Research on strategies for enhancing the competency of safety directors in EPC projects empowered by AI

With the widespread application of the engineering-procurement-construction (EPC) delivery model in large-scale infrastructure and complex industrial projects, the highly dynamic construction environment and the escalating complexity of risks pose heightened requirements for the competency of project safety directors. Conventional approaches that rely primarily on experience and manual inspections have become a bottleneck to further improvements in safety management capability. This paper investigates strategies to enhance the competency of safety directors in EPC projects through AI empowerment. Drawing on dynamic capability theory, synergy theory, and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), we develop a competency enhancement framework comprising three dimensions-sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring. A comparative experimental design and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) were employed for empirical evaluation. The results indicated that the Comprehensive Competency Index (CCI) under the AI-empowered mode increased by 45.9% relative to the traditional mode, enabling a shift in safety management from experience-driven practices to data- and intelligence-driven governance. Furthermore, this study proposes a tiered improvement strategy and a quantitative evaluation system, offering theoretical grounding and practical guidance for talent selection and digital-intelligent transformation in construction enterprises..