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Dive Brief:
- Turner Construction is opening its artificial intelligence-based safety tool for use by the broader construction industry.
- The New York City-based contractor will allow other building professionals to access SafeT Coach, Turner’s AI-powered safety assistant, free of charge, according to a Monday announcement shared with Construction Dive.
- SafeT Coach acts as a virtual safety consultant, where users can ask plain language questions and receive answers based on Turner’s environmental, health and safety framework as opposed to the broader internet, according to the release.
Dive Insight:
SafeT Coach emerged from Turner’s AI Innovation Challenge, a companywide initiative meant to help Turner employees create and prototype their own AI solutions. Turner emphasized that push via its “wall-to-wall” partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
To that end, SafeT Coach is a custom tool deployed within OpenAI’s ChatGPT environment, Maria Pantelaros, Turner’s director of innovation, told Construction Dive via email. The next version will be on Google’s Gemini platform. Using both platforms will allow builders to use whichever service they are more comfortable with.
“This is a tool that essentially 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 photo, speak into and it coaches you,” said Steve Spaudling, senior vice president and chief environmental health and safety officer for Turner.
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 extended jobsite use and an independent external review by a risk partner, prior to its public release. Since the initial pilot, SafeT Coach has logged more than 25,000 interactions with Turner staff, trade 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 of the firm. Turner won’t have visibility into the data that external users enter, Pantelaros said. On the internal side, Turner operates within what it calls a secure enterprise environment with strict data controls, Pantelaros added.
“The goal was to get this to the frontline workforce so that, say they build a scaffolding, they can take a photo of it and it will tell them, ‘Everything’s aligned,’ or, ‘Hey, you may need to look at the toe boards, you may need to look at the cross bracing,’” Spaulding said.
The tool has already paid off on Turner jobsites. For example, Darren Dreas, a superintendent for Turner on a higher-education lab, used SafeT Coach to ask whether a vertical shaft qualified as a permit-required confined space.
The AI tool generated a decision flow chart, a start-of-day permit checklist and policy citations, which enabled the construction team to have an informed conversation with the trade partner’s safety manager, per the builder.
Turner, the largest contractor in the U.S. by revenue, announced the release of SafeT Coach as part of Construction Safety Week, which runs May 4-8. Spaulding said Turner jobsites this week will host QR codes where workers can download the app.
