Independent voice making surveyors visible | The Surveying Room - independent community for ALL surveyors, all career stages | This is Surveying podcast | AI in Surveying | Did you know? | Lionheart Trustee | Digital Strategist
Independent insight on surveying, careers, AI, and professional visibility. Expect clear thinking, industry perspective, and commentary on how the profession is changing, written for surveyors and those working around the built environment.
Surveying has never rushed to adopt anything. Drones took years to move from gimmick to standard kit. iPads on site met the same resistance. Digital mapping, the same story.
The profession could afford that pace, because the pressure to change came from inside. Internal pressure can be outwaited.
That grace has gone with AI. The pressures now come from outside the profession, from forces a firm does not control. The UK Jurisdiction Taskforce's Legal Statement on Liability for AI Harms, published in July, is only the newest of them.
Here are ten. Not one of them sits within the profession's gift to slow down.
The legal standard. The Taskforce's statement confirms a professional can be liable for failing to use AI where a competent peer would have used it. Reasonable care moves as tools become common. Clients. They are using AI themselves. That means sharper questions and better-armed complaints. Competitors. Firms already using it turn around faster and price more keenly. Every instruction they win on speed is one you did not. Incoming talent. Graduates arrive expecting these tools as standard. A firm that has not tried them can look dated before day one. Existing staff. Your current people watch other firms work with AI. Tools are becoming a reason to stay or to leave. Search. Google now answers many queries itself and sends far fewer people onward. More clients ask a chatbot instead of visiting your site. The visibility you built over years is thinning. Insurers. Underwriting and policy wording are moving on AI. How you govern it will start showing up in renewal questions and premiums. Your own software. Report, CRM, and practice management tools are adding AI by default. A firm that has decided against AI is very often using it already, with no record of the decision. Client procurement. Larger clients and panel managers are starting to ask how firms use and govern AI. Lenders and automated valuation. Lenders are leaning harder on AVMs and desktop products.
None of these can be managed by ignoring them.
This is what separates AI from drones or iPads. Those were tools inside the profession, picked up in a firm's own time.
AI is not. It is in the hands of your clients, your competitors and the public, and it works whether a firm engages with it or not.
Plenty of surveyors have little grasp of what AI even is, let alone how to adopt it well.
Standing still does not keep AI at arm's length, because it does not sit inside the profession waiting to be adopted. It is already everywhere. And the pressures above will only grow. I say all this from a genuine place of concern, not HYPE. I'm already seeing the fallout and sadly, much more is coming.into firms with no tools and no policy
Thanks as always for reading. If you have any thoughts on this or other AI topics please do reply to this email. I read every one.
Independent voice making surveyors visible | The Surveying Room - independent community for ALL surveyors, all career stages | This is Surveying podcast | AI in Surveying | Did you know? | Lionheart Trustee | Digital Strategist
Independent insight on surveying, careers, AI, and professional visibility. Expect clear thinking, industry perspective, and commentary on how the profession is changing, written for surveyors and those working around the built environment.