What BEFA’s AI report means for surveying firms

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The Built Environment Futures Assembly (BEFA) “Mapping the AI Landscape in the Built Environment” was published this month. It’s worth a read.

It is one of the most serious attempts yet to treat AI in this sector as a question of competence and governance rather than software. That framing is right, and it is rarer than it should be.

BEFA is chaired by Mark Farmer, with Aled Williams as Executive Director. Harlow Consulting carried out the research, drawing on thirteen interviews with senior figures across industry, professional bodies, academia and government, a workshop with BEFA’s Strategic Advisory Board, and a review of existing guidance and standards.

Core messages

The core findings will be familiar to anyone who has been reading this newsletter.

• AI should augment professional judgement, and it cannot carry professional responsibility
• The greatest near-term risk is unmanaged use, ahead of job losses
• Verification, challenge and documentation need to become professional habits
• Individual use is already running ahead of firm policy, client expectation and professional guidance

One line from the interviews is worth reading twice.

The sector has an unknown risk profile right now because individuals are using AI without structure or oversight.

This is an example of shadow AI,described by senior figures, in a published report, as a condition of the whole sector rather than a problem at the margins. Shadow AI is a risk I mention in every one of my monthly AI Briefings, as it is a significant risk where we haven’t seen the fallout yet.

The report is also clear about where the pressure will actually come from. It says the parameters of AI use that professional indemnity insurers are prepared to underwrite will very likely become the guardrails that guide adoption.

And the report is honest about who gets left behind. It identifies a squeezed middle of SMEs, local authorities and under-resourced organisations who may struggle while larger, digitally mature firms move first. Around 75% of RICS surveying firms are SMEs. That warning is aimed squarely at this profession, and it is worth taking seriously.

Reading the numbers

• 37% of businesses in “professional, scientific and technical activities” use AI. OECD-wide rather than UK. The category holds lawyers, accountants, consultants, architects, engineers and research firms alongside surveyors.
• Around 20% of firms have a formal AI policy, and fewer than one in three invest in literacy training, from AI Institute research.
• 30% of built environment firms provide AI literacy training. Built environment here runs from housebuilding through to facilities management.

The direction of travel is unmistakable. Adoption is well ahead of policy. That is the finding, and it is sound.

What the figures cannot do is tell you where surveying sits within them.

The built environment is an enormous brief. Design, construction, engineering, planning, real estate, cost consulting, facilities management, and surveying somewhere in the middle of it. A report covering all of that cannot also zoom into any one profession, and BEFA did not set out to. It drew the wide picture and drew it well.

The consequence is simply worth naming. When you read that report, you are reading about the sector. You are not quite reading about your firm.

Why that matters more for surveying than for most

The RICS Professional Standard on the Responsible Use of AI in Surveying Practice became mandatory on 9 March 2026. No transition period. Thirty mandatory requirements. Section 4.1 alone carries two mandatory lists.

The report calls for practical AI competency frameworks and argues that professional bodies should move from being gatekeepers of knowledge towards gatekeepers of governance. Surveying already has one, live and binding.

Most professions in that report are being invited to consider what good governance might look like. Surveyors are required to evidence it.

That puts this profession in a genuinely useful position. If a profession made up overwhelmingly of small firms can implement a mandatory AI standard, the rest of the built environment learns something worth knowing. That is a contribution surveying can make to the wider conversation, and BEFA’s report is a good place for it to start.

What your firm needs to do regardless

The standard applies whether or not the sector has organised itself.

Two gates. Baseline duties apply whenever you use AI to deliver surveying services: AI knowledge, data governance, a written policy, annual training. Heavier duties trigger when an AI output is material, meaning it can influence delivery, judged on the facts and circumstances. That is when the register, the appropriateness assessment, vendor due diligence, reliability sign-off, client disclosure and the quarterly risk register apply.

BEFA says verification needs to become a defining habit. Your standard already requires you to evidence it.

Three questions worth answering this week.

• If a claim landed tomorrow and AI had touched the work, could you show who decided to use it, what was checked, and by whom
• Do you know which of your existing software tools have embedded AI, and have you asked the vendor what it does with your data?
• Has anyone in your firm written anything down at all

If the answer to the third is no, that is where to start. GUARD is how I frame the five pillars for firms who ask, and the link is at the end.

Worth saying
The report concludes that BEFA’s distinctive role should be to help define what responsible AI-enabled professional practice looks like for the built environment.

That is the right ambition and the work deserves support. The wide picture matters, and somebody had to draw it.

The narrower picture matters too, and there is more to say about surveying specifically than a sector-wide report has room for. I will have more on that before long.

This is a serious piece of work and the profession is better for having it.

Nina

Read the report: Mapping the AI Landscape in the Built Environment, BEFA, July 2026.