From transcript to insights: Summarizing safety culture interviews with LLMs

The latest developments in AI have the potential to significantly support qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. This study explores the utility of the OpenAI o1-model to assist in efficiently obtaining reliable summarizations of safety culture interviews. Analysis shows that the current approach has the clear potential to significantly improve efficiency of interviewers by providing a concise report that summarizes multiple interviews according to a pre-defined format. However, some hallucinations are present in the generated report. Additional work will aim at reducing their presence, but such hallucinations also emphasizes that LLMs should primarily assist, rather than replace, interviewers in creating a definitive report.