Sphera’s 2025 Process Safety Report, published this week, shows that the industrial sector’s safety challenges are deepening despite a decade of digital progress. The global benchmarking study highlights the limits of visibility-led safety management and calls for a shift towards operational resilience — with artificial intelligence now emerging as a pivotal enabler.
Drawing on responses from 300 senior process safety professionals across six industrial economies, the report identifies three converging pressures: aging infrastructure, loss of experience in the workforce, and increasing operational complexity. These factors, Sphera warns, are stretching traditional safety systems to their limits.
Since the report’s first edition in 2016, many companies have migrated from single-purpose tools to integrated, cloud-based platforms. Yet incident reduction has not matched this technological shift. While risk assessment software is now standard, systems capable of predicting and preventing major accident hazards remain far from universal.
“Today, the process safety industry stands at a crossroads,” said Paul Marushka, Sphera’s CEO and president. “Aging infrastructure, workforce attrition and increasing operational complexity are pushing traditional safety solutions to their limits. Leaders must move beyond endorsing safety initiatives to owning them, ensuring that digital systems and AI tools are being carefully embedded to support operational decision-making.”
The report shows that 64% of respondents believe technology is already improving safety outcomes, with 47% using live risk data. Forty-two percent are using or planning to use AI, and nearly a quarter have applied it directly to safety programmes. However, one in three organisations still lack in-house AI expertise — a constraint that risks widening the performance gap between early adopters and laggards.
Partnership models appear to accelerate progress. More than half of surveyed organisations rely on third-party providers for process safety management, and these companies report higher AI adoption (52% versus 29% for in-house programmes) and greater confidence in managing risk. Yet overall confidence in reducing exposure to major accident hazards has dropped sharply — from 35% in 2024 to 27% this year.
Sphera’s tenth annual study suggests that while digitisation has matured the discipline, resilience is now the frontier. Integrating AI across connected safety platforms, rather than deploying it in isolation, will determine whether process industries can translate digital capability into measurable risk reduction over the next decade.
