Construction Dive Trendline on Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence isn’t just for back office tasks anymore. It increasingly can help make jobsites safer, experts say.

Construction Safety Week, which runs the first week of May every year, provides contractors with an opportunity to pause work and double down on safety. In 2026, those conversations featured more references to AI.

Indeed, builders including Skanska, Turner Construction and Balfour Beatty are already using AI to keep workers safe. 

Skanska’s safety planning helper

Building onto the generative AI boom, Swedish builder Skanska has leveraged its own homegrown solutions, known as its Sidekicks, on its jobsites. 

The contractor revealed its initial Sidekick in February 2024. On release, it was capable of generating answers to help workers with project questions based on a well of Skanska’s proprietary data.

In 2025, the contractor introduced its Safety Sidekick, a generative AI tool that plumbs Skanska’s EHS Manual, OSHA construction standards and supplemental safety documentation.

Currently, Skanska mostly leans on the Safety Sidekick for planning, but it still has reactive use cases, said Brian Karas, national environmental health and safety director for Skanska USA Building. 

“It doesn't leap out your phone and tell you to get off the ladder, but it definitely gives us a leg up in terms of learning from this wealth of information,” Karas said.

To that point, the Safety Sidekick uses data from the company’s jobsites to improve planning and learn from past events. This is on top of a vetting process, where members of the builder’s EHS team review the information and make sure it’s accurate, valuable and timely, Karas said. 

That review process also helps protect against so-called “hallucinations,” where AI tools generate answers that are not based on any real fact or data. 

Mitigating those false outputs meant training the tool to respond “I don’t know” when it does not have the answer, said Will Senner, Skanska USA’s data solutions team leader.

“You know, I won't sit here and definitively claim that we have it 100% perfect, but I think we did a really good job at minimizing potential erroneous answers,” Senner said. “Making sure that the tool will respond to say, ‘I don't have information about that,’ if it's a question that is not in its knowledge base, as opposed to trying to make up an answer that sounds plausible.”

Turner Construction’s SafeT Coach

New York City-based Turner Construction, on the heels of its partnership with OpenAI, has made a tool available that the rest of the construction industry can now also use on jobsites across the country, the contractor shared in May 2026.

Known as SafeT Coach, the generative AI tool is trained on Turner’s environmental, health and safety database and gives builders plain-language answers to questions. The current version was built in OpenAI’s ChatGPT environment, while the next will be in Google’s Gemini, which will give builders the ability to select whichever tool they prefer. There will also be two versions, one for internal Turner use and one for external use.

One superintendent, according to the news release, used SafeT Coach to ask whether a vertical shaft qualified as a permit-required confined space. SafeT Coach, in response, generated a decision flow chart, a start-of-day permit checklist and policy citations, which helped the superintendent have a safety conversation with a trade partner’s safety manager. 

Since the initial pilot, SafeT Coach has logged more than 25,000 interactions with Turner staff, trade partners and field teams.

Balfour Beatty’s smart alarm

London-based infrastructure builder Balfour Beatty knows how dangerous roadside jobsites can be — for 2025’s Safety Week, the firm recognized traffic as construction’s fifth fatal risk.

On those jobsites, heavy equipment operators have a lot to worry about, said Jason Sikora, construction manager for Balfour Beatty's infrastructure work in the Southeast.

“So, the operator has to worry about the GPS telling him what to do. He's got to worry about the traffic next to him. He's got to worry about the people on the ground, the other equipment moving around, like a roller,” Sikora said.

That’s where Balfour Beatty makes use of equipment manufacturer Caterpillar’s Cat Detect system. Amid all that movement, the system uses intelligent cameras to track people who go near heavy machinery. If they get too close, the system sounds the alarm. 

The sensor, Sikora said, is based on speed and movement, with scaling alarms that heighten as a person gets closer to the machine. It’s like a regular backup camera, Sikora explained, that can differentiate between a person and an inanimate object. When a person breaks into preset ranges, an alarm, visual indicator or both will activate.

For the people on the ground, there may also be an alarm affixed to the equipment to get their attention, a big help on a roadside jobsite where the noise of passing traffic, heavy equipment and other distractions may drown out one source of noise.

With that in mind, however, Sikora was still adamant that the person was ultimately the focal point for making safety decisions. He echoed a sentiment he’d heard that a human brain was the best computer in the world.

“So we want to give the person in that seat all the information we can, and they're going to make the right choice,” Sikora said.