Ambient.ai and NVIDIA Collaborate with Cosmos Reasoning Model to Advance Physical AI for Environmental Health & Safety

At Ambient.ai, we’ve spent years advancing the use of AI and computer vision to deliver intelligent, real-time threat detection that makes physical environments safer. Today, at the SIGGRAPH 2025 conference, NVIDIA announced the expansion of Cosmos Reason, a vision-language model purpose-built for real-world, physical reasoning. I am proud to announce that Ambient.ai is collaborating with NVIDIA to apply Cosmos Reason to Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) use cases across industrial environments. Our goal: to combine Ambient.ai’s production-proven physical security platform with Cosmos Reason’s temporal and physics-aware reasoning to help organizations reduce incidents and respond faster.

Why EHS Matters

Work should never cost a life. Yet global estimates indicate nearly three million people die each year from work-related accidents and diseases, and hundreds of millions sustain non-fatal injuries. In the U.S. alone, there were 5,283 fatal work injuries in 2023 (3.5 per 100,000 FTEs). The National Safety Council estimates $43,000 per medically consulted injury and $1.46M per death in 2023, reflecting wage losses, medical expenses, and employer costs. Layer in climate stressors (e.g., extreme heat) and aging infrastructure, and the case for stronger EHS has never been clearer.

Where Traditional Camera Operations Hit Limits

For years, organizations have relied on two approaches:

1. Traditional monitoring: operators watching banks of cameras and responding to alarms.
2. Traditional AI analytics: first-generation, rule-based/video-frame models (motion, line-crossing, simple object detection).

Both help, but both struggle with EHS, where context, behavior, and timing determine risk.

• Human vigilance declines. Control rooms ask operators to watch dozens of feeds for hours; rare, critical events are easily missed.
• Alarm fatigue is real. Legacy motion rules and basic analytics trigger false alarms (weather, glare, insects), eroding trust and slowing response.
• Brittle to site changes (domain shift). Uniforms, PPE colors, lighting (day/night/IR), seasons, dust, and camera angles vary by facility; models tuned for one site degrade at another without targeted data and calibration.
• Video is temporal; traditional tools are frame-first. Many traditional systems evaluate images in isolation, while EHS questions are sequence-based (e.g., “Was the harness on during ascent?”). Frame-only logic misses the timeline that defines risk.

Why NVIDIA Cosmos Reason Fits EHS

As mentioned before, most EHS questions are temporal: what happened before/after, is an action safe, what’s the likely next outcome? Cosmos Reason is built specifically for physical common sense and embodied decisions. It reasons over short video clips, explains its thinking step-by-step, and was post-trained with supervised “Physical AI” data and reinforcement learning to reward correct physical logic. That makes it a strong fit for use cases where context over time is critical.

• Native temporal & physical reasoning. Consumes short clips (not just images) and uses chain-of-thought to judge what’s safe, what’s risky, and what should happen next. This is ideal for procedure compliance and near-miss prediction.
• Trained for “Physical AI.” Post-trained with physical common-sense and embodied-reasoning data, then refined with reinforcement learning to reward correct physical logic.
• Openly available for evaluation. Cosmos Reason weights and inference code are public, enabling trials in privacy-sensitive environments.

How Ambient.ai Brings It Together

Ambient.ai’s platform integrates with existing cameras and sensors to deliver real-time threat detection, investigation, and outcomes for physical security teams without privacy-invasive techniques like facial recognition. We’ll evaluate Cosmos Reason as the reasoning layer over these signals to deliver explainable, policy-aligned decisions for industrial safety, working closely with NVIDIA to improve EHS outcomes.

If your organization is pursuing EHS improvements in construction, manufacturing, or logistics and want to help shape the next frontier of safety AI, we’d love to talk. Reach out to Ambient.ai to start a conversation.