A safety director on the shifts an agent now works
One safety director for a million square feet running three shifts. Kevin, director of safety at Unique Industries, on what changed when the cameras started covering the hours he could not.
Unique Industries makes party goods. Its Virginia distribution center is a million square feet, with a second building of 400,000 square feet nearby, and it runs around the clock: more than 450 people across three shifts. The person responsible for keeping all of them safe is Kevin, the company's director of safety and asset protection. There is one of him.
The quotes below are from Spot AI's published account of the deployment. They read as a straightforward description of what a video agent is for, from someone with no interest in the technology beyond whether it works.
The problem was hours
"If I'm spending less time looking up video, that's more time for me to be on the floor keeping people safe."
Before the agents, an incident meant finding the right camera and the right time window, then scrubbing through it. The company says investigations that took hours now take minutes. That reads as a productivity statistic until you consider where a safety director spends the recovered hours, which in Kevin's case is on the floor, where the forklifts are.
The agent watches the lanes
The agent Kevin relies on most watches for forklifts and pedestrians getting too close. The standard complaint about camera alerts is that they cry wolf.
The system is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. When we get an alert about a near-miss between a forklift and pedestrian, it's always legitimate.
An alert that is always legitimate is one people keep reading, which is the precondition for everything else the system does. The company reports a 15 percent improvement in safety compliance since the deployment.
Second shift, third shift
The headline comes from this line.
Video AI Agents are my second and third shift safety personnel on-site. They're my extra eyes and hands when I can't be there.
A single safety director cannot be on a night shift and a day shift, and Unique did not hire two more of him. What the agent adds is coverage for the two shifts a day he cannot be on.
The culture question
Warehouse crews are not usually keen on more cameras. Kevin's answer to that is part of why the deployment held.
"Tech goes with safety. It's a help, not a hindrance."
And the line he ends on, which is about the people: "My goal is to take care of the people. When you take care of your people, they take care of you."
At Unique Industries the agent covers two of the three shifts, and the safety director describes it in the same breath as taking care of his crew. If you run safety for a plant, which of your shifts has nobody on it?