Adam Aronson, Arrowsight Inc. CEO: ‘Our Mission is to Provide Tools to Improve Performance and Maintain Safety’

“Training can only go so far; even employees with years of experience are also susceptible to a variety of risks.”

If you spend every workday sitting in front of your computer with the occasional walk to the break room to top off your coffee, safety likely isn’t an issue that’s top of mind. Yet, for millions of workers across the globe, their jobs can put them in some extremely high-risk environments where valuing safety can mean the difference between life and death.

In light of the foregoing, we’re thrilled to present Arrowsight Inc.

Arrowsight provides secure tools and strategic solutions anchored to excellent and longstanding service relationships with client partners across a broad spectrum of global industries. Its goal is to continuously promote achievements in safety, quality, compliance, and financial performance.

The company pioneered hybrid Remote Video Auditing (RVA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions and continues to advance its proprietary software and hardware capabilities with an open platform.

Arrowsight integrates with a diverse array of converging technologies: onsite wired or mobile video cameras, Digital Recording Devices (DVRs), and new technology such as motion sensors and machine learning or computer vision algorithms, based on client needs.

The experience for Arrowsight’s client partners begins with an in-depth review of baseline assessment of protocol compliance rates followed by swift and efficient implemented solutions that provide significant performance gains in just a few weeks, which are then sustained permanently and lead to a continuous improvement culture.

Adam Aronson, Arrowsight Inc. CEO spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Please help us understand the current market landscape.

Companies around the world in many industries continue to struggle with ensuring that their work teams adhere to safety and operational protocols. To address this, Arrowsight built a robust technology and service platform that empowers front line supervisors with hybrid RVA and AI services and reporting tools that provide precise and actionable performance metrics of their workers. Arrowsight solutions are widely used in the food protein industry, healthcare, and, more recently, in the construction services sector.

How is your company positioned in the current market scenario?

Arrowsight is very well positioned as the market leader of hybrid RVA and AI solutions due to its scalable business of reviewing over 75,000 audits per day with remote human annotation specialists serving clients in eight countries around the world.

What are the pain points of the industry addressed by the company?

The three sectors we work in, food manufacturing, healthcare, and construction, all have unique risk management challenges. Food companies need to prevent food recalls and undercover videos of animal abuse. Hospitals need to avoid “never events,” which are a shortlist of preventable medical errors such as wrong-site surgeries and hospital-acquired infections. Construction firms need to prevent severe, life-changing workplace injuries.

What are the differentiating factors that set your company apart from its competitors?

While many companies sell camera technology and software, there aren’t any fully integrated companies that also include robust 24/7/365 remote monitoring of safety and productivity applications using a combination of human video specialists and AI tools. Arrowsight also has extensive scale experience in the three sectors it serves.

A brief overview of the products and services Arrowsight offers.

In addition to providing a comprehensive suite of proprietary RVA and AI services and reporting tools, Arrowsight also has a subsidiary company called Arrowsight Sentinel that builds and services specialty portable video cameras and sensor technologies. The way RVA services work is that Arrowsight uses a combination of proprietary AI tools and human “auditors” to remotely review and assess client-defined safety protocols on a sampled basis and then provide automated performance reports that show safety compliance rates to front line supervisors in web-based Microsoft Power BI reports that include links to any flagged videos of non-compliance. Front line supervisors are required to review the daily reports and annotate “agree/disagree” with all the flagged videos. The entire program is designed and deployed in a non-punitive fashion, which is why it has garnered strong support from workers and unions.

Arrowsight Collaborates with Posillico Civil

By leveraging lightweight onsite portable cameras, Arrowsight partnered with Joseph D. Posillico III (one of the owners of Posillico Civil) and his team, to develop customized workplace safety RVA and AI-assisted solutions that enable construction organizations to collect safety performance metrics of their employees easily.

The majority of the focus is on reducing the risk of severe injuries that are caused by workers being too close to energized equipment, workers touching or standing underneath suspended live loads, and workers not following fall protection protocols.

“All the performance data generated by Arrowsight’s program is made available in web-based Microsoft Power BI data mining reports that allow our frontline supervisors to analyze specifically what kinds of safety challenges exist in every work zone, on every job site, and to review all flagged videos,” Joe Posillico III stated.

Brief us about the journey of the company from its inception to date.

In the early 2000s, I had an idea to bring the use of video analytics in sports to the business world. We refer to this concept as “Game Film for Business.” We started the company in 2002 and decided to focus first on the US meat industry due to it being a massive industry with a heavy focus on preventing food recalls and avoiding undercover animal abuse videos. Between 2002 to 2007, Arrowsight was an R&D concern developing the technology, building a first remote video auditing center, and working with meat companies to identify work zones to install cameras that could reduce the risk of food recalls and undercover animal abuse videos. In 2008, we began commercially selling our services and within several years, began to gain a lot of traction with most of the large meat companies in the US. We currently service meat production facilities in the US and Canada that produce more than 60 percent of North American meat products and also serve clients around the world in eight countries.

In the mid-2000s, we began working with hospitals and steadily built up a robust business assisting hospitals to prevent patient injuries. See below for more details on healthcare and also construction.

Arrowsight was very well funded with over $90M of capital invested by a terrific group of qualified strategic investors, many of whom own or run businesses in the markets we serve.

Who are some of your biggest clients? In which vertical do you see the most traction?

The following clients have done joint press with us that makes them referenceable. There are many other large companies we serve that are not listed here. The meat industry is currently the largest vertical. Still, we expect the US construction sector to eventually be the most significant sector since the size of the industry is $1.2T/YR vs. the US meat sector, which is $170B/YR.

• Tyson, Cargill, JBS, OSI, Northwell Health, UMPC, Posillico Civil

Case studies to highlight the story:

Food industry:

• The largest global meat company, JBS, was able to reduce their E. Coli rates in the meat products by 60% when we did the initial rollout of our services in 2011 by getting the workers to achieve 99.7%+ compliance on food safety practices. This story was widely reported in the press, including a WSJ article.

Healthcare:

• There have been many peer-reviewed medical journal studies published about how Arrowsight RVA services have been used to improve patient safety in hospitals. Notable studies include the 2016 BMJ Quality & Safety journal, which reported how Arrowsight RVA services reduced the risk of wrong-site surgeries and surgical site infections by achieving 95%+ compliance by the surgical teams following essential safety protocols.

Construction:

• In 2018, a large diversified construction firm called Posillico Civil performed foundation construction services at a job site on 45 Broad St in lower Manhattan for an 80-story building. The job site was very tight and challenging, with a 60X150 footprint work site. This foundation project required the Posillico team of dock builders to drive 100+ piles using three large drill rigs, which were augmented by excavators and lulls. The work site had significant safety challenges with a steep sloping grade, muddy conditions, and very little room for error when driving piles given that the building site was situated between two other existing tall city buildings. For piles being driven on the edges of the foundation site, the giant drill rigs were often just feet away from the adjacent buildings.

In the summer of 2018, Posillico Civil began an RVA workplace safety pilot program with Arrowsight that was funded by Posillico’s insurance carrier.

The main focus of the pilot program was to reduce the risk of severe, life-changing injuries. For the phase of foundation work that Posillico performed at 45 Broad St, the two main areas of risk of an acute injury were being struck by a large machine (energized equipment) or having a suspended live load fall on workers. For this pilot, Arrowsight provided five portable cameras that were put up in the morning and taken down at the end of the shift for overnight video exportation to a video recorder, so that the remote human auditors could review the video for safety performance. The pilot program included one month of baseline data collection without any performance feedback, followed by several months of phased-in feedback to significantly improve workplace safety performance.

Within weeks of beginning to receive performance feedback from Arrowsight, Posillico’s team at 45 Broad St. was able to reduce high-risk behaviors from 50% of the time to less than 5% of the time. This 90% reduction in risky behavior resulted in no recordable injuries on the job site from the time the cameras were installed, to the end of the Posillico’s time on the job site. Towards the end of the job, there was a near miss that occurred in which a live load of drill rods being transferred across the worksite fell to the ground when a 15-ton Crosby Shackle broke, and the load of drill rods crashed to the ground without striking any workers. The workers asked their supervisor to call the owners of both Posillico and Arrowsight to thank them for instituting the program. The workers believe if the program had not been implemented, their behaviors of many years would have continued, and there would have been workers either under the load or touching the load. The workers credit the camera program for changing their behaviors, and no one getting seriously hurt when the rigging failed.

In 2019, Posillico Civil steadily expanded Arrowsight’s services to the majority of its job sites, which include tunneling work, bridge repair, retaining wall work, road repair, and materials plants. As more sites came online throughout the year, Posillico reported a ~50% reduction in the cost of insurance claims.

What is the road map ahead?

Arrowsight continues to expand its food manufacturing services to many countries around the world. In the US, we see strong growth in healthcare and even stronger growth opportunities in construction. Additionally, Arrowsight continues to build and deploy new hybrid AI and human video annotation service applications across all industry sectors. In the next 1-2 years, Arrowsight also anticipates expanding its service offerings to workplace safety in other high hazard sectors, security guard replacement services, and joint partnerships with commercial fleet vehicle telematics firms who need 3rd party human annotation services.

“All the performance data generated by Arrowsight’s program is made available in web-based Microsoft Power BI data mining reports that allow our frontline supervisors to analyze specifically what kinds of safety challenges exist in every work zone, on every job site, and to review all flagged videos.”

Joseph D. Posillico III, one of the owners of Posillico Civil