The insurance conversation surveying firms aren’t having

If you haven’t read the RICS Professional Standard on Responsible Use of AI in Surveying Practice yet, this is your reason.

Not just because it’s mandatory, but because things are already happening around you that complying with the standard will help you prepare for. And if you’re not ready, the consequences land on you.

Law firms including CMS, RPC, Beale & Co, Kennedys, Brodies, DWF, and Mills & Reeve have all published articles analysing what this standard means for professional liability. Brokers, including Howden, Lockton, Griffiths & Armour, WTW, and Continuum Insurance, have all published guidance on what it means for your PI cover. Insurance trade press including Insurance Post and Insurance Times are covering the pricing gap.

That’s a lot of people in the insurance and legal world paying very close attention to a standard that most surveying firms still haven’t read.

Here are five scenarios. Every one of them is either happening now or will happen within the next 12 months.

Your PI insurer asks how you’re using AI

This one is already happening. Howden confirmed in February that a common theme in recent insurer discussions is how firms are embedding AI into their daily work. Lockton reported the same – underwriters are increasingly asking to see firms’ AI policies at renewal. Lockton’s Marc Rowson has been clear that underwriters aren’t trying to penalise firms for using AI, but they do want evidence that outputs are checked and data is protected.

If you don’t have a documented AI usage policy, you’re walking into that conversation unprepared. And your premium, your terms, or your ability to get cover at all could be affected.

Continuum Insurance reported in March that firms with documented AI governance frameworks are already negotiating better PI terms at renewal. That’s not a prediction. That’s what brokers are seeing right now.

Governance is no longer just a compliance obligation. It directly affects insurability

— Continuum Insurance, March 2026

A client asks: “Did you use AI for this?”

The standard requires you to tell them. Section 4.3 makes it mandatory to notify clients in writing when AI has been used in delivering your services. Your terms of engagement must now include the extent of your PI cover for AI use. CMS, in their March 2026 analysis written specifically for PI underwriters and brokers, confirmed that this standard will inform how courts assess professional negligence claims against surveyors.

But even without the standard, this question is coming. Clients are becoming aware of AI. Lenders and institutional clients are starting to ask. If you can’t answer clearly – what you used, how you checked it, where the professional judgment sits – you have a problem.

Beale & Co, a specialist construction and insurance law firm, warned that professional negligence claims could increasingly turn on whether a firm complied with the standard. RPC, one of the UK’s leading PI defence firms, confirmed that RICS professional standards will be taken into account in regulatory, disciplinary, and legal proceedings.

A client uploads your report into AI

You deliver a building survey. The client drops it into ChatGPT and asks “what did the surveyor miss?” or “is this report thorough?”

AI gives them an answer. That answer may be wrong. But now the client has a second opinion – however flawed – and they’re comparing it to your work. If your report doesn’t hold up to that scrutiny, or if your methodology isn’t clearly documented, you’re on the back foot before a complaint is even made.

The standard’s requirements on documentation, reliability decisions, and audit trails may feel like bureaucracy, but they’re your defence file. As Howden put it, just as valuers document comparable evidence to support their opinions, firms should apply the same audit trail discipline to AI outputs.

Someone in your firm is using AI and you don’t know about it

A junior surveyor uses AI to draft part of a report. A trainee runs comparable evidence through a large language model. An admin uses AI to summarise client correspondence.

None of it is documented. None of it has been checked. None of it is covered by your firm’s processes because your firm doesn’t have AI processes.

The standard requires firms to have an AI policy. It requires named accountability for material AI outputs. It requires that a qualified surveyor makes documented reliability decisions on anything AI produces that affects service delivery.

If you don’t have these controls in place, you don’t know what’s happening inside your own firm. And when something goes wrong, you’re the one who’s accountable – not the AI tool your employee used.

DWF Group, in their analysis of professional liability risks, posed a question worth sitting with: at what point will a professional be considered negligent for not using AI? We’re not there yet. But the direction of travel is clear, and the gap between firms that have governance in place and those that don’t is widening fast.

Something goes wrong and your PI policy doesn’t clearly cover it

Here’s the bit nobody is talking about loudly enough.

Most PI policies were written before AI entered professional workflows. They don’t explicitly cover AI-related errors. They don’t explicitly exclude them either. Insurance lawyers call this “silent AI” – a term coined by Kennedys Law, one of the UK’s leading PI defence firms. It means nobody really knows what happens when the first AI-related negligence claim hits a surveyor’s desk.

In terms of client instruction, professional responsibility and liability there is no flexibility built into professional standards or professional liability insurance policies to accommodate AI

— Adrian Tagg MRICS, RICS Modus, January 2026

Kennedys has warned that many PI policies may not explicitly cover AI-related errors or omissions. Mills & Reeve are running an ongoing series on the impact of AI on PI insurance. And Insurance Post reported that RSA’s UK head of PI acknowledged that PI insurers are currently bearing an unpriced exposure to generative AI.

Griffiths & Armour, a specialist construction PI broker, has taken a firm position on where this is heading. They’ve confirmed that at least one insurer has already started applying AI-specific exclusions to liability policies. But their view is clear:

The PI insurance market cannot simply exclude AI and hope the problem goes away. AI tools are going to become so embedded in the industry that to simply exclude liability for their use would see the insurance sector render itself irrelevant.

— Griffiths & Armour, 2025

The RICS standard doesn’t fix your PI wording. But compliance with it gives you a defensible position. If a claim arises and you can show you followed the standard – documented your AI use, maintained audit trails, made proper reliability decisions, disclosed to the client – you’re in a fundamentally stronger position than a firm that can’t show any of that.

Getting your firm ready