Automated document review has arrived in construction compliance in the last couple of years, and the reason is narrower and less exciting than the marketing around it suggests. It is not that a model understands safety better than a competent person. It is that reading thirty pages with equal attention, forty times a week, is something people cannot do and software can.
We build one of these tools, so read this as an interested party being specific about where the line falls.
The three problems it addresses
Consistency
Two reviewers apply different thresholds. The same reviewer applies different thresholds on a Monday and a Friday, before and after an incident, to a familiar subcontractor and an unfamiliar one. None of that is negligence; it is how human attention works. An automated pass applies the same checks in the same way to every document, which makes the baseline predictable — and a predictable baseline is what lets a team agree on what "good enough" means.
Fatigue
The failure mode at volume is not missing something difficult, it is missing something obvious on the ninth document. Blank residual risk is trivially findable and is missed constantly, because by document nine the eye recognises the shape of a table rather than reading it. Reviewing fifty documents a week goes into what that does to a process.
Volume
Packages have grown and subcontractor chains have lengthened, so the number of documents per project has risen without the compliance team rising with it. Something has to absorb that, and the honest options are: review less thoroughly, review more slowly, or automate the mechanical part.
What it does not do
Worth stating plainly before anything else, because a tool oversold here is a liability rather than a product.
- It does not decide whether a method is safe. That is a judgement about a physical situation the document only partly describes.
- It does not know your site. It cannot know the muster point moved, that the survey found asbestos in the ceiling void, or that the neighbouring unit is a nursery.
- It does not approve anything. No output is a compliance certification, and a clean report does not mean a document is adequate.
- It does not move the legal duty. The employer's duty to make a suitable and sufficient assessment, and the contractor's duty to plan and monitor the work, sit exactly where they always did.
"The software did not flag it" is not a defence, in the same way "the consultant did not mention it" is not a defence. Can you use AI to review RAMS documents works through that division of responsibility in more detail.
How Valify works, concretely
Uploading
You upload one document — PDF or Word, up to 50MB — and can add optional notes: what the document is for, sections to focus on, concerns you already have. The scan starts immediately and runs on our side, so closing the tab does not cancel it. Most documents come back in under five minutes. Uploading your first document covers the flow.
What gets checked
Every section is located and read for content rather than for the presence of a heading: project details, scope, personnel, plant, materials and COSHH, hazard identification, risk assessment, control measures, PPE, emergency procedures, environmental considerations, briefing arrangements, legislation, sign-off and revision history.
Then the cross-document checks, which are where most real findings come from: do the hazards match the scope, does every hazard have a control, does the PPE match the hazards it is meant to address, does every item of plant appear in the hazard register, are there internal contradictions, and does the scope look like it was updated after the hazard register was written.
What the report contains
A short summary of the document — what type it appears to be, how many of the expected sections were found, an overall assessment — followed by findings in four groups: Critical, Needs Attention, Minor and Done Well. Each finding names the section it relates to and says what specifically is wrong rather than that something is.
Critical means the document is unsuitable for use until it is resolved: a hazard with no control, absent emergency procedures, missing risk ratings, a control that only says "take care", PPE as the sole control for a significant hazard, blank signature fields. Needs Attention is content that should be improved but does not make the document unusable. Minor is quality. Done Well records what the document gets right, which matters more than it sounds when the report is going back to whoever wrote it.
Why severity ranking is the useful part
A list of thirty findings is not more useful than no list; it is a second document to review. Ranking them means a reviewer with twenty minutes reads the six that would fail the document and defers the rest, and a subcontractor receiving the report knows what to fix first. It also makes the tool auditable in a way a score never is: you can disagree with an individual finding and see exactly what it was.
Where it fits in a real process
- The author runs it before submitting, and fixes the mechanical gaps while they are cheap.
- The principal contractor's reviewer runs it on receipt, and reads the findings before reading the document.
- A competent person reads for method — the judgement work the tool cannot do.
- A named individual signs, and the sign-off records their decision, not the tool's.
Used that way it replaces nobody. It removes the part of the work that was being done badly because it is tedious, and hands the reviewer the part that needs a person.
What to ask before adopting anything
Where are documents stored and for how long — ours are deleted 90 days after upload. Is content used to train models — it is not. Does the output claim to certify anything — it must not. What does it explicitly not check — our limitations page is the honest answer to that one, and it is the page worth reading before the feature list.
If you want to see what it finds in your own documents rather than take any of this on trust, the trial is three scans with no card required. Upload something you are unsure about rather than your best document — the useful test is whether it tells you something you did not already know.
This article is general guidance on UK construction documentation practice. It is not legal advice, a compliance certification or a substitute for review by your own qualified health and safety personnel, who remain responsible for deciding whether any particular document is adequate. See our disclaimer.