Programme

Fredrik Rosengren opens Industrial Safety 2026 as chair for the day, setting the stage for a day focused on safety, learning, and practical application in high-risk environments. With his extensive experience in EHS, he will guide you through the day’s key themes and create a common thread connecting insights, case studies, and discussions.

We like to believe that we make rational and safe decisions. But in reality, much of our behavior is driven by autopilot, cognitive biases, and mental shortcuts. In safety-critical environments, these biases and our fast-thinking decision system can lead us to underestimate risks, misinterpret signals, and choose risky solutions over safe ones.

Rapidly evolving technologies are creating new layers of complexity for industrial safety leaders. From the electrification of equipment including higher-voltage batteries and new maintenance risks to the growing autonomy of machinery. Organisations are facing new operational hazards, driven by rapid technological change that is putting pressure on EHS practices to continuously adapt. The challenge? Enabling innovation and operational progress without allowing safety to fall behind. In this keynote, Christian Hörnkvist shares his vision on how HSE leaders can strike that balance, stay ahead of technological change, and apply practical lessons from his own experience at Sandvik.

Ensuring that every employee, contractor and visitor understands site-specific safety requirements before entering your facility remains a major challenge for industrial organizations. Traditional classroom sessions and paper-based onboarding processes are time-consuming, difficult to scale and often inconsistent across locations, languages and contractor populations. In this session, you'll discover how organizations such as Fluxys, Ineos and Ysco transformed their safety onboarding and certification processes through digital safety training and pre-arrival certification. Learn how leading industrial companies are reducing administrative workload, improving compliance and creating a safer working environment before a worker even sets foot onsite. Key takeaways: Ensure workers understand critical safety instructions in their own language. Certify employees, contractors and occasional visitors before arrival, even when they are not part of your HR systems. Simplify onboarding for large volumes of external workers without complex user administration or email-based processes. Verify training completion instantly and maintain a reliable audit trail for compliance and recertification. Reduce manual follow-up while standardizing safety knowledge across sites and contractor networks. Explore practical approaches for linking safety certification to site access and visitor registration processes. Walk away with a proven framework for making safety onboarding faster, more scalable and more reliable while strengthening compliance and reducing operational risk.

Collaborative industrial robots have over the last decade promised many new possibilities for automation, allowing close collaboration between robot and human worker. These robots offer small and flexible automation solutions, but despite their name, rarely provide real collaboration. For many types of use cases, safety remains a significant barrier to uptake, and, in the wake of generative AI, we now see a new generation of humanoid robots designed to replace rather than support human workers. In his talk, Billing will present highlights from his own research on close human-robot collaboration, developing robots that adapt to their human colleagues, arguing for a future of automation that still leaves room for human work.