Everyone’s somewhere different with AI

TL;DR

• AI worries people well beyond work. Their children, their safety, their future. That shapes how they feel about using it at work
• Meanwhile, pressure on firms is building. More queries, more complaints, and claims likely to follow
• The tools keep changing. How people respond to them doesn’t. Identity, fear, stigma, first impressions and lack of time are the fixed points
• Those forces leave every firm, and every person, at a different stage
• Not adopting is a valid choice, but it’s still a decision with risks worth assessing

What doesn’t move when AI does

A few weeks ago someone asked me what their child should study.

They wanted to know whether the career their daughter was working towards would still be there when she qualified because of AI. I didn’t have a clear answer. Nobody does right now.

It also wasn’t the first time I’d been asked. Parents want to know what to steer their children towards. They want to know whether their children are safe online and what kind of world they’re growing up into. These questions shape how people feel about AI long before it reaches work.

Then there are the headlines. One week AI is going to cure disease. The next it’s going to take every job or wipe us out altogether. It’s no surprise people hesitate and are genuinely fearful. Would you rush to bring something into your business that you’re worried about at home? Does it feel safe? For a lot of people, the answer is no.

The pressure at work

And yet the pressure at work keeps building.

Client queries have risen sharply. Complaints are increasing. Clients now arrive with questions and challenges shaped by a chatbot, sometimes before they’ve even spoken to you. A QS sends over a cost plan and gets back a list of questions that clearly started life in ChatGPT. A building surveyor’s report is picked apart line by line by a client who asked AI to find the weaknesses.

Other professions are further down this road. Lawyers have already stood in front of judges to explain cases that AI made up. Surveying tends to lag behind, but I don’t think claims are far away. When they come, the question won’t only be whether AI was used. It will be whether anyone can evidence what happened.

So people are caught between two pulls. One says slow down, this doesn’t feel safe. The other says keep up, everyone else is moving. It can be exhausting and confusing.

My own challenges

I’ve been building something structured to help firms get to grips with AI. Practical, grounded and I kept getting stuck on two questions.

Who should it be for? Some firms haven’t started at all. Some have staff using AI every day, with or without permission. Some have a policy, a tool list and a review process, and still feel uneasy. Anything relevant at one group misses the others.

And how long will it stay right? The tools change every few months. What they could do a year ago and what they can do now are barely comparable. Even what the RICS standard expects us to know will move over time. Whatever I build risks being out of date by the time it’s finished.

A while ago I stopped simply looking at the technology and started looking at the people.

Setting control points

Anyone who has run a measured survey knows you set your control points first. Fixed references that don’t move, so everything else can be measured from them. If your control is off, every reading after it is off too.

With AI, almost everything moves. Tools, prices, features, guidance, even the language we use to describe it. What doesn’t move is how we respond to it. The fears, the doubts, the pressures and the habits are predictable and psychological. They were there when electricity was born, when computers arrived in offices, when email arrived, and when the internet changed how clients found us. They’re here again now, only stronger.

So those are my control points. If we understand them, everything else becomes easier to measure.

What holds us back?

People feel potential losses more strongly than equal gains. It’s one of the most reliable findings in behavioural science, and it explains a great deal.

The promise of saved time feels distant. The risk of getting it wrong feels immediate.

Then there’s professional identity. Many surveyors built careers on knowledge that took twenty years to earn and hone. Reading a building. Spotting the risk in a cost plan. Knowing a market well enough to defend a valuation. A tool that appears to do parts of that in seconds touches something much deeper than workflow. It raises uncomfortable questions about what our expertise is for.

First impressions matter too. Lots of people tried a chatbot a year or two ago, found it poor, and haven’t looked again. That view sticks, even though the tools today are barely recognisable. I spoke to someone recently who was weighing up whether a paid subscription, roughly the price of a coffee a week, was worth it. Free versions are more limited, and your data may be used in ways you didn’t intend. The saving is tiny next to the risk. But if your last experience was disappointing, paying feels like a gamble.

There’s stigma as well. In many offices, using AI still feels like cutting corners. Lazy. Cheating, even. So people use it and keep it to themselves. That came up again at a built environment roundtable I joined last week. And because nobody talks about it, every firm assumes it’s the only one unsure what to do.

For the first time, we’re working alongside something that can reason, draft and argue back. It’s unfamiliar in a way previous technology wasn’t. For many people that’s unsettling at a level that’s difficult to put into words.

And then there’s time.

Most people I come across genuinely want to understand AI. They simply haven’t got the hours. Fees are tight, deadlines don’t move, and staffing is stretched. AI sits at the bottom of a long list, behind everything that has to be done this week.

What pulls us forward

At the same time, some forces push people on whether they’re ready or not.

Software is one. A surveying software adds an AI feature in a routine update. Nobody asked for it, and now it’s part of the workflow. A geospatial team has been using AI in point cloud processing for some time without calling it AI.

Workload is another. A graduate drafts a schedule of condition with a free chatbot because the deadline is tomorrow and the senior surveyor is out on site.

Clients are a third. They’re using it, so the conversation comes to you whether you’ve adopted AI or not.

And pace sits over all of it. Government departments, universities and professional bodies are all working hard to keep up. None of them can move as fast as the technology. There’s good work happening across the built environment, but it’s happening in pockets, and very little of it is joined up.

Why everyone ends up somewhere different

None of this is a failing. Surveyors are trained to be sceptical. You assess risk for a living and you don’t take claims at face value. Much of the caution I see is sensible.

But put these forces together and you get a profession spread across very different places. Same pressures, different outcomes, depending on the firm, the discipline and the person. Even within one practice, the principal, the senior surveyor and the graduate can each be somewhere completely different.

One is cautious, one is curious, and one is already using it every day without mentioning it.

That’s what makes this so hard to get right. Advice that suits one group misses the rest. Guidance written this month may look dated by spring. And when nobody can see where anyone else is, it’s very hard to know what good looks like.

A way of seeing where we are

I’ve found three words helpful.

Awareness is knowing where AI already sits in your business. In your software, your team’s habits, your clients’ emails, and the standard you work under. It sounds simple. In practice it’s where many firms have the biggest blind spots.

Adoption is choosing it on purpose. Deciding which tools, for which tasks, with what checks, and making sure the people using them know what good looks like. It’s the difference between AI arriving by accident and AI being part of how you work.

Assurance is being able to show it. What was used, what was checked, and who signed it off. Surveyors are always accountable. Assurance is having the evidence to stand behind that accountability when a client, insurer or tribunal asks.

These five profiles are illustrative, but you’ll probably recognise some of them. Firms rarely sit neatly at one stage. Some are using AI far more than they realise. Some use it well and have nothing written down. Some have a policy that nobody follows. Very few are strong across all three.

The forces I’ve described explain why. Time pushes awareness down. Stigma hides adoption. Fear and first impressions slow everything. Workload and software pull adoption up regardless. And assurance is usually the last thing anyone gets round to, which is exactly where the risk sits when something goes wrong.

The risk of standing still

Choosing not to use AI is a legitimate decision. Some firms have thought it through and concluded the time isn’t right, and that deserves respect.

But it is still a decision, and like any decision it carries risk. It’s worth assessing with the same care you’d give anything else.

Start with the market. If competitors can turn work round faster or at lower cost, clients will notice. Not overnight, but gradually, in fee conversations and tender responses. A firm that hasn’t adopted may find its pricing under pressure without quite knowing why.

Then think about people. Graduates and younger surveyors are growing up with these tools. Many will expect to use them, and some will choose employers on that basis. Recruitment is hard enough already.

Consider clients too. They’re using AI whether you are or not. Their questions, challenges and expectations are being shaped by it. A firm that doesn’t understand the tools will find those conversations harder to handle.

There’s the value of the business itself. For any owner thinking about succession, a sale or a merger in the years ahead, how efficiently the firm runs and how well its knowledge is captured will matter to a buyer. Firms that have built that foundation using AI may be worth more.

And there’s a question many firms skip. Are you sure you’re not using AI already? It’s in software updates. It’s on your team’s phones. A firm that believes it hasn’t adopted may simply not know where it already sits. That’s the riskiest position of all, because it’s adoption without awareness and without assurance.

None of this means rushing. It means making the choice deliberately, reviewing it regularly, and understanding what it costs as well as what it saves.

The biggest change in our lifetime

I think AI is likely to be one of the biggest changes most of us see in our lifetimes. It’s affecting how we work, how our children learn, and how we think about our own value.

People need insight and support, without the hype in either direction. That’s what I try to bring here. It’s my view, built on what I read, what I see and what I’m hearing.

Just for you

Answer these honestly for your own firm.

• Do we know everywhere AI is already being used here, including the bits nobody mentions?
• Did we choose the tools we use, or did they arrive on their own?
• If a client or insurer asked tomorrow, could we show what AI did and who checked it?
• If we’re choosing not to use AI yet, when did we last review that decision, and what would change our minds?
• If any of those gave you pause, you’re far from alone. Most of the profession is somewhere in the middle of working this out. Like i have said before, its a messy soup!

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Until next week

Nina