CARES: A Conversational AI System for Regulation-Grounded Safety Reporting in Construction Education

Construction safety reporting often relies on manual logs and static templates that provide limited feedback and leave daily activities disconnected from relevant regulations. This paper introduces CARES (Conversational AI Reporting for Enhanced Safety), a conversational AI system that integrates regulatory guidance into daily reporting to support construction safety education. CARES combines proactive multi-agent dialogue, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and automated report generation. The system guides users through reporting tasks, retrieves relevant regulatory passages using hybrid retrieval, and converts conversations into structured daily reports. Regulatory sources and the evolving report are displayed alongside the dialogue to support user review and correction. A preliminary evaluation involving 15 construction management students assessed retrieval quality, response faithfulness, and conversational relevance. CARES achieved an overall faithfulness score of 0.74 and an answer relevance score of 1.00, while initial retrieval ranking remained an area for improvement. These results provide preliminary evidence of the technical feasibility of regulation-grounded conversational reporting. The study highlights opportunities to integrate regulatory knowledge into routine documentation, with future work needed to evaluate effects on report quality, safety awareness, and learning outcomes.