A conversational AI system called CARES helps construction management students learn about safety regulations by guiding them through daily reporting tasks and retrieving relevant rules.

In plain terms

Current construction safety reporting often relies on manual logs and static forms, which don't effectively connect daily activities to relevant safety regulations, making it challenging for students to learn. This paper introduces CARES (Conversational AI Reporting for Enhanced Safety), a conversational AI system designed to integrate regulatory guidance into daily reporting for construction safety education. CARES uses proactive multi-agent dialogue (where different AI components work together to guide the conversation) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique that combines an AI's ability to generate human-like text with its capacity to retrieve accurate information from a specific database of documents. The system guides users through reporting, retrieves relevant regulations, and converts conversations into structured daily reports, displaying sources and the evolving report alongside the dialogue for user review. A preliminary evaluation with 15 construction management students showed strong "faithfulness" (how accurately the AI's responses reflect the source material) and "answer relevance" (how on-topic the AI's answers were), though "retrieval ranking" (the system's ability to find the *most* relevant regulations out of many possible ones) still needs improvement. These results suggest that a regulation-grounded conversational reporting system is technically feasible.