How AI Is Changing COSHH Assessments in Construction

The Problem With COSHH Assessments

Let me paint a picture you'll recognise. It's Monday morning, the project manager wants COSHH assessments for three new chemical products that arrived on site last week. You've got the safety data sheets somewhere — probably in an email, or maybe the supplier left them with the delivery driver who left them on a pallet that's now buried under fifty bags of cement. You dig out the SDSs, open up a blank template in Word, and start copying hazard statements, control measures, and exposure limits by hand. Two hours later you've got three documents that look like every other COSHH assessment you've ever written, because they basically are.

The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002 require a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risk to health from every hazardous substance used on site. That's not optional, and "suitable and sufficient" means more than copying the SDS into a different format. It means considering the specific tasks, the people doing them, the conditions on site, the duration of exposure, and the hierarchy of control measures. Most hand-written COSHH assessments don't get anywhere near that level of thought, because nobody has the time.

What AI Actually Does Differently

AI-powered COSHH tools don't replace your judgment. What they do is handle the donkey work. You tell the tool what substance you're using, what task you're doing, and where you're doing it. The AI pulls in the relevant hazard classifications, matches them against standard control measures, generates exposure route analysis, and produces a formatted assessment that's specific to your situation — not a generic copy-paste job.

Ebrora's COSHH Assessment Builder does exactly this. You answer a set of guided questions about the substance, the work activity, and the site conditions, and the AI generates a fully structured assessment with risk ratings, control measures, PPE requirements, emergency procedures, and monitoring recommendations. The whole process takes about five minutes instead of two hours.

The assessments come out as downloadable Word documents, properly formatted with your project details, ready for review and sign-off. They're not perfect — you still need a competent person to review them and add site-specific detail — but they're a million miles ahead of starting from scratch every time.

The Quality Argument

Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough: AI-generated COSHH assessments are often more thorough than manually written ones. Not because AI is smarter than a health and safety professional — it absolutely isn't. But because it doesn't get tired, it doesn't skip fields to save time, and it doesn't forget to include the emergency procedures section because it's Friday afternoon and there's a briefing at half three.

I reviewed about forty COSHH assessments on a site last year as part of a CDM audit. More than half were missing emergency procedure details. A third didn't reference the specific WELs for the substance. Several just said "wear appropriate PPE" without specifying what that meant. That's not suitable and sufficient — that's a box-ticking exercise, and it leaves the site exposed if something goes wrong.

An AI tool generates every section every time. It doesn't skip bits. You still need to check it, absolutely, but you're reviewing a complete document rather than trying to remember what you forgot to include.

Common Pushback (And Why It's Wrong)

"We've always done them by hand." Brilliant. And your filing cabinet is full of assessments that nobody reads and half of which are out of date. The method isn't sacred — the outcome is.

"AI doesn't understand our site." True — and that's why the tool asks site-specific questions before generating the output. It doesn't produce a generic assessment for "epoxy resin"; it produces one for "epoxy resin application in a confined chamber at a wastewater treatment works with limited ventilation and two operatives working a four-hour shift." That context makes all the difference.

"The HSE won't accept AI-generated documents." There's nothing in the COSHH Regulations that specifies how the assessment must be produced. It needs to be suitable and sufficient, it needs to be reviewed and signed off by a competent person, and it needs to be communicated to the people doing the work. How you draft it is up to you. People use templates, they use software, they use consultants — AI is just another drafting tool.

Making It Part of Your Workflow

The best way to use AI COSHH tools is as a first draft. Generate the assessment, print it off, sit down with the supervisor and the operatives, and walk through it. Does it match what's actually happening on the ground? Are the control measures practical? Is there anything specific about the work area that needs adding? Mark it up, amend it, sign it off, and file it. That review conversation — the five minutes where people actually talk about the hazards — is where the real risk reduction happens. The AI document is the thing that makes that conversation structured and efficient instead of a vague chat about "being careful with chemicals."

If you're still writing COSHH assessments from scratch, you're spending hours on a task that could take minutes. That's not dedication — it's waste. Try the COSHH Builder, generate one assessment for a substance you know well, and compare it to what you'd normally produce. You might be surprised.

If you're tracking COSHH data in Excel, our COSHH Assessment Tracker spreadsheet is also worth a look for managing the register side of things.