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Artificial intelligence is no longer just for back office tasks. Increasingly it can help make workplaces safer, experts say.
Construction safety weekwhich runs through Friday, gives contractors a chance to stop work and double down on safety. This year, those conversations will include more references to AI.
In fact, builders such as Skanska, Turner Construction and Balfour Beatty are already using AI keep workers safe.
Skanska Safety Planning Assistant
Building on the generative boom in artificial intelligence, Swedish builder Skanska has leveraged its own homegrown solutions, known as Sidekicks, on its jobsites.
The contractor revealed his initial Sidekick in February 2024. Upon launch, it was able to generate answers to help workers with project questions based on a data well owned by Skanska.
In 2025, the contractor introduced its Safety Sidekick, a generative AI tool that feathers Skanska EHS ManualOSHA building standards and supplemental safety documentation.
Currently, Skanska relies primarily on the Safety Sidekick for planning, but it still has reactive use cases, said Brian Karas, national director of environmental health and safety for Skanska USA Building.
“It doesn’t pull out the phone and tell you to get off the ladder, but it definitely gives us an advantage in terms of learning that much information,” Karas said.
To this end, Safety Sidekick uses data from the company’s workplaces to improve planning and learn from past events. That’s in addition to a verification process, where members of the builder’s EHS team review the information and make sure it’s accurate, valuable and timely, Karas said.
This review process also helps protect against so-called “hallucinations,” where AI tools generate answers that aren’t based on any real facts or data.
Mitigating those false results meant training the tool to answer “I don’t know” when it doesn’t have the answer, said Will Senner, Skanska USA’s data solutions team leader.
“You know, I’m not going to sit here and say definitively that we have it 100 percent perfect, but I think we’ve done a really good job of minimizing potential wrong answers,” Senner said. “Make sure the tool will respond by saying, ‘I don’t have information about that,’ if it’s a question that’s not in its knowledge base, rather than trying to invent an answer that sounds plausible.”
Turner Construction SafeT Trainer
Turner Construction, based in New York City, after its partnership with OpenAIhas made available a tool that the rest of the construction industry can now also use on job sites across the country, the contractor shared Monday.
Known as SafeT Coach, the generative AI tool is trained on Turner’s environment, health and safety database and provides builders with answers in plain language to questions The current version was built in OpenAI’s ChatGPT environment, while the next one will be in Google’s Gemini, which will give builders the ability to select their preferred tool. There will also be two versions, one for Turner’s internal use and one for external use.
A superintendent, according to the news release, used SafeT Coach to ask if a vertical shaft qualified as a permit-required confined space. SafeT Coach, in response, generated a decision flow diagram, start-of-day permission checklist, and policy citations, which helped the superintendent have a safety conversation with a business partner’s safety officer.
Since the initial pilot, SafeT Coach has logged more than 25,000 interactions with Turner staff, business partners and field teams.
Balfour Beatty Smart Alarm
London-based infrastructure builder Balfour Beatty knows how dangerous road jobs can be, for last year’s Safety Week the company recognized traffic as the fifth deadliest construction hazard.
On these jobsites, heavy equipment operators have a lot to worry about, said Jason Sikora, construction manager for Balfour Beatty’s Southeast infrastructure works.
“So the operator has to worry about the GPS telling him what to do. He has to worry about the traffic next to him. He has to worry about the people on the ground, the other equipment moving, like a roller,” Sikora said.
This is where Balfour Beatty makes use of the Cat Detect system from equipment manufacturer Caterpillar. Amidst all this movement, the system uses smart cameras to track people approaching the heavy machinery. If they get too close, the system sounds the alarm.
The sensor, Sikora said, is based on speed and movement, with scale alarms that increase as a person approaches the machine. It’s like a regular security camera, Sikora explained, that can tell the difference between a person and an inanimate object. When a person enters preset ranges, an alarm, a visual indicator, or both will be activated.
For people on the ground, there can also be an alarm placed on the equipment to get their attention, a big help on a road work site where the noise of passing traffic, heavy equipment and other distractions can drown out a noise source.
However, with this in mind, Sikora was still adamant that the person was ultimately the focal point for making security decisions. He echoed a sentiment he had heard that a human brain was the best computer in the world.
“So we want to give the person in that seat as much information as we can, and they’re going to make the right decision,” Sikora said.
