[Anchor]

AI technology is now filling blind spots in industrial safety.

Reporter Park Jaehyeon investigates how AI is being utilized for unexpected situations at construction sites and for facility safety management.

[Reporter]

A large-scale building construction site.

Mobile CCTVs are installed everywhere.

The newly introduced safety management AI system analyzes CCTV footage in real time to detect risk factors.

If a worker's abnormal behavior, such as a sudden collapse, is captured, it immediately notifies the control room.

[Collapse event occurred.]

It also sends warnings when dangerous heavy machinery, such as forklifts, approaches or if there is a hazardous area nearby.

[This section is a suffocation risk zone. Please move outside immediately.]

[Min Yeon-gi / Daewoo E&C Site Manager: Since there are severe limitations to human visual monitoring, CCTV constantly monitors blind spots and hazardous areas in real time...]

AI is also used when patrolling roads and inspecting communication facilities.

When a camera mounted on a vehicle detects an excavator, the AI analyzes the level of risk.

[It is extremely close to the overhead cables. It calculates how much impact the cables will take, and then determines the level of danger.]

It also identifies leaning utility poles and sagging cables.

[Bok Jae-won / SK Telecom Network Operations Manager: Over four months, we completed inspections on 50% of the wired infrastructure in the capital area. If humans had to do this one by one, it would take more than about a year and a half...]

Before building a stage, if the blueprint is ported into a virtual environment, a "digital twin," AI analyzes various risk factors such as heavy rain and load concentration, and then suggests improvements.

[Kim Tae-hoon / Sogang University Graduate School of Metaverse: To do things like having a certain number of people perform on stage and running simulations to see where and how vibrations are transmitted and whether bolts could loosen or not...]

At an auto parts manufacturer in the United States, the introduction of a safety AI system reportedly reduced worker injury frequencies by 48%.

The size of the industrial safety AI market is expected to more than double from 3.5 trillion KRW in 2024 to 9.8 trillion KRW by 2030.

(Video by: Kim Hak-mo, Park Hyun-chul | Video Editing by: Yoon Tae-ho | VJ: Lee Ji-hwan | Footage courtesy of: SK Telecom, Sogang University)