Turner Construction Built an AI Safety Tool, Tested It 25,000 Times, Then Gave It Away for Free

America's largest contractor by revenue just handed its competitors a tool it spent years building. For free.

Turner Construction announced this month that SafeT Coach, its artificial intelligence-powered safety assistant, is now available to any construction professional in the world at no cost. The decision was announced during Construction Safety Week, which ran from May 4 to 8, and it represents one of the more unusual moves in an industry not known for giving things away.

SafeT Coach functions as a virtual safety consultant, accessible from any mobile device on a jobsite. Workers can type or speak a plain-language question and receive a response grounded in Turner's Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) standards and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations, not generic internet searches. They can also photograph a section of a site and upload the image. The tool analyses it, generates a potential hazard identification table, assigns risk levels, recommends controls and provides policy references, all within seconds.

The tool emerged from Turner's internal AI Innovation Challenge, a companywide programme through which employees design and prototype their own artificial intelligence solutions. Before going public, it was validated through field pilots involving more than 80 stakeholders and an independent external review by a risk partner. Since the initial pilot, SafeT Coach has logged more than 25,000 interactions with Turner staff, trade partners and field teams.

The current version runs inside OpenAI's ChatGPT environment. A version built on Google's Gemini platform is in development, giving users the option to work within whichever service they prefer. There will be two versions, one for Turner's internal use within a secure enterprise environment, and one for external users. Turner will have no visibility into data entered by external users.

One real-world example from the field captures what the tool is designed to do. Darren Dreas, a superintendent on a higher-education laboratory project, used SafeT Coach to determine whether a vertical shaft on site qualified as a permit-required confined space under OSHA regulations. The tool produced a decision flow chart, a start-of-day permit checklist and the relevant policy citations within minutes, giving him what he needed to have an informed conversation with the trade partner's safety manager without waiting for a specialist to become available.

The tool is framed deliberately as a coaching resource rather than a compliance enforcer. Outputs are presented as potential hazards and coaching prompts, not citations or warnings. The intent, according to Turner's Chief Environmental, Health and Safety Officer Steve Spaulding, is to shorten the distance between uncertainty and action so that when someone in the field has a question, the answer is already in their hands.

For smaller subcontractors and specialty firms without a dedicated safety officer on every project, the implications are significant. Access to the kind of real-time, policy-grounded safety guidance that large contractors build into their operations has historically been unavailable to firms operating below a certain scale. SafeT Coach, at no cost and accessible from a phone, changes that calculation directly.