Can I use AI for incident investigation in my workplace?

Short answer: yes. AI is already useful in workplace incident investigation for analysing photo and video evidence, structuring a root-cause analysis and proposing corrective actions. The condition is that a qualified person stays in charge of every conclusion and every action. That is how QuickInspect implements it: the AI drafts, the investigator decides.

What AI can realistically do in an incident investigation

An investigation has four repetitive, time-consuming parts where a language model helps immediately:

Task	What AI does well	What the investigator still owns
Evidence	Describes what is visible in photos and videos, flags hazards (missing guards, blocked exits, PPE not worn), suggests a hazard type and a risk rating	Confirming that the description matches reality on site
Root cause	Structures a 5-Why across design, people, environment and management, proposes contributing factors, asks the next question	Interviews, judgement, deciding which causes are real
Documentation	Turns notes into a clear, structured description	Sign-off, legal wording, reporting obligations
Corrective actions	Suggests actions along the hierarchy of controls, with a priority and a time frame	Prioritising, assigning, verifying effectiveness

What AI does not do: decide who was at fault, replace witness interviews, or know the specific machine, permit or procedure in your plant unless you give it that context.

Where the limits are

1. GDPR and personal data. Incident records contain names, health data and sometimes images of people. Under GDPR Article 9 health data needs a specific legal basis, and Article 22 restricts decisions based solely on automated processing. Keep the human in the loop and keep the data in the EU.
2. Accountability. In Germany the employer's duties under the Occupational Safety Act (ArbSchG) and the accident reporting rules of the statutory accident insurance do not change because software helped. The investigator signs, not the model.
3. Hallucination. A model can invent a plausible-sounding cause. Every AI statement in the record must be traceable to evidence: a photo, a witness statement, a measurement.
4. Confidentiality. Do not paste incident data into consumer chat tools. Use a system with a data processing agreement and EU hosting.

A practical AI-assisted investigation workflow

This is the workflow QuickInspect supports:

1. Report in under a minute. Anyone on site reports from the app or by scanning the incident QR code posted in the workplace; with external reporting enabled, no account is needed. In the iOS and Android apps a report can be captured offline and syncs when the phone reconnects.
2. Let AI describe the evidence. Photo analysis returns a description, a hazard type and a proposed likelihood and severity, both actual and potential, on your company's own risk matrix. Video analysis identifies unsafe conditions, missing PPE, housekeeping and equipment issues with a severity, a reference to ISO 45001 or local regulations, and suggested corrective actions. The investigator edits or rejects each item.
3. Investigate the root cause. Run the 5-Why with AI across design, people, environment and management, from the description, photos and documents. The assistant hedges what it infers and writes "needs verification by the investigator" rather than guessing. Record worked hours so that LTIR and TRIR are calculated correctly.
4. Assign corrective actions. For each root cause, AI suggests an action classified along the hierarchy of controls (elimination, substitution, engineering, administrative, PPE) with a priority and a due time. Each action gets an owner and a due date and links back to the incident. When a root cause is a competence gap, the loop can continue into training: the recommended training is assigned, and its completion closes the recommendation.
5. Meet reporting duties. For German operations, Key Users file the statutory accident report (Unfallanzeige, form U 1000) with a guided wizard from the same data.

Every AI output is a draft or a suggestion. The investigator decides what goes into the record, and the audit trail shows who changed what and when.

Why this matters for ISO 45001

Clause 10.2 of ISO 45001 requires you to react to incidents, investigate causes, implement corrective actions and review their effectiveness. Auditors look for evidence of each step. Because QuickInspect keeps the incident, the analysis, the actions and their completion in one record, the evidence trail exists without extra paperwork, and Key Users can export an ISO 45001 compliance report as a PDF.

Getting started

QuickInspect is free to install on iOS, Android and the web. Reporting incidents and closing actions are included in the Free plan; AI features are part of Standard (€40 per user per month) and Key User (€50). Set up a company, add your team, and run the next investigation with AI as your assistant.