AI Advantage Will Come From Proprietary Data
AI is becoming standard in safety technology, shifting differentiation toward proprietary hazard data, domain expertise and human oversight that competitors cannot easily replicate.
Prevention Technology Is Reshaping Safety Value
Safety spending is moving from compliance documentation toward real-time incident prevention, favoring businesses with recurring data, workflows and measurable outcomes over hardware alone.
Fragmentation Creates a Platform Opportunity
A fragmented safety market and increasingly strategic EHS buyers favor platforms that consolidate vendors, expand across hazard categories and build broader data advantages.
Members of Baird's Safety & Security team recently attended the 2026 NSC Safety Congress & Expo in Indianapolis, Indiana. This year’s event drew more than 1,000 exhibiting companies alongside more than 130 educational opportunities and has anchored the workplace safety calendar for more than a century. The dominant story on the floor was artificial intelligence (AI), but the more useful signal was what buyers now expect it to do. Safety budgets are shifting from documenting compliance toward preventing incidents, and that reframing changes how sponsors and strategics should value assets in this sector. Baird’s Safety & Security team have identified four sector themes shaping where value accrues as AI, prevention technology, regulation and consolidation reset the safety and security market.
AI moved from a handful of booths to the default positioning across the expo floor, and nearly every category of provider now leads with it. The Congress gave the topic its own breakout session covering best practices for safety professionals both deploying AI tools and evaluating AI tools already running in their workplaces, a framing that acknowledges AI can introduce risk as well as reduce it. Buyer appetite is present: 44% of Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) professionals now identify AI and automation as the largest force shaping the profession's future, and 70% trust AI-generated insights to inform EHS decisions (Source: VelocityEHS, 2026 EHS 360 Benchmark Report). Our read is that the differentiation will not be the model. It will be proprietary incident and hazard data, domain expertise and human oversight in the loop. Several platforms were explicit about augmenting rather than replacing the safety professional. In diligence, we would separate AI as a feature claim from AI built on a data asset a competitor cannot replicate.
Adoption of this new technology is no longer the question. Our earlier report this year found construction leading interest in safety technology at 84% of companies considering new tools, ahead of 57% to 72% across other end markets (Source: National Safety Council). What changed in 2026 is the value proposition. The solutions drawing the most attention sat between the worker and the equipment, using wearables and real-time signals to intervene rather than to reporting after the fact. The forklift safety solution that won last year's Safety Innovation Challenge, which detects workers by armband and gives operators live risk indicators based on nearby pedestrian density, is a fair template for the direction of innovations across the sector. Providers are also aiming higher up the risk curve, at serious injury and fatality exposure and hazards that are difficult to detect manually. The investable layer is recurring data and workflow, not the hardware around it.
Enforcement remains the demand engine for core safety categories. The occupational keynote slot was reserved for the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, and the agenda ran repeat sessions on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) most frequently cited standards of fiscal 2026. Those citation categories, including fall protection, hazard communication and ladders, are exactly where providers have concentrated new product development. A change in enforcement posture would potentially impact product prices as a result of perceived demand. We would therefore underwrite a safety asset on the durability of the underlying hazard, not on the enforcement intensity of any single standard.
More than 1,000 exhibitors competing for one EHS budget is the clearest structural fact of the event. Most are point solutions built around a single hazard or product family, sold to the same safety director. Fragmentation of that kind typically precedes consolidation, and it is reinforced by where the buyer is heading. EHS leaders report the function is becoming more strategic, with 82% saying it is gaining influence at the executive level (Source: VelocityEHS, 2026 EHS 360 Benchmark Report). A more senior buyer wants fewer vendors and one accountable relationship. The winners will be platforms that attach adjacent hazard categories onto an existing installed base, and AI economics push in the same direction because breadth of data improves the product.
Safety spending is holding up because the hazards are structural, not cyclical. What is changing is the standard of proof, from compliance documentation to demonstrated prevention. Assets that own differentiated safety data, prove an outcome and can consolidate a fragmented vendor set should attract the most attention from sponsors and strategics over the next 12 months.
Connect with Baird's Safety & Security team to discuss these themes and the opportunities ahead across safety and security.
Trisha Renner
Managing Director
+1-303-270-6347
trenner@rwbaird.com
Alex Ballantine
Managing Director
+44-20-7667-8242
aballantine@rwbaird.com
Theo Blomquist
Vice President
+1-312-609-7009
tblomquist@rwbaird.com
