Before I joined construction technology, I spent years in healthcare tech, an industry where the stakes of getting software wrong are never abstract. A missed alert, a gap in documentation, a workflow that moves faster than the person using it: the impact of an error is life or death. When I moved to construction technology, that weight remained. Different industry, same responsibility. Build it right, stay safe, take care of others, or someone gets hurt.
That's the lens I bring to safety product development at Procore. And it's the lens I want to bring to this moment, because as an industry, we are at an inflection point.
AI is on jobsites. It is less a question of if your company will deploy it, and more a question of how your company and your teams will adopt it. AI is changing how everyone writes, communicates, and learns. Companies are being challenged to think of how to be thoughtful about AI’s role to create the most connection, understanding and compliance on the jobsite. When employed well, it will help create safer jobsites. When not well considered, it has the potential to create serious misunderstanding and risk on the jobsite.
Lifting the administrative burden
The counterweight to that risk is not more technology. It is trust. And trust does not build itself. It is built in the moments when a leader chooses the jobsite over the inbox.
The strongest risk mitigation strategy on any jobsite is a field or safety leader who knows their crew. Who is first to walk up and introduce themselves on a new site. Who notices when someone seems off. Research across high-hazard industries consistently shows that teams with high psychological safety, where workers feel they can speak up without fear of retribution, see meaningful reductions in safety incidents (Edmondson, updated 2023).
Today safety leaders and field teams are at risk of spending their days compiling reports, chasing down safety paperwork, and reconciling data across disconnected systems, instead of taking advantage of critical opportunities to teach and learn in person. Safety professionals report spending 58% of their time in the office and only 30% of their time in the field (BCSP, 2024).
That is where AI can earn its place. Aggregating data across projects, helping to surfacing patterns that would take a human days or weeks to find, flagging hazards before they become a near-miss, identifying a worker whose certification is about to expire before it becomes a liability on a live site. Technology can give teams extra eyes and ears on the jobsite, helping safety professionals act faster and in a more coordinated way, and get back to the work that only they can do.
When AI becomes an extra set of eyes
Even the most present safety leader cannot be everywhere at once. That is not a failure of effort, it is a reality of scale. And it is exactly where thoughtfully built technology starts to earn its place.
Two examples where we are developing this kind of support within Procore:
Getting eyes on risk across every site, not just the one you’re standing on
Research has identified lax housekeeping as one of the most frequently occurring major hazards in construction incident data, alongside scaffold falls and trench hazards (Al Shaaili et al., Heliyon, 2023). A safety leader cannot be on every floor of every building. But when photos captured in the field can be analyzed to surface tidiness concerns and prompt a conversation, that is technology doing what it should: extending reach without replacing judgment.
Identifying where training gaps are hiding in plain sight
Every hazard assessment is only as complete as the experience behind it. Workers who are earlier in their careers, or stepping onto an unfamiliar site, are more likely to miss risks in their planning, not from carelessness, but because some hazards only become visible once you have seen them before. We are developing capabilities that can review hazard assessments, and help detect gaps and surface potential risks that may have been overlooked, giving field leaders a second layer of review without creating another bottleneck.
The goal in both cases is the same: give safety leaders better information so they can have better conversations. AI helps surface more possible risks. The human decides and acts with more information.
Safety is not a week. It's a way of working.
There's a reason Construction Safety Week exists. Our industry needs a moment to stop, refocus, and recommit to learning. The best safety cultures I've seen don't treat this week as the exception, they treat it as a reflection of how they operate every other week of the year.
At Procore, safety is a full-time investment, in our product thinking, in how we engage with customers, and in the platform we're building. Every capability we introduce into our safety workflows is informed by feedback from the field, because the only output that matters is fewer incidents on the jobsite. The safety profession demands that standard, and so do we.
What we are working toward is a platform that removes the administrative weight so safety leaders can do what only they can: walk the jobsite, build relationships with crews, and create the conditions where every worker feels personally responsible for getting home safe. Not because a system told them to. Because the culture they work in expects it of everyone.
That shift is worth naming. Safety stops being a function when it becomes a shared value. From the superintendent to the newest apprentice, everyone on a jobsite speaks one language: are we doing this safely, and do we know what to do if something goes wrong? Technology can support that. It can reinforce it, but it cannot create it.
The future of safety technology should be in service of that. At Procore, that is the only version of the future we are building toward.
To see how Procore Safety is built for prevention, visit explore our safety solutions or book a demo with our team.
Sources:
Board of Certified Safety Professionals (BCSP). Safety, Health & Environment (SH&E) Industry Salary and Workforce Survey. 2024. bcsp.org
Edmondson, A.C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Updated research, 2023. Wiley.
Al Shaaili, M., Al Alawi, M., Ekyalimpa, R., Al Mawli, B., Al-Mamun, A., & Al Shahri, M. Near-miss accidents data analysis and knowledge dissemination in water construction projects in Oman. Heliyon, 9(11), e21607. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21607
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