A second set of eyes on safety compliance
The JHA gets written at 6:15 in the morning, on the tailgate of a truck, by someone who also has a delivery to chase and a crew waiting. It gets copied from last week's sheet with the date...
The problem
The JHA gets written at 6:15 in the morning, on the tailgate of a truck, by someone who also has a delivery to chase and a crew waiting. It gets copied from last week's sheet with the date changed. Nobody means to do that. It is just what happens when the scope shifts daily and the paperwork does not.
The photos have the same problem. Crews take pictures all day for progress and documentation. Almost nobody looks at them for safety. A missing hard hat in the background of a roof photo, an unguarded edge, a cord across a walkway: these show up in the picture and nobody catches them until an inspector or an incident does.
The safety lead cannot be everywhere. On a multi-area job, with a solar array in one place and a building envelope in another, there is more work than eyes.
How the agent workflow works
The agent does two jobs, and both end with a person.
Job one: drafting the JHA. Each afternoon, the agent reads tomorrow's scope from the schedule, the delivery list, and any notes from the daily log. It sees, for example, that tomorrow includes setting racking on the north array, a crane pick for inverters, and trenching near an existing conduit run. It drafts a JHA for each task: steps, hazards, controls, and required PPE. It also pulls forward open items from earlier logs, such as a note that the trench area had soft ground.
The safety lead reviews the draft that evening or before the pre-task meeting. They strike what does not apply, add what the agent missed, and sign. Nothing goes to the crew unsigned.
Job two: reviewing site photos. The agent watches the shared folder or app where crews upload photos. For each new image, it looks for visible PPE gaps (no eye protection, no high-visibility vest, no fall protection near an edge) and visible hazards (open trenches without barriers, blocked egress, damaged cords, materials stacked unsafely).
It does not issue discipline or stop work. It produces a short flag list: the photo, what it thinks it sees, and a confidence note such as "possible, image is angled." The safety lead gets that list once or twice a day, confirms or dismisses each item, and decides whether to walk over and talk to the crew.
The agent is a screen, not an inspector. It points at pictures worth a second look.
What you need to set it up
- A schedule and daily log the agent can read, in whatever format you already use.
- A shared place where field photos land consistently, with the area and date attached.
- An AI model with image-reading capability, connected to those sources through an automation tool or agent platform.
- Your own JHA template and PPE requirements, so drafts match your forms and site rules.
- A delivery channel for flags, such as email or a message thread to the safety lead.
Plan on several hours to connect the sources and tune the JHA template, then more time over the first couple of weeks adjusting based on what the safety lead keeps dismissing.
Where it breaks
Photos are a narrow window. The agent sees only what someone chose to photograph, from the angle they chose. A clean photo says nothing about the area outside the frame.
Image review misses things and flags things that are fine. Glare, distance, and dust make a vest look like no vest. A hard hat turned away can read as bare-headed. Expect false alarms, and expect the safety lead to tire of them if the flags are not tuned.
The JHA draft is only as good as the schedule. If the plan changed and nobody updated it, the agent writes a confident JHA for work that is not happening. It also does not know your site: the overhead line, the neighboring tenant, the soft shoulder.
There is a real risk of complacency. If crews or leads start treating an agent-reviewed day as a reviewed day, the check has replaced the person. Signing a JHA you did not read is worse than a copied one.
Photos of workers also raise privacy and morale questions. Tell crews what the system does and does not do before it starts.
The bottom line
Use the agent to draft the paperwork and to look at pictures nobody has time to look at. Keep the safety lead as the one who decides, signs, and walks the site. It adds coverage. It does not add authority.
Source: Associated Construction Publications, "Technology in the Year Ahead" - https://acppubs.com/MWC/article/D1BC1451-technology-in-the-year-ahead-amplifying-interconnected-integrated-interoperable-construction