You cannot sign it off after the fact

How to Think About AI – Edition 6

A survey report goes out. AI-assisted wording, somewhere in the drafting. Nobody signed it off at the time.

Eighteen months later, a complaint lands. The firm goes looking for the reliability decision. There isn’t one.

It cannot be created now. A reliability decision is a judgement about that job, made at the time. Write one today, and it isn’t evidence; it’s a document with a motive, and it carries a timestamp that proves it. Produce that in front of an insurer or a solicitor and the conversation stops being about the survey. It becomes about what the firm just tried to do.

Why I need to see the file

I spent years running audit and compliance reviews against FSA requirements, and time at a firm of solicitors auditing personal injury claim processes, regulated by the SRA. Different sectors, same rule everywhere I’ve worked. You evidence a decision at the time, or the regulator treats it as if it never happened.

An auditor doesn’t ask if a control probably worked. An auditor asks to see it. That’s the instinct a claim, an insurer, or a client brings to this now. Good judgement that was never recorded looks identical, on file, to no judgement at all.

That’s the scenario most firms picture. It is not the worst version of this.

Take the sign-off away entirely

A junior surveyor runs comparable evidence through a chatbot. Nobody told them not to. Nobody asked. The firm has no idea it happened.

This isn’t a missing record. Nobody made a call because nobody knew a call was needed. The materiality assessment that should have triggered the whole process never ran, because leadership never saw the use. A firm in this position cannot see inside its own delivery.

And the firm does not need a live AI complaint to get caught out on it. The written policy is required the moment AI is used at all, not material use, and most firms don’t have one. That gap surfaces the moment any complaint prompts a wider look at how the firm runs itself, whatever the complaint was actually about.

And the client already knows

This isn’t only a regulator’s question. It’s a client’s.

A client gets a report, drops the summary into ChatGPT, asks what it thinks. If a complaint follows, one of the first questions is straightforward. Did you use AI. How did you check it?

Section 4.4 makes that answerable on request: what type of AI, how it works, what due diligence was done, how the risk was managed. A firm that can answer loses nothing in that conversation. A firm that goes quiet has already lost it, whatever the survey itself actually said.

Governance as a braking system

Formula One cars carry the most powerful brakes on the grid, because brakes are what let a driver carry pace into a corner and trust the car to haul it down at the last moment. Weak brakes mean driving cautiously.

Governance is the braking system. A firm that can account for its AI use can afford to use it hard. The framework is what makes the speed usable.

Start today, because today is the only part you can still protect

Everything before today, unrecorded, stays unrecorded. That gap doesn’t close. It only stops growing, and only from the point a firm starts.

GUARD is the only AI governance framework mapped to the thirty requirements of the RICS Standard, delivered to over five hundred surveyors. The framework is the easy part. The decision is whether a firm starts now.

Closing the series

This edition is the last in the series of How to think about AI in Surveying.

Six editions, one argument. The surveyor is not the point, the client’s problem is. Defending what you do leaves the outcome exposed. AI doesn’t need to look like a surveyor to displace surveying work. Automation is the smallest of the changes coming. Plan for the AI that’s arriving, not the one in front of you. And governance is what lets a firm act on all of it, and prove that it did. All prior editions can be found here

Nina

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