WorkSafe Victoria is funding an AI pilot inside return to work decisions

WorkSafe Victoria has announced a Return to Work Innovation Trials pilot with an explicit AI component. Dr Mary Wyatt of RTW Matters has been funded to test an AI-enabled tool that gives employers practical guidance and evidence-based suggestions when they are navigating complex return to work decisions. It is the first project under the program to name artificial intelligence as the mechanism, rather than a redesigned process or a new consultation model. This blog covered the underlying program on 3 September, when WorkSafe Victoria opened a $1.25 million funding round for organisations willing to trial new approaches to return to work. That round was framed around program evidence: baseline metrics, implementation records, a mid-trial review, and a final evaluation. The AI pilot is the first concrete output of that funding call, and it puts a decision-support tool directly inside the part of the RTW process PCBUs already find hardest to document consistently, working out what suitable duties look like for a specific worker, and when a plan needs to change. The point worth pausing on is what an AI suggestion actually is inside a workers' compensation file. It is a recommendation, not a decision, and it is not evidence that a decision was made properly. If a tool suggests a set of duties or a review timeframe, a PCBU that simply accepts the output has not created a record of consultation, of the worker's input, or of why that suggestion was accepted or varied for this person. The suggestion sits upstream of the same requirement WHSQ set out this same week: return to work plans that are built with people, not for people, and are evidenced as such. The practical read for anyone whose RTW process might eventually touch a tool like this, whether through WorkSafe Victoria's trial or a commercial product built on the same idea, is to treat the output as one input to a decision, not the decision itself. What still needs to be recorded is unchanged: who was consulted, what alternatives were considered, why a particular set of duties was chosen, and when it will be reviewed. An AI recommendation with no accompanying record of that reasoning is not a stronger position than no tool at all, it is simply a faster way to arrive at the same undocumented decision.