Despite decades of advances in workplace safety, the number of serious injury fatalities (SIFs) at U.S. companies remains alarmingly steady, at around 5,000 each year. In the supply chain, this is more than a safety statistic; it’s a persistent threat to operational stability, worker well-being and business performance. 

To make meaningful progress toward safer workplaces in 2026, environment, health and safety (EHS) teams across the supply chain are preparing for a fundamental shift in how they prevent serious harm. They’re rethinking how it is understood, measured and prevented.

While basic compliance and incident-prevention programs have driven down minor-incident rates in past decades, traditional safety efforts have yielded diminishing returns on serious work injuries. Yearly Bureau of Labor Statistics reports show the industries with the highest rates are consistent: agriculture, construction and transportation and material moving. 

At the same time, organizations are balancing the rise of artificial intelligence and emerging risk contributors such as fatigue and mental health.

At this intersection lies a unique opportunity to radically reduce SIFs, but it requires recalibrating risk across the supply chain. This is according to the Risk Recalibrated: the 2026 Executive Leadership Report, which suggests that leaders will more substantively combat risk with an integrated equation of aligned SIF definitions and metrics, responsible AI adoption and governance and integrated human-centric factors. 

There’s a widening gap between the risks that supply chain operations face and the metrics, systems and definitions used to manage them. Eighty-percent of organizations have SIF prevention programs today. Yet, as every safety team laments, there is no universal SIF definition. Instead, they vary widely, which leads to inconsistent classification across job sites and uneven data. This complicates operational benchmarking and confuses priorities.

Nearly one in five EHS leaders say that traditional safety metrics have no relation to real risk, and more than half say they only partially reflect SIF drivers. This misalignment results in a critical exposure for supply chains that rely on dashboards to prioritize high-hazard work, capacity planning and root-cause analysis.

Standardizing internal definitions and data structures will ensure that safety decisions are based on consistent, comparable information. This is the foundation for reducing incidents.

AI is reshaping how organizations maintain safe workplaces, offering new ways to predict, prevent and respond to risk. Across the supply chain, AI has the potential to support safety teams in detecting potentially unsafe conditions, capturing and classifying incidents, supporting audits and inspections by consolidating and summarizing findings, and connecting information across incidents, inspections, audits and near misses that may point to emerging risks.

While AI use in safety is growing, with 42% now piloting some aspect of the technology, and another 32% exploring use cases, many leaders are slow to adopt due to concerns over data quality and bias (58%), privacy (39%) and a lack of explainability (36%).

The potential for AI to measurably reduce supply chain safety risk is undoubtedly high, but so are the stakes of getting it wrong. Clear guardrails are needed to prevent missing key controls or recommending an unsafe warehousing process. The supply chains that benefit the most from AI will implement strong governance early, including stringent data privacy standards and transparent AI applications.

Traditional safety strategies focus heavily on achieving compliance and examining behaviors after they happen. This approach falls short because real people differ. Human-centric work strategies prioritize employees’ well-being and perspectives, and encourage design processes and workflows that account for everyday human factors such as stress, burnout, fatigue, grief and literacy or language barriers. 

Organizations are increasingly recognizing that these and other human-centric conditions contribute to risk. But most (89%) say these contributors aren’t yet integrated into safety or SIF strategy. Closing this “knowing–doing” gap will require supply chain leaders to modify safety programs by embedding real human variability factors into assessments and workflows, not more parallel initiatives. Greater collaboration among EHS, HR and operations teams will help.

Could 2026 finally be the year we see a meaningful decline in SIFs? These shifts point to a new way of thinking that gives the industry a chance to make real progress. For supply chain leaders, modernizing SIF prevention is no longer just about compliance; it’s about protecting people and the resilience, continuity and performance of the entire network. A safer supply chain is a stronger supply chain, and the path to achieving both is long overdue.

Jonathan English is chief executive officer of Evotix.