TRADESAFE study finds accountability, safety issues with AI-generated documents

TRADESAFE recently surveyed 514 U.S. workers in manufacturing, construction, warehousing, logistics, and the skilled trades about how AI is being used in safety documentation.

It asked who reviews AI-drafted material, how much workers trust it, and who they’d hold accountable when an AI-assisted error leads to a near miss or an injury.

Lockout/tagout steps, hazard assessments, and toolbox talks used to come from a safety manager’s desk. More and more, a generative AI tool writes the first draft, and that draft doesn't always get checked before it reaches the floor.

When one of those documents gets a step wrong, the people who follow it want to know who answers for it.

Insurance Business reported that insurers have filed 4,078 state-level form adoptions of ISO's generative AI exclusions across 49 states and DC through July 31, covering several commercial insurance lines. That raises the possibility that businesses relying on AI could face gaps in liability coverage when something goes wrong.

Key takeaways from the report

• Among workers with visibility into document creation, 51% say their company uses generative AI to help write safety documents.
• Only 18% of workers report a formal policy defining who is accountable when AI-assisted safety content contains an error.
• One in five workers (20%) report having seen an adverse outcome associated with an AI safety-document error, including near misses, minor injuries, and failed inspections.
• In the unreviewed-AI injury scenario, 56% look to company leadership or the safety department (28% each), versus 9% who blame the employee handling the document.
• More than a third of workers (36%) have personally seen an AI-generated safety document with an outdated requirement, vague instruction, or missing hazard step.
• Nearly two-thirds of workers (63%) would trust a safety policy less if they knew it was partially AI-written, while 78% say qualified human review increases trust.
• Frontline workers are 45 percentage points less likely than leadership to say they have visibility into how safety documents are created (31% vs. 76%).