A mandatory standard. An unprepared profession. And now a new pathway.

TLDR:

The RICS AI Standard went live on 9 March. It requires every surveyor who uses AI to have a baseline understanding of how it works, where it fails, and what the risks are. Firms must train their staff. But most firms do not have AI expertise in-house, the APC Data Management competency has not been updated, and there is no structured literacy programme for the profession. Into this gap, RICS has announced a new Data, Analytics and Intelligence pathway for data specialists. That may be right for the long term. But right now the urgent problem is not a new type of surveyor. It is upskilling those who are already practising.

The RICS Professional Standard on Responsible Use of AI in Surveying Practice went live on 9 March. The first mandatory AI standard in the profession’s history.

There is something which very few are talking about. And it is not technical. It is cultural.

The reality inside firms right now

I talk to surveyors all the time and the picture is messy.

In the same firm you can have a junior surveyor using ChatGPT to draft report sections, a mid-career associate experimenting with AI-powered measurement tools, and a senior partner who has never opened an AI application and has no intention of starting.

Some senior surveyors have told me directly that AI is one of the reasons they are looking forward to retirement. Not with anxiety. With relief. “I will be out before it matters.”

Others wear non-adoption as a badge of honour. “I do not use AI. I never have. My professional judgment is enough.” They say it with pride, as though resisting the technology is itself a mark of quality.

Meanwhile their junior staff are using it every day. Often without telling anyone. Often without understanding the risks. Often without any guidance on what is appropriate and what is not. Or they are looking for firms who are adopting and embracing AI.

The generational divide is real

The surveying profession has an ageing demographic. A significant proportion of practising surveyors are in their fifties and sixties. Many qualified in an era where technology meant a calculator and a fax machine. They built successful careers on deep technical knowledge, site experience, and professional relationships. None of that is diminished by AI.

But the standard does not distinguish between a 30-year-old associate and a 60-year-old principal. It applies to every RICS member who uses AI in their practice. And if your junior team is using AI to support work that you sign off, you are accountable for those outputs whether you understand the tool or not.

You do not need to use AI yourself. But if anyone in your firm is using it in the delivery of surveying services, the standard says you must understand enough to govern it.

And that is where the culture problem meets the compliance problem.

What the standard actually requires

The language is specific. Before using AI in practice, RICS members must have a basic understanding of the different types and subsets of AI systems and their basic ways of working, limitations and failure modes. They must understand the risk of erroneous outputs. They must understand data usage risks, including privacy and confidentiality.

Firms must provide regular training for staff to ensure they are equipped to manage the risks posed by AI.

This is not about becoming a data scientist. It is about being able to look at an AI output and know what questions to ask before you rely on it in a professional context. It is about understanding why CoPilot might give you a confident answer that is completely wrong. It is about knowing what happens to client data when you paste it into a free AI tool.

That baseline understanding is now mandatory. Not recommended. Mandatory.

But where do firms actually start?
This is the gap that keeps coming back.

The standard sets the requirement. But there is no structured AI literacy programme designed specifically for the surveying profession. No baseline training mapped directly to what the standard requires that a sole practitioner or a ten-person firm can access without taking a week out of fee-earning work.

The APC mandatory competency on Data Management has not been updated either. It still covers data collection, storage, and retrieval. GDPR. BIM. Databases. It does not cover AI literacy, hallucination risk, accountability for AI outputs, or any of the requirements in the new standard. Yet the RICS has confirmed that AI is a hot topic for APC candidates in 2026. Candidates will be questioned on it in their final assessment interviews.

So the next generation of chartered surveyors is expected to demonstrate understanding of AI before they qualify. But the competency framework they are assessed against has not caught up.

For the surveyors already practising, the challenge is different. You are not sitting an exam. You are running a firm. You have fee-earning work to deliver, staff to manage, and PI insurance to renew. AI literacy is now another thing on the list. And the profession has not made it easy to tick that box.

The standard sets the destination. The profession has not built the road to get there.

Different levels. Different attitudes. One standard.

What makes this so difficult is that AI adoption across the profession is not a spectrum. It is a patchwork.

Some firms are advanced. They have integrated AI tools into their workflows, trained their teams, and started building governance around it. They were ahead of the standard before it landed.

Some firms are curious but cautious. They know AI is coming. They have experimented individually. But they have not formalised anything at firm level. The standard is the push they needed.

Some firms have not started at all. Not because they are opposed to technology but because they have been busy doing the work. Surveying. Running a business. Paying the bills. AI felt like something that could wait.

And some firms have people inside them who are actively resistant. Who see AI as a threat to the profession rather than a tool within it. Who believe that professional judgment and technology are in opposition rather than in partnership.

That is why the culture piece matters as much as the compliance piece. You can write a policy document. You can build a risk register. But if half your team does not understand why AI governance matters, and the other half is using AI without telling you, your governance is a piece of paper, not a practice.

The standard says firms must provide regular training for staff to ensure they are equipped to manage the risks posed by AI.

So firms are trying. Some are running internal sessions. Lunch and learns. Team meetings with AI on the agenda. A partner doing a presentation based on an article they read last week.

But here is the question nobody is asking. Where is the AI expertise inside these firms actually coming from?

In most surveying firms, there is no AI expert. There is no data specialist. There is no one on the team who has formal training in how AI systems work, where they fail, or what the governance requirements look like. The person delivering the internal training is often learning it at the same speed as the people they are training.

That is not a criticism. It is reality. These are surveying firms, not technology companies. Their expertise is in buildings, land, valuation, and construction. Nobody trained them for this.

But the standard does not care about that. It does not say “train your staff when you feel confident enough to do so.” It says train them. And it means properly. With accurate information. Covering the right risks. Mapped to what the standard requires.

A well-intentioned internal session delivered by someone without AI expertise is not the same as training. It may even be worse than no training at all, because it creates a false sense of compliance. The firm thinks it has ticked the box. It has not.

What I am doing about it

I have spent nearly 4 years talking about AI in surveying, both on social media, events and through my weekly newsletter. The standard means it cannot be put off for another day.

The free AI prompt pack I put together has now been downloaded by hundreds of surveyors. Last week, David Wong (Huang Dawei), a chartered surveyor in China, adapted it into a full compliance toolkit for Chinese-speaking RICS members and published it on Zhihu. He credited Surveyors UK and the GUARD Framework. That prompt pack was designed for UK surveyors. It is now being used to help the profession prepare on the other side of the world.

I delivered an intro to AI for surveyors to Legal and General last week, which was well received.

The GUARD workshop on 31 March is the first in a series of workshops covering different aspects of AI in surveying practice. It focuses on governance. How to build AI governance that satisfies the standard. Risk registers, documentation, accountability, practical implementation for SMEs using my GUARD framework.

The AI in Surveying hub I am building on Surveyors UK will bring all of this together. Training, consultancy, resources, and guidance, delivered both by me and by the AI and technology partners already on the Surveyors UK marketplace. Firms will have one place to go for practical support, whether that is a workshop, dedicated firm training, or the tools to get started on their own. We also have an AI & Tech group in the Surveying Room community, which you can join today.

Last week’s episode of my podcast This Is Surveying featured Suzanne Hill on AI in construction. And there are episodes coming soon with people directly involved in formulating the RICS AI Standard itself. The people shaping the rules are willing to have those conversations publicly, and they are having them here.

Data, Analytics and Intelligence pathway to MRICS

Into all of this, RICS has announced a pilot for a new Data, Analytics and Intelligence pathway to MRICS in the same week as the standard. It would create a route for data professionals working in the built environment to become chartered surveyors.

If you are a building surveyor, a valuer, or a QS sitting in a small firm, what signal does that send? It says data and AI expertise is a specialism. It says there are people whose whole pathway is built around it. It says that is their job, not yours.

That is the opposite of what the standard requires. The standard says every surveyor is accountable for AI in their practice. The pathway risks giving the profession permission to think otherwise.

The pathway may well be the right move for the long term. But right now, the urgent problem is not the creation of a new type of surveyor. It is upskilling the 100k + who are already practising. It is closing the gap between a mandatory standard and a profession that has not been given the tools to meet it. Not to mention the need to update competencies to incorporate AI for the APC, for which candidates will be examined later this year.

It is addressing the culture, not just the compliance.

Learn more about the GUARD framework, access the prompt pack here

Get in touch

I’m always interested in hearing from anyone who would like to get involved with the AI in Surveying Hub – training, content, insights, partnerships, tech. I’m bringing together the tools and resources that are already out there and shaping some of my own to help surveyors and firms across AI.

Nina