Litmus: why I convened an independent group

Where the profession actually is

AI adoption in surveying has lagged behind adjacent professions. Legal, particularly conveyancing, and financial services moved faster. That changed this year, and it accelerated once the RICS Professional Standard on the responsible use of AI in surveying practice took effect on 9 March.

As founder of Surveyors UK and host of This is Surveying podcast, I speak to surveyors and surveying firms every week, across every discipline. What I kept hearing was confusion, not clarity. Vendors arriving at pace. Genuine innovation happening alongside genuine hype. Surveyors caught between people telling them AI would replace them and people telling them to ignore it entirely, with very little in between grounded in what was actually happening on the ground.

Why Litmus, and why that name

I wanted something free, built entirely from people who work with AI directly, not commentators.

The name is deliberate. A litmus test is a quick, honest reading of a moment, not a permanent verdict. That is what this is: a snapshot of what senior practitioners, working across firms of very different sizes and exposure, are actually seeing right now.

Five practitioners and I met under the Chatham House rule for the first session:

James Garner FRICS, Head of AI and Data at Gleeds and founder of Project Flux ;

Chris de Gruben, FRICS, AssocRTPI FRICS, AssocRTPI, Senior Director and Head of Property UK and EU at Artefact;

Suzanne Hill, Founder of Constructive Intelligence UK; AI and Business Consultant

JONY MILNER❤️🏠🏗️🟢 MRICS, MCABE, Technical Manager at Legal & General Surveying Services;

Nik Carle FCIArb, Solicitor and Litigation Partner at Browne Jacobson LLP.

No funder, vendor, professional body or institution has any influence over what we discuss, find or publish. We do not endorse products or rank tools. It runs quarterly, and we intend to bring in further contributors over time. I convene and chair it. Litmus is convened by Surveyors UK but not owned by it. It is not a think tank.

What the room told us

Our first published report is called “Faster than we can explain”. Four things from it matter most for firms reading this now.

The Standard produced a scramble in March, then a lull. Most firms did the visible compliance work, the policies, the risk registers, and then stopped. Few had a clear view of what a second stage of maturity looks like.

Exposure builds whether or not a firm has made a decision. Staff, subcontractors and clients are already using these tools, with or without a policy in place. Doing nothing is not neutral.

AI is being used against surveyors as well as by them. Complaints have changed in character. Fabricated evidence is now convincing enough to force a re-inspection. That is happening now, not a risk sitting in the future.

And the resource that matters most, judgement, the instinct that catches a mistake before it becomes a claim, is being spent faster than it is being built. Nobody in that room had an easy answer for protecting it while AI takes on more of the work that used to build it.

The gap this leaves firms with

None of this is a verdict on AI. It is a record of a profession working out, largely alone, what responsible use actually means in practice. The Standard tells firms what to document and who is accountable. It does not tell them how to build the judgement that a compliance document cannot replace, and that gap is where most of the risk in these findings sits.

What to do now

If your firm completed its compliance work in March and has not revisited it since, that is the first thing worth checking. Ask whether staff, subcontractors or clients are using AI tools you have not accounted for. Ask whether anyone in your firm would recognise fabricated evidence in a complaint if they saw it.

Read it before you need it

The full Litmus report, Faster than we can explain, is free to read in full right now. No registration. No email address. Head to the link below and read it today, because the findings in it, particularly the one on fabricated evidence, are the kind of thing you want to have seen before it turns up in a complaint, not after.

Please do share this far and wide with peers and colleagues.

Read the full report

Before the complaint arrives

One more thing. I am running a free AI Briefing session on Wednesday 16 September: Before the Complaint Arrives, on what the AI-generated complaints landscape actually looks like right now.

Reserve your place

Until next week.

Nina