Mitchell Services Unlocks Safety Insights with AI-Powered Risk Management

Mitchell Services is Australia’s most diverse drilling company, operating in high-risk environments across the mining and resources sector. With over 750 employees and 35 projects, they recognized the importance of proactive and reliable risk management to meet client expectations and achieve a fatality-free workplace. Their leadership sought to strengthen the effectiveness and resilience of critical controls to prevent serious harm even when work conditions changed or unexpected variations occurred. Mitchell Services faced the challenge of identifying gaps in their critical risk management and determining if, when incidents occurred, they were failing safely or just getting lucky. They needed to assess their safety performance against critical control standards and prioritize their critical risks effectively. To address this, they collaborated with Libero AI and The University of Queensland in 2025 to analyze their safety performance using the CaNeTA method. To improve results, CaNeTA was augmented with IBM® watsonx.ai® on the process front-end to prepare data and causally link events, and IBM watsonx Orchestrate® on the process back-end to enhance data analysis and insights generation. 
 

To address the challenges in their safety management, Mitchell Services, in collaboration with Libero AI and The University of Queensland, embarked on a groundbreaking project. By leveraging the Causal Network Analysis Topology (CaNeTA) method, they aimed to gain a deeper understanding of their operational risks and critical controls. The CaNeTA approach models workplace risks, controls, and consequences as a dynamic causal network, exposing hidden interactions and risk propagation pathways that traditional risk registers often overlook. The project involved a thorough analysis of incident reports from FY24/25 against critical risk standards and risk registers. This analysis utilized various CaNeTA tool sets, including Network Visualisation, Betweenness, Eigenvector Centrality, In-Strength, and Metric Aggregation. These tools provided insights into how incidents propagate through ‘damage’ events, often linked to transportation and logistics, and highlighted critical bridging events such as wildlife interactions and unsecured loads. The analysis also revealed that near misses often resulted from ‘failing lucky’ rather than robust controls. By applying CaNeTA, Mitchell Services gained a nuanced understanding of their risk landscape, enabling them to reframe their risk management strategies. The insights gained from the CaNeTA analysis prompted strategic realignments, including expanding risk oversight beyond core drilling operations and re-establishing transportation, logistics, and maintenance as core critical risk domains. Enhanced Critical Control Verification (CCV) protocols, in the form of Heavy Vehicle Inspections, were introduced to verify the integrity of all critical controls, critical systems and restraints before and after transportation events. The collaboration with Libero AI and The University of Queensland, facilitated by IBM’s support for innovative technologies like CaNeTA, has empowered Mitchell Services to build greater resilience across their operations.

Mitchell Services has strengthened its risk management capability by leveraging IBM’s AI-powered risk management solution, CaNeTA. Using FY24/25 incident and near miss data, the project produced a data-driven mathematical analysis and visualisation that quantified and prioritised preventive actions.

By applying CaNeTA, Mitchell Services identified key risk propagation pathways, including incidents propagating through ‘damage’ events often linked to transportation and logistics. The analysis revealed that wildlife interactions and unsecured loads emerged as critical bridging events, and vehicle incidents and communication failures can have disproportionate downstream safety impacts. These quantified insights enabled Mitchell Services to broaden oversight beyond core drilling operations, re-establish transportation, logistics and maintenance as core critical risk domains, and uplift critical control verification by shifting from presence-based checks to efficacy-based verification, particularly for logistics and transportation activities. Protocols were also enhanced to complete whole-of-system integrity checks before and after transportation events. With these new capabilities, Mitchell Services is better equipped to make informed decisions about risk, energy release and control effectiveness, supporting continued improvement in safety performance and operational resilience.

Mitchell Services is an ASX-listed drilling services provider and is Australia’s most diverse drilling company. For over 50 years, the Mitchell brand has operated in the mining and resources sector. Mitchell Services now has over 80 surface and underground drill rigs, over 750 employees across 35 projects in Australia, and operates in diverse, high-risk environments from remote exploration to underground drilling.

Libero AI is a pioneering company at the forefront of artificial intelligence implementation to enhance business performance for heavy industry. They deploy AI to improve, harness, and leverage data to solve business challenges around safety, maintenance, and operations. Libero AI worked with Mitchell Services and The University of Queensland to implement CaNeTA.