Half of construction firms now use AI tools at work, up twenty percentage points in a year, according to Houzz’s September survey of the industry. Most of that is quoting, writing and admin: useful, low stakes, and easy to check.
One use sits much closer to people’s pay. Software that decides who gets which job, and scores how they did it. Dispatch that learns which crews are “reliable”. A leaderboard of jobs closed per day. A ranking that quietly sends the better work to the people at the top of it.
Europe’s AI Act has a name for that use: high-risk. If you work in the EU, sell into it, or buy software from someone who does, it is worth knowing what that covers. And the questions it raises are good ones to ask wherever you work.
What the law covers
The AI Act sorts AI by what it is used for, not by how clever it is. One annex lists the uses it treats as high-risk, and one entry in it is about work. Next to recruitment, it names AI used to:
- make decisions that affect the terms of work, promotion or termination
- allocate tasks based on individual behaviour or personal traits
- monitor and evaluate the performance and behaviour of the people doing the work.
Two things make that wider than it first sounds for field businesses. The Commission’s draft guidance, published in May, reads “work relationships” to include contractors, freelancers and the self-employed, not just employees. In plenty of field businesses, that is most of the crew. And software that profiles people, evaluating their reliability, performance or behaviour, cannot use the Act’s exemption for systems that only play a minor part in a decision.
- Handing out jobs on acceptance rate, punctuality or ratings
- Scoring each worker on jobs completed per hour
- Sending better-paid work to whoever ranks highest
- Flagging people for discipline or removal from a roster
- Payroll and leave
- Time recording used only to record attendance
- Company-wide reports that aren’t used to judge individuals
- Routing that only balances coverage (a reading, not settled)
The draft guidance does not settle every case. Routing that only balances coverage, without scoring anyone, may well sit outside, but that is a reading rather than the text. The direction is clear enough: working out which crew can do a job is planning. Ranking people on how they have behaved, and handing out work on that ranking, is a decision about them.
When it applies
The high-risk duties were due in August 2026. An amendment adopted this year, known as the Digital Omnibus, moved them to 2 December 2027. Other parts of the Act were never delayed: the banned practices have applied since February 2025, and the transparency duties since August this year.
Just over a year reads like breathing room. In practice it is about one procurement cycle. A dispatch or workforce platform chosen this year will still be running when the duties apply, and changing how a tool hands out work is far easier before crews are used to it than after.
If you buy the tool, you’re the “deployer”
The Act splits the duties between the provider, who builds the system and puts their name on it, and the deployer, the organisation that uses it. Buy a dispatch platform and you are the deployer.
For a contractor, the deployer’s duties are practical rather than exotic. Use the system the way its instructions say. Put people with the competence, training and authority in charge of overseeing it. Keep the logs it generates for at least six months. And tell your workers, and their representatives, before it is switched on.
The penalties for getting that wrong reach €15 million or 3% of worldwide turnover, whichever is higher, and for smaller businesses whichever is lower. Nobody should choose software out of fear of that number. It does explain why it is worth having the answers before somebody asks for them.
What good looks like
None of this asks you to stop using software to plan work. It asks you to be able to explain it. The pattern that makes that easy is one a good dispatcher would recognise anyway.
- Tickets and licences the work requires
- Distance to site
- Who is free, and when
- The equipment on the van
- The client’s site inductions
- How often they accept a job
- Customer star ratings
- Jobs closed per day
- A “reliability” score nobody can explain
Assign by what the job needs. Tickets and licences, distance to site, who is free, the equipment on the van, the client’s inductions. These are facts about the job and who is able to do it, and anybody can check them.
Let a person decide. The software proposes, the dispatcher confirms or changes it, and changing it is one tap rather than a fight with the system. Oversight that takes ten clicks is oversight nobody does.
Be able to say why. Every assignment should answer “why this crew?” in a sentence the crew would accept: holds the confined-space ticket, four kilometres away, free from ten. “The model scored them higher” is not a reason anyone can check.
Let the work be the evidence. Photos, times and locations captured on the job show what was done, and when. They make a better record of a crew’s work than a speed score does, and they protect the crew as much as the company.
Six questions to ask your vendor
As with any AI claim, ask to be shown rather than told. Each of these has an answer you can see in a demo.
If you are judging the AI in the rest of the product too, the six questions in “No hallucinations” is the wrong promise cover where its answers come from and what happens when it is wrong.
Why it matters outside Europe
Software is built once and sold everywhere, so a product designed around Europe’s rules tends to carry them into every market it sells in. Contractors with European clients, owners or parent companies will meet these questions in their own procurement. And the questions are worth asking regardless of where you work: crews who can see why they got the work are far more likely to trust the system that gave it to them.
The short version
Software that decides who gets the work, or scores how they did it, is high-risk AI in Europe from December 2027. The safe pattern is the sensible one anyway: assign by what the job needs, let a person decide, keep the record, and be able to say why.
This is general information about the law, not legal advice.