# Keynote Case Study: National Safety Council: 15,000 Safety Professionals. A Warning About Accelerating Risk.
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The National Safety Council conference is the largest gathering of occupational health and safety professionals in the world. More than 15,000 of them showed up when I spoke to them, and I opened by telling them the old safety playbook was already out of date. New hazard types were emerging faster than legacy safety assumptions could keep up. That was the challenge behind the keynote, "The Future of Safety and Risk," which walked through what's actually changing on the floor and in the field: industrial IoT, collaborative robotics, virtualized work, advanced materials, and predictive safety. The short version: safety used to run on compliance and hindsight. It's becoming a data business, built on connected sensors, cobots, and analytics that catch problems before they turn into incidents. Six trends are driving that shift. Connected Workplace. Sensors and device connectivity are making safety visible in real time. Industrial IoT. Machines, systems and assets are generating new streams of operational and risk data. Collaborative Robotics. Cobots and automation create new productivity opportunities and new safety requirements. Advanced Materials. New materials and new processes introduce unfamiliar risk profiles that must be managed early. Virtualized Work. Remote operations, augmented interfaces and digital workflows are changing the nature of work. Predictive Safety. Analytics are helping organizations move from reactive reporting toward proactive intervention. The future of safety is connected, predictive and fast moving. This isn't a one-off theme for me. The future of risk is something I return to often on stage, from the Zurich Insurance Global Risk Management Summit to the Governance, Risk and Control Conference. You can browse more of that work here.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/09/national-safety-council-15000-safety-professionals-a-warning-about-accelerating-risk/