Kia (000270.KS) said on the 9th that its Gwangju plant, AutoLand Gwangju, won the top prize at the "2026 AI & Smart Industrial Safety Technology Best Practice Challenge," hosted by the Ministry of Employment and Labor and the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA). Kia said it was recognized for becoming the first in Korea to introduce a smart safety management system incorporating AI technology to prevent safety accidents within automated processes.
Kia's safety management system consists of △fingerprint and NFC-based automatic authentication △a safety door handle locking structure △AI vision-based automatic detection of workers inside the process area. The system prevents equipment from being arbitrarily activated from outside when a worker is inside the process area, and compares the number of workers who entered with the number currently inside in real time, triggering an immediate alarm if the figures do not match.
"This is the result of being recognized for our efforts to directly confront the limitations of the existing worker-dependent safety management approach and improve it with AI and smart technology in order to prevent safety accidents within automated processes," a Kia official said. "We will build a system-centered safety environment that makes it difficult for risks themselves to arise, rather than relying solely on workers' attentiveness."
