WHS law and construction AI: the safety case imperative

The Work Health and Safety Act (harmonised across most Australian states and territories) places on Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking (PCBUs) a primary duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers and others affected by their operations. AI systems deployed on construction sites — whether for safety monitoring, equipment operation, or workforce management — are within the scope of this duty. A PCBU that deploys an AI safety monitoring system that fails to detect a hazard that causes a worker injury may face WHS enforcement action if the failure was reasonably foreseeable and the risk was not adequately managed.

The "reasonably practicable" standard requires PCBUs to take the measures that a reasonable person in their position would take, having regard to the likelihood of the risk, its severity, the availability of ways to eliminate or reduce it, and the cost of those measures. For AI safety systems, this means: the PCBU must have assessed whether the AI system performs adequately in the specific conditions of the site, must have addressed known limitations of the system, must have implemented backup safety measures where the AI cannot be relied upon, and must have trained workers on the system's capabilities and limitations.

BIM AI and professional indemnity

AI tools are increasingly used in building information modelling to generate structural designs, optimise specifications, and identify clashes in building systems. These outputs, if incorporated into construction documents without adequate review, create professional indemnity risk for the engineers, architects, and project managers responsible for those documents. The professional indemnity risk is not reduced by the AI origin of the design — the professional who puts their name to a design is responsible for its accuracy and fitness for purpose regardless of the tools used to generate it.

The emerging standard of practice in the Australian construction industry is that AI-generated design outputs must be reviewed with the same rigour as manually produced outputs — the AI is a productivity tool, not a substitute for professional judgment. Firms whose professional indemnity insurance may not cover AI-generated work product failures should review their policies explicitly.