How AI Is Making Claims Easier Against Surveyors

Speaker: 00:08
Hello and welcome. You’re listening to This Is Surveying, the podcast shining a light on the people, ideas, and stories shaping this incredible profession. I’m Nina Young, founder of Surveyors UK and the Surveying Room, the community bringing surveyors together, breaking down silos, and making surveying visible. So for now, let’s dive into our latest episode. Hello everybody, and welcome to This Is Surveying. Today’s guest and welcome to have on board is Nick Rains. Welcome, Nick.

Speaker 1: 00:44
Hi Nina, thank you for having me.

Speaker: 00:45
Yeah, no, it’s great to have you on here today. And Nick is a senior contract and wordings executive from Howden Insurance Brokers. And there’s a lot of things we’re going to go through today, but with b before we dive into anything, I would like to hear a little bit more about what you do, Nick, and sort of what your background is and how you got here today.

Speaker 1: 01:08
Oh, thank you very much. So

Speaker 1: 01:10
my sort of day-to-day role is very much in the construction and professional indemnity insurance sphere. So that is working with architects, surveyors, engineers, design and build contractors on the more technical aspects related to professional indemnity insurance. So not so much to do with the placing of the policy itself, but it may be things like reviewing their appointments, collateral warranties, et cetera, and also advising on technical policy terms. So alongside that, the theme of sort of the discussion today is also artificial intelligence, which I’ve sort of, like most people, I think, fell into. You know, you sort of get onto one AI project, and then before you know it, uh you become the AI person. So that’s very much become an increasing feature of my day-to-day role.

Speaker: 01:59
Yeah, and I was obviously, you know, I do, I do talk a lot about AI. So I was looking forward to our conversation today. And one of the things obviously it would be good to explore is sort of AI and its general impact on sort of the claims side, not necessarily with surveyors, but generally claims, because I think this is something we discussed before.

Speaker 1: 02:18
Yes, yeah, definitely. So I would say that directly there aren’t that many claims that we’re seeing arising out of the use of AI itself. Um I think that’s a little bit further down the line when we’ll see that a bit more prominently. You know, you have quite high-profile cases with law firms and things like that, where there’s been cases cited in court that are incorrect. But we’re we’re not quite there with surveyors and design professionals in terms of the claims coming in. However, what we are seeing is an increase in the number of claims that have been clearly generated using AI tools. And actually, normally the free AI tools, they’re not even really the good versions that you get if you pay a bit of a premium. And what’s happening is we’re seeing claimants take a slight issue with something that the professional has done. Uh, they’ll put that into Chat GPT, for example. They’ll

Speaker 1: 03:10
get a full sort of letter of complaint and they’ll send that off. And that sort of kick starts the claims process. And sometimes claimants don’t even realize they’re formally submitting a letter of claim, which then you know it starts the formal process under the civil procedure rules because they’re just putting it into Chat GPT and they’re saying, I’ve got this issue, write me a letter that will deal with it. And then there is the cost of a postage stamp. And then it obviously costs the professional and the insurers time and money engaging lawyers to defend that. And what we’re seeing is the lawyers might spend, you know, a few weeks, you know, really researching, really re-thinking about a response. And then within a few hours of it being received by the claimant, they’ve put it through chat GPT, they’ve got a response and they’ve sent it back. And then, of course, time and money needs to be spent analysing every single aspect of that, even if it looks like nonsense, because there might be one element that’s that’s correct. Like I say, it’s not having a direct impact. We’re not seeing direct negligence claims arising out of AI, but it’s just the ease at which you can bring a claim nowadays, and then it’s just taking up a lot of time from both the claims team perspective and sort of the insurers and the lawyers. And I think that will only increase.

Speaker: 04:22
Yeah, I’m gonna say, is it increasing, but I I would imagine you’re gonna say yes, because I’m I’m hearing it across all sorts of different professions where there’s like you know, another one is like conveyances and their workload that’s increased. Obviously, not claims, but queries, they’re literally because now suddenly everyone’s an expert. And like you say, these free tools, they’re not as good as the pay tools, and yet the majority of people use the free ones. When you say it’s basically they don’t realize that they’re well at what point is it something that these tools sort of is it the wording or is it they don’t, you know, somebody’s put it into say free uh free chat GBT and they’re gonna make a complaint or whatever the claim. When you say they don’t realise it, what do you mean by that?

Speaker 1: 05:08
So there’s a difference between making a general complaint. So, you know, you phone up, you send an email, what have you, and say, hey, look, I think some of your work’s been a bit defective. Um, you’re potentially negligent here, you cause me this loss. There’s a difference between that and actually there’s a concept known as the letter of claim or letter before claim. And once that is sent, that starts the time period set out in the civil procedurals ticking in how a claim then develops. So again, I must qualify this by saying that I don’t deal with the claims in the day-to-day, but I sit amongst the claims team and obviously up with technical matters and things like that. But it’s the claimant doesn’t realise that what they’ve sent is an official thing, you know, official letter for claim that then starts the clock ticking and then the defendant, the professional, has a certain amount of time to review that letter and to respond. And if they don’t and they just ignore it, then if a claim is brought through the courts, that can prejudice their position because they haven’t complied with the sort of pre-action protocol they’re supposed to comply with when they receive the first notification. So it can have a knock-on effect. And many times, you know, you just put something into Chat GPT, you say, How do I bring a claim against someone? And it’ll say, Well, do this. You go, Well, great, draft me that letter. And then it’ll get sent. And Claim hasn’t really thought about it. They just want to complain and threaten the claim and all that sort of thing. But now there’s a proper process that needs to be notified to insurers and lawyers might need to come on board, and there’s defence costs to be incurred and all that sort of thing.

Speaker: 06:41
That’s a lot more cost, isn’t it? That’s gonna be a lot more cost that you know, brokers and then they’re gonna have to deal with.

Speaker 1: 06:48
Yes, yeah, exactly. So it is a concern of certainly insurers, certainly brokers, that is just this easy. And I don’t know, I think anyone knows what the solution is uh for the time being in respect of that. I mean, moving across to say the solicited profession, for example, we know there’s been a massive increase in the amount of complaints the SRA receives, but just because

Speaker 1: 07:10
it’s so easy to fire those off and it’s kind of the same when it when it comes to claims for other professionals as well, that I think we are just going to see so many more of these. And that means that we need to look at the terms of the policy and you need to see, well, actually, is the amount being claimed or potentially being claimed enough to get you over the excess under your policy and therefore enough for insurers to be providing those defence costs because otherwise you could find yourself, you know, if the claims for a couple of grand, well, that’s something that the professional will need to look at and consider whether they’re willing to pay defence costs themselves, you know, engage lawyers or whatever, or whether they just go, oh, here’s two grand, go away, it’s not worth the cost in defending this. It’s it’s a very tricky sort of thing to consider.

Speaker: 07:52
It’s very tricky. And it’s it’s only gonna get worse because there’s only I think I can’t remember what the the figures figures are. You might have heard of it, but I think it was something like only I think 10% of you know, globally people have these, are using AI like regularly, these tools. But that 10%, that’s 10%, and that’s only gonna increase. And it’s interesting from the surveyor side. So I have heard through some surveyors that they start to get more queries, more follow-up questions from reports. And I’ve heard a little bit about an increase in some complaints. The the trouble is you don’t get visibility on that. So firms are not gonna, you know, disclose, oh yeah, we’ve had loads of complaints. You know, nobody wants to disclose that. But I do think that’s happening behind the scenes because it it can only happen if it’s happening everywhere else. So why would surveying be any different from that? And with regards to sort of AI generally and you know, within sort of insurance brokers and stuff, is there other other areas that you get involved with, sort of how you’re using AI or how how basically, you know, you’ve got claimants coming through, you’ve got that workload increasing. Is there an opportunity to use AI to help with that? You know, is I don’t know, I could be wrong, but I think there absolutely is.

Speaker 1: 09:14
The the challenge is making sure it says the right thing. So at the moment on the claims front, it’s more about, I guess, data. So you want to see what are the common causes of claims, where are they likely to arise from, what sort of professionals receive the most claims, that sort of thing. I think initially those are where the big projects lie. But yes, certainly you could have AI to assist in reviewing, you know, is this actually likely to be a sensible claim, or on average, how many do we see of these types of complaints that don’t come to much? I think that’s something that potentially in insurers would look in the background to evaluate their risk model models, um, ne as opposed to necessarily us as brokers, because we deal with insurers rather than necessarily ourselves deciding how to go back to the claimant. But it’s definitely something that I think will need to be used to help manage processes and what have you. And you could certainly have an AI that generates a sort of first response, and then you have a human look at it, and then that cuts down on the time needed. Um, I think though there’s a lot of value in you know having an in-house claims team like like Haldan does in that personal touch and all the experience that people have built up over the years. So if AI is used, it will supplement it rather than being just, oh, let’s just stick all the claims through AI and it can deal with it because you need that expertise to sort of look at the policy wording, say how do we shape this so that it’s best likely to be covered under the policy and things like that. So it’s never going to replace the human touch. But certainly I think AI can bring great efficiencies to almost any process you can think of, I would have thought.

Speaker: 10:55
But there is a, like you say, there is that risk exposure as well of you’ve got to be able to verify and the outputs that these are producing. And um as we know, a lot of people are coming to cropper across professions by relying on these tools and not not understanding the outputs or the relia reliability of these outputs and the bias and and things like that.

Speaker 1: 11:17
Yeah, certainly. So I think that’s um you know, certainly really, really pertinent um given there’s so much change at the moment. And yeah, the RICS uh sort of mandatory guidelines that came out in, I think, March earlier this year, they became sort of in force as opposed to just being suggestions. When it comes to professional indemnity insurance, it’s generally there to provide cover for claims that arise out of the negro and performance of professional services. And so it isn’t a some people think it’s a bit of a catchal policy, and you’re sometimes seeing contracts requirements for the PI insurance to cover all liabilities that may arise under a contract. It’s not really what it’s there for. It’s if your work is negligent or efficient, you receive a claim, it’s there to provide coverage for that scenario, not for example, if you breach data protection regulation or you fail to issue a cash warranty when you were supposed to purely because you have a disagreement with your client. You know, that’s more of a commercial matter. When it comes to AI, um, I know the question on everyone’s lips is is it covered by professional indemnity insurance? And the answer to that at the moment is that it’s not excluded, which is a funny way of saying it’s covered, as long as it wouldn’t ordinarily be covered by the terms of the policy. So you won’t have a claim excluded at the moment purely because AI was used. You know, if AI is used to run some cost calculations and it gets it wrong and a member of staff um hasn’t checked it properly and has just sent it out and you receive a claim, because actually now the project costs a lot more than than was anticipated based on those calculations, would they still still expect that to be covered as a normal claim for negligence, as if everything had been done by sort of the expert surveyor themselves? Where it gets a bit, I guess, murky is if that use of AI is unauthorized. So if the firm doesn’t have a policy that says you can use AI or it does and says you can use it in these certain circumstances, then you must use Copilot or the enterprise version of Claude or ChatGPT where all the data is secure and it’s still on, you know, it’s not being used to train the model, it’s not being sent elsewhere. So if you have policies in place that say this is how you use AI responsibly, but one of your employees goes off and goes on to the free version of Jack GPT and inserts it all anyway and does all their work on that without you knowing about it, there’s then a question of whether is that actually a use of software that was unauthorized, and maybe that’s a cyber issue. We don’t know if that’s how it would be interpreted, but it sort of shows the importance of having controls at an sort of employee level, you know, maybe have access, you know, cut off access to the free version of these tools on your on your browsers, have the IT admin behind the scenes, sort of restrict the use in that way. But I think one thing we’ve learned is that people, if you don’t give any access to AI tools, people will try and use them in ways they’re not supposed to. Yes. So I think it’s best to have a policy in place and set out how and when they can be used rather than just saying you’re not allowed to use them at all. Because people will use them in respect of the sort of cyber thing to watch out for. I think in in insurance

Speaker 1: 14:30
where it’s coming to the fore is really in the period prior to the placement of the policy. So the information that insurers are requesting and what they’re looking at in respect of the business and the use of AI. So it’s become a common question on the proposal form for insurers, how do you use AI? I think with the RICS um requirements, it’s only going to increase. Insurers are really going to want to see how the firm is using AI, what systems they have in place, what governance they have in place, how the output is checked, uh, what is put into it, all that sort of thing, and making sure it’s properly supervised and the people using it properly supervised. And that will then inform how they write the risk, whether they’re willing to write the risk in the first place. And things like pricing, you know, they’re probably more likely to look favorable and offer more favourable pricing to a firm that can demonstrate good risk management when it comes to AI versus a firm that just says, Oh, actually, we haven’t quite developed that yet.

Speaker: 15:29
I see. So it’s about, yeah, because that that’s kind of where I see it evolving over time, is it’s it’s risk management. And if you can upfront demonstrate, or you know, you’re looking for your next, you know, PI, you’re getting quotes, and you can go, look, this is how I demonstrate AI. We’ve got this, we’ve got that, and you can you can show that and demonstrate it as well. And there’s evidence. I can see how that risk profile then, you know, the appetite would be more acceptable, and that could then have a knock-on effect on premiums, you know, down the line as we go along, potentially down the line, because the the thing is we’re in that really kind of murky time at the moment, aren’t we? Where there’s so much change, we haven’t seen a lot of activity through claims within surveying, and certainly not around sort of the compliance with the standard. Um, and I think that, you know, from what I understand, you know, that is something that is going to happen. It’s inevitable. It’s happening in other professions, a lot more, say, in legal. It’s happening a lot more because I think there’s been increased adoption. I think with surveying, the adoption of AI is lagging because, well, there’s naturally a very skeptical surveying is quite a skeptical um profession, but also it’s how you can use AI. You know, a lot of it is obviously physical, it’s physical inspection. So some of it lags. And I don’t know what you think, but I think I don’t know what you’re sort of aware of with other professions, but I see it sort of definitely in the public eye, the media, the articles I’m reading, is that it’s impacting those professions faster. And I think surveying is just not there yet because of the sophistication adoption levels.

Speaker 1: 17:09
I think that makes sense. I think it’s also, you know, in professions where, you know, it’s not just words, as it were. So, you know, it’s very easy for a sort of lawyer to put something in and you get words back, right? And then you can read the words and you can say, okay, well, is that? Whereas surveying and other design professionals from the technical aspect, well, you then need to sit down and do the maths yourself to make sure that that’s all right anyway. And I think it’s less of an obvious use case immediately because people associate these models with generating text-based output as opposed to, you know, sort of numbers and calculations and drawings and designs and all that sort of thing. And also, I think people generally have

Speaker 1: 17:50
tried with perhaps earlier models, perhaps even the free versions of the models where you’re maybe even a year or two behind now if you’re using the free version of, say, ChatGPT versus a paid version, and they’ve not been happy with the output and they’ve thought, oh, this is rubbish, it will never be able to understand what we do. And then actually, if you use one of the more recent models, the leap has been insane. It has been absolutely beyond what I thought it would it would be, and it’s happened in about six months. So I think that’s an element of why people don’t necessarily trust it so much. And I think there’s probably also not so much competitive pressure. You know, you have you say you take law firms, for example, there’s a lot of pressure because they charge clients an awful lot of money, and those clients want to see efficiencies are being used, and it’s in the law firm’s own interest to get those efficiencies, so they need fewer staff, and there’s there’s sort of more profits in the work that they’re doing. Um, and that becomes more, I guess, to the fore in the legal profession where they’re talking about it all the time. Whereas when you look at sort of surveyors, there’s still, you know, if you get it wrong, a building falls over. Um, so there’s still a little bit of that sort of trust element of, you know, it’s not a case that, okay, you’ve prejudiced core proceedings or whatever, which is obviously a terrible thing, but no one’s died. Whereas, you know, you get your designs wrong, your exact your calculations wrong, and it could be quite catastrophic. So I think there is naturally an element of cautiousness when it comes to these things in the sort of construction industry. But it’ll be interesting to see actually what happens over the next few years in terms of whether there’ll be an argument that a responsible professional exercising reasonable skill and care would have used AI in a certain instance, and the facts they haven’t is sort of a reason for complaint.

Speaker: 19:37
It’s interesting because I’ve come across that because that’s that’s been you know talked about quite a lot recently. And I think there was a lawyer recently who actually posted on LinkedIn about that and about how that could apply then into surveying. And I was like, oh, then it’s just a bizarre thing, isn’t it? Where we’re in this different levels of adoption, and yet now there’s actual discussion of, well, would it have been better to use AI in that situation?

Speaker 1: 20:03
Yeah, exactly. And I think if you, you know, if you’ve got an AI tool that has been proven to, let’s say it has an accuracy rate of 95%, and in tests you can say humans have an accuracy rate of 85%. It’s almost like the self-driving car argument of, okay, a self-driving car is it if it has fewer accidents than humans, but then morally, what’s the case when it does have an accident? You know, it’s it’s one of those points of we like the human to be in control and to be responsible ultimately for the output. And there’ll be discussions to be had if we ever get to a point where you say, well, actually the accuracy of these models is now so good that it should at least everything should at least be run through it at least once, or maybe you’ll have a design checker or something where it can analyse the design against the building regulations and say, Yep, I think this complies, you’ve got a green tick from the AI, and that becomes mandatory for all firms. I don’t know, you know, it’s purely sci-fi speculation at the moment, but I don’t think it’s completely the stuff of fiction.

Speaker: 21:02
No, not at all. And I think because because I do know there are quite a few surveyors who have said, because one I one thing I’ve always said in very early days is one of the most powerful things you can do, even just as a small firm or whatever, is is take these tools, obviously using, you know, don’t put anything confidential, use your enterprise grade levels, but also you can literally use it to review your own work. So, and and I know surveyors that do this and that they’re like reviewing, they’re improving, they’re comparing, this like what against building regs, these all these, you know, really weighty that would take a long time. And they’re doing it as a final check because everyone gets tired. Everyone, this the the assumption is it’s because the free chat GPT that came out in November 22, you know, it hallucinated like no one’s business. It was horrendous. And a lot of people stayed with that. And they’re like, it’s rubbish, like you say, and then now it’s just uh incomparable, and they’re just gonna get better and better. And it’s been proven in other areas, such as in med. medicine and things where they’ve been used for MRIs or identify cancers and things. And it its accuracy is identifying more cancer or potential cancer than the human. And you still need to have like you still need to have radiographers, you’ll still still need them. But certain elements of a task it can be much better at. Yes. And then it slots in, doesn’t it? It slots in. It doesn’t re doesn’t replace, but it slots in. And I think that’s I think people are going to catch on to that. But I think there’s a lot of people I mean, you know, you and I and and others that we kind of use AI, we we follow it a lot. We kind of forget that there’s a lot of people that haven’t even used it once. And or people that are very resistant to it. And I think everyone’s in a very different camp. And I do wonder about on the claim side, like members of the public, I know queries have increased with surveyors. I know complaints I am sure I mean that there must be words and you know I I’ve no doubt the public, you know, if they can, you know, complain or make you make a claim even, then they’ll they’ll try it. And these tools are so easy to use. And if it’s happening in other areas it’s it’s happening in surveying. And I I do wonder at what point the public’s going to get savvy or well they don’t need to get that savvy do they? They’ll just put it into chat GPT and chat GPT goes, did the firm use AI? Have they complied with the standard? Have you asked these questions? Yeah and I’m just that’s what I’m seeing going to come down the line. It’s going to it’s the it’s the AI tools that are going to be able to inform

Speaker: 23:30
the public of things that they never would never even thought about a Rick’s standard.

Speaker 1: 23:35
They wouldn’t yeah exactly I think as well it’s a very good point about them not having to sort of learn about it as such. And I think that’s also a danger you know within the profession. So moving if we move forward sort of 10 years or so and you’ve got you know what does your staff look like in terms of their own knowledge you know do you have a period of time where you have to train people and then not allowed to use these tools so they develop their own knowledge in their in their brains and then can assess things that the AI has put out because I think there’s a risk that professionals in any profession will not develop the skills themselves they might otherwise have done because they can just put it through AI and not even necessarily in a bad way because that increases efficiency and all that sort of thing. If the AI is very good then you know fine. But you might end up in a position where you know half your team has never spent the amount of time that a senior member of the firm has going through everything, you know, calculating everything themselves, working on the designs themselves with you know minimal assistance from automation. And then you say okay well then whose fault if all these people have just been trained using AI models and they’ve always relied on them, what does the future of you know surveying for example look like and how do you make sure that that knowledge is retained at a human level you know so when that senior person retires or moves on there’s still the knowledge in the firm and you haven’t just you know got people relying on on AI and they can check and let’s say there’s an AI outage and all the systems go down and then you need people to actually think again.

Speaker: 25:07
Oh I think it’s all a huge issue isn’t it Nick coming down the line I think that’s massive because it’s you’ve got all the issues around universities, you know, speaking to lectures at universities, training where students have have used it throughout their degree, they’re coming into firms and I’m this is something I’m I’m anticipating is going to be an issue. We won’t necessarily hear a lot about it, but is where graduates will be looking for their first job. I mean regardless of the fact that jobs are getting impacted by AIs for for entrance. So it’s it’s hitting graduates across professions not necessarily so much big in surveying yet but then they come to a firm they’ll be looking for an employer that allows them to use AI. They’ll want that because that’s forward thinking that’s modern that’s what they’re used to. They won’t like it and I think that will affect recruitment. And I think when we get to those stages where the expectation will be from new entrants we want to be using AI firms will have to and it it’ll be come before that. There’ll be other reasons why they’ll have to sort of under, you know, train their teams I think whether the surveying firm adopts it or not, I think there’s going to be pressures outside of that such as employment, shadow AI, such as you know, clients complaints, claims, people asking about AI, competitors using it, all these things are going to influence, but are they going to do it quick enough where I think my my thoughts are a lot of firms are going to be heavily impacted because it’s going to be a massive wake up call. A few years down the line I expect probably two to three years where the firms literally that haven’t done anything suddenly they’re going to be pushed out because these firms just haven’t just become efficient but they are hiring people that because they’re AI so they’ll get the better the the talent but like you say the big gap is and I think this is a whole thing that nobody’s answered yet really is how do you then prepare for like for example if you haven’t got that long experience of doing the the grunt work so to speak how do you know to verify the output? I think that’s a really hard question that because you haven’t got that expertise and that going through and making mistakes and learning and then so how do you know what’s wrong, what’s right? And then like you say that with with firms we’ve got an age in demographic I think there’s a lot of sort of leaders of these firms that very resistant to AI they they they want to retire. They don’t want to be changing the whole business process or you know and so then what happens because these younger generations need to learn from the the older ones and how and how to use AI responsibly but who’s going to teach them to do that it’s like really messy I think.

Speaker 1: 27:47
Yeah I think that’s it it’s just going to be and I think we’ve all it’s always a worry I think it’s an indefinite worry within the um sort of construction sector that there’s always a pending retirement of senior figures and a gap that needs to be filled and like you say that’s potentially only going to increase when you look at you know the adoption of AI and things like that. But that knowledge, that industry knowledge and the specialisms that you can really develop because it becomes a you need a specialism in you know surveying but you also need a specialism in AI as it relates to surveying. So you don’t just need to be a really good surveyor you need to be really good at getting AI to do the things that can sort of increase your efficiencies and things like that. So it’s almost like a dual skill set and you don’t want to lose the skill of surveying because you’ve developed the skill of AI.

Speaker: 28:36
And I think I think that’s going to be an interesting one because you know in in areas not all I mean I think certain areas are are more at threat than others from you know impacting for jobs and things across surveying depends on the discipline. But I think those where it’s heavily you’ve got a heavy heavy element of physical inspection I don’t think that’s going away as that will take longer to be impacted you know because whilst obviously Elon Musk is building his robots I don’t think it’s anytime soon that that’s going to happen. And I think that will come up against a lot of human resistance, people resistance. A lot of people say it’s not just about the tech it’s actually getting people in these firms like you say to train to adopt it to get the mindset to use it. And I think people forget that it it so much of this could be is resistance so that I know there are there are people that don’t want to use it and there’ll be people in firms that don’t want to use it. And so then how do you get them to use it responsibly if they’re resistant to it in the first place?

Speaker 1: 29:28
Well yeah exactly that’s uh that’s all part of it and I think sometimes the sort of the regulator ricks whatever can encourage that change and help push it forward you know it’s really good that they’re one of the first

Speaker 1: 29:40
ones to come out with this these requirements and responsible usage. I guess what you don’t want people doing is going that looks scary let’s just not use it. You want to encourage adoption and I think that’ll probably be you know a big driver you know for them and for other you know RIPA for example in how do we get people to actually use it because it will be creating efficiencies and we don’t want to get stuck behind other professions and we’re the only ones not using it whilst also making sure there’s a safe safe risk management. It’s kind of another thing to to manage in addition to your data protection stuff with emails and your cybersecurity and what have you you know it’s yet another technological thing. But people have adapted to the changes that the internet brought and people will adapt to the changes that AI bring and those that do it quicker may find a benefit above those that don’t. So yeah certainly lots of very good things to come and lots of potentially scary things to come but I don’t think it’ll I’m kind of in the middle when I look at this so I don’t think it’s going to destroy the world and I think it’s going to create this land of milk and honey. I think it’s just going to create some very good efficiencies and but people need to be very careful because it could be a risk to their business if they get it wrong. But it could be a risk to business if they don’t get it right.

Speaker: 30:51
So yeah yeah I think that’s yeah they’re all really good points like you say the the the the land of milk and honey is like going to have this like you know amazing world and it’s just like that’s just an absolute pipe dream in my view. Just like that is not going to happen. We’ve got these very power hungry um running these so much power with these models. I think so many things are going to change down the line you know I think government’s more and more going to step in I think with with with AI and its usage and things. But you’re right I think the RICS standard I think it was really good it came out because the built environment needs I mean obviously it’s uh applies to RICS members and firms but the built environment we need more of that more of that and it’s I I do feel there’s there is some resistance some firms have said I don’t really want to use AI heavily because as soon as I hit materiality I’ve got to do risk registers I’ve got to do this and that and so in a way it has put some off but I think over time people will just they’ll just adopt and they’ll just use it and they’ll get used to it as a as a BAU business as usual. I think like anything else. Is there anything else before we wrap up for today that you’d maybe like to share or any any advice or any thoughts or anything else really?

Speaker 1: 32:05
I think just generally it’s I think the takeaway from this is you know don’t be scared of AI but use it sensibly and the thing and and this is true across claims generally it’s not necessarily just related to AI but keep records keep uh sort of logs of how you’re uh monitoring the use of AI and you know if something has been produced by AI and you know a junior member of staff whatever has done that and then senior person has has supervised it’s gone through this process just make sure you note on your file that you’ve done that and it’s obvious you know that could even just be an email to your junior colleague saying I have reviewed this I have the following comments or I’ve reviewed this and this is all okay this has gone through the following process and then you know it could be a few lines and you have that on the system so that if anything comes up and goes well actually no insurer’s looking and go, well was this authorized did you use proper process or on renewal have you got proper processes in place you can just point to your sort of case management system and say these are the actual discussions we’ve had because it’s all well and good having those in your firm verbally. But if you haven’t got in writing and you can’t prove them then it becomes a bit of he said she said and what can you actually prove? So it all comes down to have good records of your risk management, have a firm policy in place to alliance with the uh the risk guidance and that will sort of serve you in good stead moving forward. And if any claims do arise then it’s important you have that paper trail.

Speaker: 33:28
There’s a really really really good advice because I think that the concern that I have is that the standard came out on the 9th of March effective from the 9th of March this year. And you know I’m sure a lot of firms are taking time to adopt the standard and do that record keeping but you can’t go back. It’s not retrospective. So the more longer you continue the other thing is it’s the unknown question that we talked about like the shadow AI is like if something comes back later on and

Speaker: 33:55
it turns out that an employer used the AI and they had nothing in place then they’re exposed and that’s why I always say do it ASAP start recording start doing it now and get compliant because it may the trouble is because we haven’t seen a lot of fallout yet or anything like that people are busy. We were busy running these firms and they’re not gonna they’re gonna think it’s something to do I’ll do it I’ll I’ll get a policy done but the it’s not just the policy if you fall into materiality it’s way more than that. But yeah no it’s um really good advice and I think it’s one of those things that we’re gonna see it play out over the next uh probably a year or two and something’s gonna unfortunately something will happen bring more attention to this and people to improve their compliance but I think it’s uh yeah it’s an important point and I’ve really enjoyed our conversation because I always enjoy talking about AI anyway but um I it’s something that I’ve I’m really interested in because I’ve had quite a few surveyors you know ask me about sort of insurance brokers, insurance AI and how is it going to play out and at the moment the only thing I’ve just said is they’re gonna start asking questions. You know that’s kind of where we are isn’t it so make sure you’ve got you know you can answer things that compliance with the standard and that’s the best sort of advice I think there is at the moment. But yeah well thank you very much for your time today Nick really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 35:14
No thank you very much for having me. It was um it was very enjoyable thank you.

Speaker: 35:17
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