CEO of FYLD, Shelley Copsey, shares insights on 2024 AI roadmap plans

FYLD continues its mission to revolutionise field workforce activities in the infrastructure sector. With our proprietary algorithms having analysed over 500,000 worksites, our AI-powered predictive analytics are reshaping our customers’ operations.

In this blog, I’ll provide a glimpse into our 2024 product roadmap as we harness the power of data to drive our mission forward. 

FYLD offers more than just surface-level fixes or point solutions masquerading as comprehensive platforms. Our approach is rooted in modern data-led methodologies, providing a transformative but intuitive way of working for field workforce operations. FYLD enables our customers to achieve enhanced productivity of over 8% within just 6 weeks, resulting in increased availability, speed, and quality of work delivered. What I love most about FYLD is hearing from our customers how it transforms their operational outcomes without needing a complex implementation project!

Across the UK Water Sector, we are seeing a direct and tangible impact on the performance of  Outcome Delivery Incentive, with FYLD-enabled teams reducing leakage and pollution events. Across construction, FYLD is supporting teams to understand and mitigate project delays, with a direct impact on project cost and margins. In the energy sector, we are enabling stronger operational performance by embedding state of the art safety technology into entire operational workflows, so every team member returns home safely everyday.

Let’s dive into that roadmap!

Situational awareness – where should I focus my attention?

Let’s start with safety.  Across the range of industries in which our customers operate, the commonality we see is that great leaders want every team member to go home safely every day. No exceptions.

When we launched our groundbreaking AI driven Video Risk Assessment (VRA) to the infrastructure sector in 2022, we changed the way operations and safety leaders thought about keeping people safe on dangerous work sites. We are really proud of the impact this product feature has made – we’ve won numerous awards for it, and a longitudinal study with SGN showed a 19.5% reduction in incidents and injuries in the field, with FYLD being the only key variable changed across the study.

But at FYLD we don’t stand still. We recognise the dynamic nature of industrial worksites, and are continuously evolving our capabilities to predict operational deviations and preempt safety risks in real-time. Through our data sets, we are learning how to predict if a day is progressing as planned, or if operations are going off track. We’re learning how to spot job anomalies from data our field workers are sharing with us as the day progresses. Because the risk of a safety incident or injury occurring is much higher when jobs fail to progress as planned. 

• By implementing a platform-oriented approach and making FYLD the core platform for our customers’ daily operations, we are revolutionising how safety is managed on worksites. 
• Safety is no longer managed at a point in time. We use AI to help field workers understand when site safety may have changed, for example through identifying a potential new risk when a worker submits some evidence of job progress. We prompt them to reassess risk and lower the risk of incident and injury on site.
• As my journey at FYLD progresses, I’m creating  a legacy of complete transformation in site safety within the infrastructure sector. I look forward to the day when more workers testify that, thanks to FYLD, they feel assured of returning home safely after every day’s work. 

Efficient and effective operations have always been at the heart of FYLD.  

We know the pressures our customers are facing – skilled labour shortages, cost blow outs through inflation, regulatory pressures to get costs down in both the utilities sector, and with our infrastructure customers’ PPP projects.  

We know the pain of the CIO, with a huge build up of point solutions from the first wave of digitisation – products that don’t easily integrate into the broader tech stack, products that throw off data that’s difficult to join up in a meaningful way, products that provide insight into their organisation’s operational leadership.  

Today marks a pivotal moment for CIOs in shaping the future of their tech stacks. While AI has been a buzzword for years, its true potential in enhancing operational delivery has materialised recently with the rise of generative AI. At FYLD, we recognise that generative AI is just one component of the AI tech stack, but one that has spurred the infrastructure sector into assessing the broader promise of AI to drive substantial operational efficiencies. 

• Platforms play a crucial role in realising the promise of AI for customers. At FYLD, we take a holistic approach, optimising entire day-to-day operations without resorting to gimmicks. 
• Our AI-driven solutions have tangible benefits, such as preventing accidents like overhead cable strikes during highway maintenance, predicting jobs becoming blocked, and standing time before it occurs. 
• We achieve these benefits by applying a range of AI technologies but also by ensuring that our customers are delivering entire workflows using the FYLD platform.  This enables AI to be deeply embedded into work processes, resulting in transformational outcomes.

When done right, AI is an incredibly powerful point solution and on occasion we think like that.  

Many of our customers have adopted the FYLD platform largely because of high numbers of service strikes happening during maintenance work – which proved both dangerous and very expensive especially in industries with tight margins.  They saw the power of the FYLD’s proprietary computer vision algorithms, which have been trained on complex industrial sites, to stop these strikes in their tracks.  Upon deployment, the FYLD platform effectively identified and prevented potential service strikes, resulting in zero incidents over several months for multiple customers. This success exemplifies FYLD’s commitment to leveraging AI to enhance safety and operational efficiency.

Another customer, a major UK gas distribution company, realised significant value through a FYLD implementation by using job blockers. By giving their workforce the power to capture data around delays on site, they recorded that over 52,000 hours were wasted because workers were unable to safely cordon-off work sites due to a lack of boards and barriers, leading to additional travel and equipment pickups. Identifying this gap enabled them to make proactive changes to equipment in vans, ensuring delays were minimised.

FYLD is at the forefront of innovation for optimising field work activities in the infrastructure sector, catalysing transformative change by seamlessly integrating AI into entire workflows. With a product strategy deeply grounded in data-led operational and safety excellence, we empower our customers to preempt risks, thereby preventing them from impacting field operations. 

Looking ahead to forthcoming platform developments in 2024, I am excited to announce predictive work outcomes. This will see our platform become even more intelligent and insightful, with remote managers given lead indicators of specific jobs or operations at risk of non delivery.  It’s all part of our mission to ensure that every FYLD customer safely delivers ALL of their operational activities with maximum efficiency.