Intelex Acquisition Of ehsAI Points To The Practical Success And Scalability Of AI For EHS

Intelex Acquisition Of ehsAI Points To The Practical Success And Scalability Of AI For EHS

On Thursday November 19^th 2020, Intelex, a subsidiary of diversified industrial conglomerate Fortive, announced the acquisition of ehsAI. Established in 2018, ehsAI is led by industry veteran Margery Moore and is headquartered in Canada with approximately 20 employees. The firm has built an artificial intelligence engine which lowers the cost of environmental compliance and has won contracts with customers like APTIM and Mosaic. To facilitate continued rapid innovation and positive engagement with the EHS ecosystem, ehsAI will operate as a standalone business from its HQ in Vancouver. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the ehsAI shareholders preferred the growth potential offered by the deal with Intelex compared to a Series A funding round with a financial investor.

By acquiring ehsAI, Intelex gets its hands on a machine learning application which has proven success in automating the process of translating complex environmental compliance documents into specific compliance requirements. The firm claims customers benefit from cost savings of up to 80% compared to manual coding of regs and permits as well as higher levels of accuracy, complete digitization of paperwork and elimination of duplicated effort for the same site. The practical success of the ehsAI machine learning algorithm is reflected in the willingness of EHS consultancies like AECOM and Jacobs to embed the tool in their workflows. The ehsAI ML engine is also designed to integrate with EHS software applications like Intelex to create compliance action plans and flag non-compliant operations. 

In just two years, ehsAI has proven out the viability of its ML engine to process environmental regs and permits. Its ability to ingest, deconstruct, interpret, index and action complex regulatory documents can be applied to numerous other categories of semi-structured documents. Within the EHS domain these include standard operating procedures, guidelines, management procedures and chemical inventories. The content agnostic design of the ML engine means it has impressive scalability to automate the processing of different document types, non-English text and domains outside EHS. Expansion of the ehsAI footprint will only be limited by factors like customer skepticism about AI and the speed at which the ML engine acquires sufficient accuracy to prove success. By deploying ehsAI to Intelex’s 1,300 EHS software customers the rate of penetration should be greatly accelerated.  

To learn more about the next generation of EHS digital analytics, read our report: Best Practices For EHS Analytics.