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Dive brief:
- Turner Construction opens up its AI-based safety tool for use by the general construction industry.
- The New York City-based contractor will let other construction professionals access SafeT Coach, Turner’s AI-powered safety assistant, for free, according to an announcement shared Monday with Construction Dive.
- SafeT Coach acts as a virtual security consultantwhere users can ask questions in plain language and receive answers based on Turner’s environmental, health and safety framework rather than the wider Internet, according to the release.
Diving knowledge:
SafeT Coach was born Turner’s AI Innovation Challengea company-wide initiative aimed at helping Turner employees build and prototype their own AI solutions. Turner emphasized that the push through his “wall-to-wall partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
To that end, SafeT Coach is a custom tool deployed in OpenAI’s ChatGPT environment, Maria Pantelaros, Turner’s chief innovation officer, told Construction Dive via email. The next release will be on Google’s Gemini platform. Using both platforms will allow builders to use whichever service they feel most comfortable with.
“This is a tool that basically takes all of Turner’s EHS policies and processes, procedures along with the OSHA standard, and gives you a tool on your cell phone that you can take a picture with, talk to, and that teaches you,” said Steve Spaudling, Turner’s senior vice president and chief environmental health and safety officer.
Turner advanced SafeT Coach through a collaborative design process and field pilots with more than 80 stakeholders, according to the announcement. The AI was validated through widespread use in the workplace and an independent external review by a venture partner, before its public release. Since the initial pilot, SafeT Coach has logged more than 25,000 interactions with Turner staff, business partners and field teams.
With the public release, SafeT Coach will have two versions: one for internal Turner use and one for external use outside the company. Turner will not have visibility into the data entered by external users, Pantelaros said. Internally, Turner operates within what it calls a secure business environment with strict data controls, Pantelaros added.
“The goal was to bring it to the front-line workforce so that, say, they’re building a scaffold, they can take a picture of it and say, ‘Everything is lined up,’ or, ‘Hey, you might need to look at the footboards, you might need to look at the cross bracing,'” Spaulding said.
The tool has already paid off at Turner’s workplaces. For example, Darren Dreas, a Turner superintendent at a higher education lab, used SafeT Coach to ask if a vertical shaft qualified as a permit-required confined space.
The AI tool generated a decision flow diagram, start-of-day permission checklist and policy citations, which allowed the construction team to have an informed conversation with the business partner’s security officer, according to the builder.
Turner, the largest US contractor by revenueannounced the launch of SafeT Coach as part of Construction Safety Week, which will take place May 4-8. Spaulding said Turner jobs this week will host QR codes where workers can download the app.
