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Anita Nelson wants you to start small with artificial intelligence.
The chief strategy officer for Skanska USA Building, the U.S. arm of the Swedish builder and developer, Nelson discussed the suite of AI products that the contractor has rolled out to its employees, which it calls Sidekicks.
The Safety Sidekick, Skanska’s newest internal offering, helps employees access Skanska data on safety and jobsite conditions. It helps employees plan toolbox talks and huddles, and gives them a resource at their disposal.
Here, Nelson talks with Construction Dive about the Safety Sidekick’s origins, how it fits into the company’s current AI suite and the advice she has for builders looking to incorporate AI into their own workflows.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION DIVE: How did the idea of the Skanska Safety Sidekick come about?
ANITA NELSON: We saw a need to make these insights more immediate and more actionable on jobsites. This data is not often leveraged in real time. Sidekick allows us to look at that data in a specific way.
Using generative AI trained on Skanska-specific safety data and jobsite conditions, it allows us to deliver custom toolbox talks, safety observations and proactive suggestions to workers.
On a day-to-day basis, that means workers can ask the AI tool safety related questions via mobile or desktop and get instant support for planning a morning huddle or addressing a new hazard.
Beyond text, if you've got a picture of site conditions that day, you can ask questions related to that image. The tool is also embedded into our workflow, so it's not an added step in the day, it’s very user friendly.
Safety Sidekick is one of a suite of AI offerings that Skanska has. How does it fit into that?
Our data solutions team, in collaboration with information technology, they've developed four secure internal AI tools.
There's Skanska Sidekick, which is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. That’s a general use chat bot that protects user business data so you can ask it anything within our organization or outside our organization.
Then we have three “expert” sidekicks.
One's called My Skanska Sidekick, and that searches for key documents on our internal intranet site. So, if you're looking for a risk management protocol or our sustainability report, or who's the leader of something, you can ask it for that.