

To some degree now, and certainly in the future, AI will assist workers in modeling safer building designs and predicting how future scenarios may play out. For example, AI can predict where fires may break out, how severe they will be, and what actions need to be taken to prevent or respond to these events. Other AI applications on the horizon are poised to enhance firefighter safety by helping them escape burning buildings in time or monitoring their vital signs for indications of distress.

Finally, technologies like AI, virtual reality, and augmented reality will be used to develop and deliver training and certification programs. The actual content of these sessions will also be increasingly focused on AI as the tools of the trade evolve. After all, the goal is to equip workers to navigate real-world scenarios, so as AI is used more frequently in the field, this will be reflected in learning models. Lastly, workers can think of AI as a “pocket assistant,” bringing information to their fingertips in the field or aiding on-the-go decision-making. However, educators or employers need to teach domain knowledge first before demonstrating how AI can make tasks easier or faster. AI should enhance workers’ knowledge and skills, not be used as a crutch.

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Just as people have a role in safety, structured learning will continue to have a role in training. AI will bring more targeted and hyper-personalized structured and in-the-moment learning together to help professionals improve their performance.

Best Practices For Using AI Responsibly

Despite the seemingly unlimited potential for AI in this sector, we need to proceed with caution and not overlook the risks. It is a collective duty to use AI responsibly by always having a real person validate its outputs and conduct final assessments. Even the most advanced models are prone to “AI hallucinations” or getting things wrong, especially if they’ve been trained on incomplete or faulty datasets. While AI is being trained, professionals must be trained to spot errors in its logic rather than complacently take AI recommendations and reports as correct.

Having the right guardrails in place will help keep AI as a guide, not an empirical source of truth. When approached through this lens, AI will be a positive, transforming force in the future of fire and life safety.

Jae has 25 years of experience helping companies develop their leaders, talent, and organization. He spent half his career as a Learning & Development Leader, and the remainder providing strategy and management consulting to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies around the world. In his current role with NFPA, Jae heads the Education and Development line of business. He is responsible for leading a transformation to deliver more contemporary learning experiences and growing NFPA’s impact in teaching the world to be safer.

Do you have a comment? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below, or send an e-mail to the Editor at jen@groupc.com.

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