Your AI took the wheel

From sat nav to self-driving car

Most surveyors who use AI use it as a chatbot. You ask a question, it gives an answer, and you decide what to do with it.

A chatbot is like a sat nav. You tell it where you want to go, it tells you the route, and you do the driving. Every turn is your decision.

An agent is like a self-driving car. You give it the destination and it drives. It chooses the route, changes lanes, takes the turns and gets you there, while you sit in the driver’s seat.

In practice, that means an agent can open your email, read your diary, search the web, fill in forms, update a spreadsheet and send messages. It checks its own progress and keeps going until the job is done, or until it needs you.

The technology has known the way for some time. Now it has its hands on the wheel.

Where to find them

You may already have access to an agent without realising it. Plans and features change quickly, so check your own account. On business plans, your IT administrator may need to switch features on.

What you can do with an agent

The easiest way to tell an agent job from a chatbot job: if you could get the same result by pasting text into a chat window, you do not need an agent. Agents earn their keep on work with several steps, across several tools, that you would otherwise do yourself every week.

The only real limit is your imagination.

• Know your local market. Every Monday, an agent checks new planning applications, developments and property listings in your area and sends you a short summary of what has changed. Useful for residential firms watching their patch and commercial firms tracking schemes coming forward.
• Understand your competitors. Give it a list of firms you compete with. It visits their websites, notes their services, published fees, areas covered and reviews, and builds a comparison table. Run it again in six months and see what has moved.
• Research the clients you want. Ask it to find managing agents, housing associations, developers, lenders or local authorities in your region, note their recent projects and who leads on property, and put it all in a spreadsheet for you to review.
• Find the work early. For commercial and public sector work, an agent can check tender portals every week for surveying, valuation and cost consultancy opportunities that fit your firm, and list them with deadlines.
• Get your own inbox under control. An agent can sort your email, flag what is urgent, pull out actions and deadlines, and draft replies to routine messages.
• A Monday morning briefing on your business. Set it to run every week. It looks at your diary, new enquiries, outstanding invoices and overdue reports, and sends you one page on where the firm stands.
• Build your own firm dashboard. Point it at your spreadsheets or booking system and ask for a simple dashboard: instructions by type, turnaround times, fee income, who owes you money. Many owners have never seen their own numbers laid out like this.

The risks

The risks come from the same place as the benefits. An agent can act, so when it gets something wrong, something happens.

• Access. An agent can reach whatever you connect it to. If it can read your inbox, it can read every client email in it.
• Errors that build. Each step can look reasonable while the overall result goes wrong. A mistake at step three is still there at step ten, and nobody saw it.
• Acting before anyone checks. With a chatbot you read the answer before you use it. With an agent, the email may already have gone.
• Being misled. Agents read emails, documents and web pages, and those can contain hidden instructions designed to redirect them. Surveyors have never had to think about their tools being manipulated in this way.
• Accountability. If an agent books the wrong job or sends the wrong figure, the firm is responsible. The software will not be.

The guardrails that matter

You would not let a self-driving car loose without knowing where the brake is. The same goes for agents.

• Read-only by default. Only let an agent change, send or delete things once you are confident it is safe.
• Draft, never send. Anything going to a client stays as a draft until you have read it.
• Keep approvals switched on. Good tools ask before they act. My favourite is Claude, because it asks for my approval before it does anything. I always know what it is about to do.
• Least access. Connect one folder, one inbox, one spreadsheet. Avoid connecting everything just because you can.
• No payments. Keep spending in your own hands for now.
• Choose your plan carefully. Use business plans with clear data terms, and keep client data out until you are certain.
• Write it down. Note which agent you use, for what, with what access, and who approved it. That is the start of the record the RICS standard expects.

Where I think this is heading

In the last few weeks, Meta and OpenAI have both launched personal AI agents. Meta’s is called Muse. OpenAI’s is called Dots, and it runs in the background on your behalf, learns your preferences and comes back to you when it needs a decision.

The tools around them are being built too. Stripe has launched a wallet for agents. You approve a payment on your phone, and the agent gets a one-time card for that purchase without ever seeing your card details. Visa and Mastercard both launched payment systems for agents last year. Start-ups such as AgentMail now give agents their own email inboxes.

Put together, that is an agent with its own email address, its own way to pay and permission to act for you. The roads are being built for self-driving cars, and quickly.

My view is that within a few years most people and most organisations will have their own AI agent. And agents will increasingly deal with other agents.

Think about what that means for a surveying firm.

• Private clients. Someone needing a survey will ask their agent to find a surveyor, compare fees and availability, check reviews and book. Their agent may never see your homepage the way a person does.
• Commercial clients. Asset managers, lenders, developers and occupiers will use agents to send instructions, request fee quotes from several firms at once, compare the responses and chase progress across a portfolio. Procurement that takes weeks today could take hours.
• Websites. Your website will be read by agents as much as by people. If your services, fees, coverage and availability are not clear and easy to find, an agent will move on to a firm whose information is.
• Trust. Businesses are already deciding which agents to deal with. Amazon recently blocked Meta’s agent from shopping on its site because it did not identify itself. Firms will need a position on this too.

It will not all go smoothly. Muse reportedly gave a user’s home address to a stranger on Facebook Marketplace without permission. Agents make mistakes, and some will be serious – Hugging Face comes to mind. But the direction is clear, and it is moving faster than most are planning for.

Before you hand over the keys

What agents can do is incredible. An agent can build a working website in less than an hour, research a market in an afternoon or prepare your week before you have had your first coffee. I use them every day, and I would not go back.

But I want to be very clear. You must be very careful with agents.

An agent will do what you ask, with whatever access you give it, at a speed no one can follow in real time. If it gets something wrong, it gets it wrong quickly and with your name on it.

So please do not give an agent access to:

• client data, survey reports or anything containing personal information
• your bank accounts, accounting software or payment details
• payroll, HR records or staff information
• passwords, or the email account that controls all your other logins

Not yet, and not until you understand exactly how the tool works, where the data goes and how to stop it.

Want to learn how to use AI agents safely in your firm? I am planning practical training on AI agents for surveyors and firm owners. What they can do, how to set them up and the guardrails that keep you safe. Register your interest here and you will be first to hear when dates are confirmed

Until next week, Nina