🧠 Introduction: The SDS Struggle is real.
You know that stack of dusty Safety Data Sheets living on your server or, worse, in a binder somewhere near the coffee machine? Yeah, the one no one wants to open. That’s the one.
Processing SDSs - extracting useful data from them, making sense of hazard info, keeping everything compliant - is one of those tasks that feels like it belongs in a 1990s office montage. It's manual, tedious, error-prone… and, let's be honest, everyone tends to avoid until audit season rolls around.
But hey, good news: AI is here, and it’s actually (really) useful this time!
🧠 What Do We Even Mean by “Processing SDSs”?
SDSs are like IKEA manuals for chemicals - except they're longer, more cryptic, and if you mess up interpreting one, someone might end up with chemical burns.
Processing an SDS involves:
- Extracting the list of ingredients (and trying to pronounce them)
- Understanding hazard symbols and classifications
- Figuring out what PPE is needed (gloves, masks, hazmat suits, …)
- Ensuring compliance with laws like REACH or CLP
- Making sure webshops have the correct safety information
- Translating the whole thing for your team in Brussels, Bucharest and Beijing
And if your company uses more than a handful of chemical products? That spells a lot of manual work.
🤖 How AI Can Actually Help
Here's where AI shows up like the competent army of interns we all wish we had - working 24/7, never asking for coffee breaks, and somehow complete experts in chemical safety.
1. Reading SDSs Like a Pro (OCR + NLP)
AI can scan and interpret even the weirdest PDF or Word layout. Whether your SDS is a crisp template or a scanned blob from 2007, AI uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to extract the good stuff.
Fair warning: just using off the shelf tools like ChatGPT is not enough to guarantee high enough accuracy or avoid hallucinations. Proper manual validation will still be required.
2. Translating Chemical Jargon
Your AI doesn't just read the SDS - it understands it. It can figure out which phrases indicate flammability, skin irritation, or the need for PPE, even when manufacturers don't make it easy. Bonus: it can translate terms across virtually any language.
3. Generating Summaries That Humans Can Actually Read
Instead of 16 pages of confusing tables, AI can generate a readable safety information card in minutes - short, visual, and understandable to the folks actually handling the chemicals, dramatically increasing safety.
Also here - using general tools will definitely require manual corrections.
4. Calculating Risk Automatically (like RECESS Scores)
AI can take exposure frequency, danger level, and probability, and turn them into risk assessments. Think of it as a safety score for each substance - no more guesswork. Add the exposure and frequency and presto, compliant ánd comprehensive risk analysis report in minutes.
5. Keeping Your Inventory Smart and Synced
AI can help build a live chemical inventory based on
- Uploaded Safety Data Sheets
- Search throughout our huge SDS database
- Agentic online search, our AI will try and find it for you!
You can link across locations or departments, helping you stay organized and compliant easily.
🎯 What’s In It for You, besides winning a lót of time?
- Safer work environments – Employees get the right info, in the right language, on time.
- Fewer mistakes – Because AI doesn’t get distracted by cat videos or snack breaks.
- Less admin, more value – Spend time improving safety instead of formatting Word docs.
- No more last-minute panic audits – Compliance info is updated, stored, and searchable.
- Instant ROI – What used to take hours now takes seconds. Multiply that across all SDSs.
🔍 Real-Life Example: A manufacturing company
Imagine a manufacturing company. They have different plant sites, using different chemicals, each product has its own 15-page SDS in Dutch, French, and "Manufacturer-English."
With NextSDS, they:
- Upload the PDFs, search in our database or have us Google for it
- Instantly generate safety cards in their language
- Know what gloves and masks to wear on which site
- Easily determine RECESS score and risks upfront
- Have easy overview over all production sites
Now they're not just manufacturing, they're manufacturing safely.
🚀 So… How Does NextSDS Actually Do All This?
At NextSDS, we built an AI-powered platform that takes SDS pain and turns it into safety gain:
- Drag, drop, done – Upload your SDS and our AI gets to work.
- Extracts hazards, ingredients, PPE, and regulations like it’s reading a menu.
- Automatically calculates RECESS scores to help with risk assessments.
- Generates clear safety info cards anyone on your team can understand.
- Keeps your chemical inventory accurate, so you can actually find what you’re looking for.
- Integrates with your tools (we’re nice like that).
⚠️ Be careful: simply using a tool like ChatGPT does not guarantee enough accuracy and is prone to hallucinations, let alone streamlining processes.
Our every-improving SDS workflow using a myriad of AI agents can be plotted to the size of a wall for a reason.
⏰ Why Now?
- Because regulations aren’t getting any simpler.
- Because your competitors are probably still printing SDSs.
- Because AI is mature enough to really change everything.
And because we hope you have better things to do than manually comb through SDS documents.
Try it in 2 minutes!
👉 Try NextSDS right now, upload your first SDS and see how magical compliance can feel.
And hey - if you liked this article, consider sharing it with your favorite safety officer! Be their hero.
Want to see how it works?
👉 Book a free demo of the NextSDS platform
👉 Get started for free!