The fee conversation surveying firms aren’t ready to have (Edition 51)

I think surveying is about to feel the same price pressure from AI that legal and accounting have already started feeling. It has not landed yet. Surveying adopts slower than those professions, which is exactly why the fallout has not been felt individually. I think that changes within the next twelve months. This is my forecast, not a settled fact, and I want to be upfront about that.

Surveying is adopting AI more slowly than legal or accounting, but that gap is closing faster than most firms realise. RICS’s own new report, AI in Commercial Property and Construction Report 2026, published last week, shows organisations reporting no AI use at all in construction has fallen by more than a third in the past year, and regular use in specific processes has risen from 12% to 19%. Commercial property is further ahead again, with three-quarters of firms reporting some level of AI use and regular use running at 29%.

Conveyancing, which sits right next to surveying in every property transaction, has moved even faster. Eight in ten conveyancing firms used AI last year, double the proportion in 2024.

Once enough firms adopt AI and cut turnaround time, clients, residential and commercial, will start expecting the saving to show up in price, not just speed.

Surveying is a slower-moving profession by nature, and RICS’s own data still bears that out even with this year’s jump. Its new 2026 report shows the most common stage organisations sit at is still the early-stage pilot, with embedded use remaining rare. More organisations plan to invest in AI than have actually moved a pilot into routine practice. The gap between intent and deployment has not closed. It has simply moved. A year ago it was the distance between planning to invest and starting. Now it is the distance between running a pilot and embedding it.

That is not a criticism. It reflects a profession built on liability, professional judgement, and physical inspection, where caution is often the right instinct. But even a narrowing gap means the price pressure that AI creates elsewhere has not fully reached surveying’s client conversations yet. That is a timing gap, not a permanent exemption, and the timing is shortening.

I do not think this is speculation. It is already visible if you look one profession over.

Accounting and the fee conversation has already started. KPMG reportedly renegotiated its own external audit fee down 14%, from around 416,000 US dollars to 357,000, by arguing that AI efficiency gains should be passed on as cost savings to the client. That is not a hypothetical. That is one of the Big Four telling its own auditor, in effect, we know AI is saving you time, so we expect to pay less.

Accounting margins are compressing for the same reason more broadly. Firms report that clients now perceive compliance work as automated, and price accordingly, whether or not the firm has actually passed on the efficiency gain yet.

I am not arguing AI will do a surveyor’s job. I am arguing that once a firm can turn a report around faster because of AI, that firm can afford to charge less and still make margin, and some of them will. RICS’s own new data supports this mechanically: the cost of trialling AI has fallen sharply, with implementation cost as a barrier dropping from 29% to 25% in construction over the past year. The economics that let a firm undercut on price are getting easier to access, not harder.

A lot of surveying work, especially residential surveys and standard valuations, is priced in a market where clients compare on cost. Its a race to the bottom. If one firm can produce a Level 2 report in two days at a lower price because AI has cut their production time, and another firm cannot match either the speed or the price, the client does not need to understand AI to make a decision. They just need to see two quotes.

That pressure does not require every firm to adopt AI. It only requires enough firms to adopt it that the market starts expecting the saving. Once the public expects AI-assisted turnaround as normal, the previous price becomes the thing that needs justifying, not the new one.

Commercial construction and quantity surveying are exposed for a sharper reason: the client may stop needing to buy the service externally at all.

QS work is built from measurement, cost estimation, and valuation, which is precisely the kind of structured, repeatable, data-heavy task AI is currently best at. One industry analysis of AI in UK quantity surveying found that under a faster-adoption scenario, held by 40% of the experts surveyed, main contractors reduce their dependency on external QS consultants as AI lets them handle more cost planning in-house, and the external consulting QS workforce shrinks by 20% to 30% over the next ten years.

That is a different threat to residential price competition. It is not “a cheaper firm wins the tender.” It is “the client’s own AI-assisted in-house team does the work a firm used to be paid for.”

Commercial clients are also simply more likely to make the KPMG argument out loud. Developers and main contractors already negotiate professional fees hard, and QS appointments are usually won through competitive tender in the first place. A client who knows a cost plan can be turned around faster because of AI does not need persuading that the fee should reflect it. They already run the tender that will tell them.

RICS’s new report shows commercial property is already ahead of construction on exactly this measure, with a much higher share converting pilots into regular use rather than leaving them as trials. That gives commercial practices a real but narrowing window to decide how they respond, before either a competitor’s tender or a client’s in-house capability decides it for them.

This is the part I want to be direct about, because I do not think it is comfortable and I do not think enough firms are thinking about it yet.

If you do not adopt AI to reduce your own cost and turnaround, competitors who do will be able to undercut you on price, and in the price-sensitive parts of the market, that is a real threat to volume. If you do adopt AI, the accounting sector’s experience suggests clients will expect some of that saving passed on, not banked as margin, which puts pressure on the fee either way. In quantity surveying specifically, there is a third option clients have that residential clients do not: bringing the work in-house entirely, because AI has lowered the skill and time threshold for doing basic cost planning without an external consultant.

I do not think there is a version of the next few years where surveying fees in the price-driven segments hold steady. The only real choice firms have is whether the pressure arrives on their terms, because they got ahead of it, or on a client’s terms, because a competitor’s quote, or their own in-house team, made the case for them.

Do not wait for the fallout to be visible in your own numbers before you think about pricing.

Watch your clients’ capability, if you are commercial or QS. The threat is not only a competitor’s tender. It is whether the client still needs to tender for the work at all.

Get ahead of the pricing conversation rather than defending against it. If a client is going to ask why your fee has not moved despite AI, decide now what you want the honest answer to be. Firms who can show clear governance and documentation around how they use AI, in line with the RICS AI standard, are in a stronger position to have that conversation on their own terms.

RICS’s new report is worth reading in full if this affects your practice. Read it in full here