This is not an exhaustive or a complete subject. It is likely to change over time, with edits, additions and deletions, and is simply a collection of my thoughts based on many years of experience. You should follow your instincts, and you must always seek your own professional advice.
The banner image for this Blog is generated by AI. It is not a real photo of a real person. It is entirely AI generated based on a few basic keywords – a female building surveyor holding an iPad looking at a crack in a wall. It was generated immediately by a simple app on a phone.
We started to see the use of AI in building inspections in 2023, although it had been in development for several years prior to that. In January 2024 I wrote a Blog post about the potential risks and concerns of using this software in building inspections and property valuations. There have been many other publications on the same theme.
There is no doubting just how incredible and useful the many variations of AI software can be to our lives. It just gets more and more involved in every aspect of our lives and we will soon find ourselves taking it for granted, just like we do with the internet.
In professional life, there are now AI apps that can scan, measure, analyse, write and make complex assessments far faster than any human can. You can quite literally have a conversation with it in the same way that real people can. It is not static either. It just gets better and better. It can read and write whole reports if you ask it to. Truly amazing.
As good as this is, we should always be mindful of professional ethics and honesty with clients who are paying for professional expertise. It is entirely foreseeable that a consumer would be able to buy access to their own AI app and do their own building inspection and rely on the AI assessment without any need for a surveyor at all. That same app could then create drawings for ideas for alterations and it could provide risk assessments for defects that it has ‘seen’. This is not fantasy or fiction. This is real and it is here now.
Professional property experts can benefit hugely from the use of AI, but this must surely be done with open transparency and communication with the paying client.
I can see a time, in the very close future, where the whole world of property inspections will need to change and adapt from the security cushion that it has relied on for decades.
No longer will it be good enough to simply expect that a consumer will see the value of a building survey at all, when they can do it themselves for the cost of an app subscription.
Adapt to survive.
This is NOT a real image of a real person – alive or dead. Any similarity or resemblance to anyone living, or dead, is purely a coincidence. It is generated by AI, and shown as an example of how sophisticated the software now is. Do not be fooled.
Disclaimer: Anything posted in this Blog is for general information only and it is not in any way intended to provide any advice, legal or otherwise, on any general or specific matter that you can rely on. You should always seek your own legal and surveying advice.