Twenty-four students at nine North American universities begin in September 2026. 

IRVINE, CA —August 26, 2026— EON AI Ventures today announced the Work Intelligence Fellowship, a capstone research program in which university student teams investigate how serious industrial incidents actually happen — and publish what they find back to the institutions and the professionals who took part. The first cohort of twenty-four students, drawn from nine North American universities across ten degree programs, begins in September 2026.

The problem the technology is pointed at

Around 900 people are killed at work every day worldwide — roughly 330,000 deaths a year from workplace accidents, according to International Labour Organization estimates. In oil and gas, more than seven in ten of those accidents involve a human or organisational cause rather than equipment failure: a procedure never practised, expertise that left with a retirement, a permit that did not cover the whole job. The seven causes are documented and familiar to every safety professional in the industry. What is scarce is first-hand, structured evidence of how they keep recurring inside working operations.

Artificial intelligence is being asked hard questions at the moment, and they are fair ones. This program points the same technology at a problem where the measure of success is that fewer people are killed at work — and it does the research in the open, with students’ names on it and every sponsor disclosed.

The program, research model, and underlying Work Intelligence approach are detailed in the accompanying white paper, “Three Shortages, One Mechanism.” 

What the students actually do

Working to a defined research brief under academic supervision, each team conducts structured interviews with operations, safety and training professionals about a single one of the seven causes, and assembles the findings into a sector evidence pack. The packs are returned to the participating institutions and to the professionals who contributed.

Every team is paired with a named EON business development partner who supervises scope and escalation. Students are not employees, are not paid, do not sell and do not discuss commercial terms. They identify their sponsor and the purpose of the research in the first sentence of every approach. The disclosure rule is a condition of participation, not a guideline.

Why now — for universities, and for graduates

The entry-level market has tightened sharply: Federal Reserve Bank of New York data for the second quarter of 2026 put unemployment among recent graduates at about 5.6 per cent and underemployment — graduates working in jobs that never required their degree — at roughly 42 per cent. What most graduates lack is not education. It is something concrete to point at.

The Fellowship is built so that all three sides get something whether or not anything commercial follows. 

• Universities get a client with a brief. 
• Students get named contact with senior industry professionals and a reference letter describing the work they actually did. 
• The industry gets evidence about its own most persistent failures, gathered by people with no product to sell.

“There are fair questions being asked about what artificial intelligence is for. Here is one answer that can be checked: around nine hundred people a day are killed at work, most of it comes down to how the work was planned, judged or done rather than to a machine failing, and that is exactly the part no system has ever recorded. We have spent twenty-five years building the technology to record it. What we have never had enough of is honest conversations about how the work really goes. A student asking a safety manager what actually happens on a bad shift gets a more honest answer — and the answer belongs to the research, not to us,” said DanLejerskar, Founder and Chairman, EON AI Ventures. 

“Every student I meet says the same thing: they want to work on something that matters, and they cannot get in the door to try. This puts them in front of senior people at real operators, on a problem where the stakes are somebody getting home at the end of a shift. Our obligation is supervision — a named partner on every team, a defined deliverable, and a rule about disclosure that nobody gets to bend,” said Anna Lejerskar, Executive Vice President, EON AI Ventures. 

The first cohort is drawn from Purdue, Boston University, Wisconsin,, Ontario Tech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, across ten degree programs.

The mechanism is deliberately portable: nothing in it depends on a particular university, country or industry. Universities interested in hosting a cohort in a future intake can find the program brief, the conduct rules and what is asked of a participating institution at www.eonaiventures.com/fellowship, or write to [email protected].

The full argument — the evidence behind each of the three shortages, the conduct rules, and the conditions under which EON would conclude the program had not worked — is set out in an accompanying white paper, Three Shortages, One Mechanism, available at www.eonaiventures.com/fellowship.

EON AI Ventures expects to extend the program to additional universities and regions during 2027, following review of the first cohort.

Read more in the “Three Shortages, One Mechanism.” white paper.

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About EON AI Ventures

EON AI Ventures is the company behind Work Intelligence (WI), the enterprise’s missing system of record, capturing how work is actually done and turning it into an owned, compounding digital asset. Built on One System Human 2.0 (the vision), the Intelligence Flywheel (the engine), and Work Intelligence (the asset), EON serves enterprises in safety-critical industries worldwide. Founded by the leadership behind EON Reality, with 25 years of experience in immersive learning, EON AI Ventures supports 4,400+ institutional customers across 80+ countries from its headquarters in Irvine, California. For more information, visit www.eonaiventures.com.