AI, Surveying, and the New RICS Standard with Christopher De Gruben

Summary

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the property industry.

In this episode of This Is Surveying, Nina Young speaks with Christopher De Gruben, chartered surveyor and Head of AI and Property at Artefact. Chris works at the forefront of AI adoption in real estate, helping major property owners and investors implement data and AI strategies across Europe and the Middle East.

They explore what AI actually means for surveyors, where the real opportunities are, and why parts of the surveying profession may face major disruption.

Chris also shares insights from co-chairing the working group behind the new RICS Responsible Use of AI standard. The discussion covers disclosure, materiality, and how surveyors can safely integrate AI into their workflows.

The episode also tackles the debate around AI and the APC process, and why discouraging candidates from using AI may risk pushing the next generation away from the profession.

If you want to understand how AI is reshaping surveying, property valuation, and the built environment, this is a conversation you do not want to miss.

What We Cover

• Chris’s international career and how he moved into AI and property
• Real-world examples of AI being used in property companies today
• The difference between AI assistants and AI analysts
• Over 300 potential AI use cases in property businesses
• The RICS Responsible Use of AI standard
• Understanding materiality when using AI in surveying work
• Why AI should not replace the surveyor’s professional judgement
• Concerns about AI restrictions for APC candidates
• The impact of AI on junior roles and surveying careers
• How the UK property industry compares to Saudi Arabia

Guest Links

Christopher De Gruben on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/degruben

Useful Links

Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) – https://www.rics.org

Surveyors UK – https://www.surveyors-uk.com

Guest Bio

Christopher De Gruben is a chartered surveyor and Senior Director and Head of AI and Property at Artefact. He advises major property investors and developers across Europe and the Middle East on large-scale data and artificial intelligence programmes. His work focuses on modernising property operating models and embedding AI into real estate businesses in practical ways.

Chris also plays an active role in shaping the surveying profession. He serves as Vice Chair of the RICS Professional Group Panel Board and co-chaired the working group responsible for the new RICS Responsible Use of AI standard. He is also co-authoring new guidance on AI in valuation.

If you want to connect with surveyors across the UK and keep up with the profession, join The Surveying Room. It is free to join and open to all types of surveyors, students, and professionals who work with them. Surveyors UK & The Surveying Room  

Connect with me - Nina Young on LinkedIn

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Hello and welcome. You're listening to This is Survey, the podcast shining a light on the people, ideas, and stories of this incredible professional. I'm Nina Young, founder of Survey UK and the Surveying Room, the community bringing surveys 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 I'm joined by Christopher DeGruben, a fellow chartered surveyor and senior director and head of AI and property at Artifact. Chris works at the sharp end of AI transformation in real estate. He leads large-scale data and AI programs across the Middle East and Europe, advising major property owners and investors on how to modernize their operating models and embed AI in a way that actually works. Alongside that, he's deeply involved in shaping the profession. He serves as vice chair of the RICS Professional Group Panel Board and also co-chaired the working group who were responsible for the new AI standard, which is now being adopted across the profession and goes live on the 9th of March. He's also co-authoring the new AI invaluation guidance document, which I've been told is very, very lengthy. But without further ado, Chris, welcome. Welcome to this is surveying.

SPEAKER_04 1:34

Thank you, Nina. Pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Yes, pleasure to have you on. As as as we both we do like to talk about AI.

SPEAKER_04 1:42

We do, indeed.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

I think what I like to have a a little a little bit about is to understand a bit about you, I guess, as to how where you've got to where you are today.

SPEAKER_04 1:52

Well, it's a long story. I'll I'll give you the short version.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:57

I love traveling, I love working internationally. My parents are diplomats, hence I I loved traveling. Somehow ended up in Mongolia, where I worked for about 14 years. And while there, I was fascinated by the move of Mongolia from a central plan economy to a market economy, and what that meant in terms of society and how it involved the built environment. Because suddenly you had a market that went from being completely state-owned to a market that suddenly overnight became a private market where people are in their apartments. And you went from a market where the state decided what to build on utilitarian grounds to one which was market-driven. And while I was doing lots of various things about collecting data and understanding the market and so on, I was, I just became really, really interested in how a young nascent population starts to shape its built environment to better reflect their values and who they are. Which led me to think about how does architecture and the built environment shape society and vice versa, uh, with sort of the usual examples of sort of the more authoritarian economies have big buildings that are designed to impress and have the power of the state with very little human scale to it. While in most democracies or most of bottom-up led, it's it's much more to human scale, representative of the people. The institutions take far less of a grandiose place in our cities. And so all of this led me to interest in property. I worked for the World Bank for a while as an urban specialist, and I worked all over the world with them, which was really fascinating. And gradually I got more and more into what we we no longer call smart cities, but at the time we used to call smart cities, but which was about how do local authorities, cities, municipalities better use data to better serve taxpayers, residents, etc. And as citizens. And I was really, really fascinated. And I worked in particular on Incheon, which is this Korean, completely planned city. I hate planned cities as a principle. I think they're that they're they fail in most respects. And there's very few good examples. Yeah, I mean, all places like Brasilia and people places like this are sort of weird, ghostly, they look good top-down, but they never really work as a livable city. Uh but Inchon is a is a planned city next to the main airport out of Seoul. And I worked on lots and lots of smart cities projects there because they were doing some really interesting things around public transport and things like this, things which I'm surprised still haven't come to the UK. But to give you one project that I really, really enjoyed was all the bus stops have cameras, like they do in the UK and everywhere else. Uh, the team built a quick algorithm that was able to tell you the average age of the people waiting, average, so the the expected sex of the person waiting, whether male or female, and how long they will be waiting at the bus for. This allowed us to build an algorithm that then predicted what the likely demand for a particular bus will be at the particular bus stop at a particular time of the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, throughout the year, which allowed us to then simplify the bus fleet for Inshon with four different types of buses, going from the very long, big bendy buses, very high capacity, to actually a small transit van that could take six people. And which means that instead of having a giant bus running up and down the route at 2 a.m. where there's absolutely no one on the route, you had a small transit van that would pick up the one or two stragglers coming out of a bar. Yeah. But then throughout the day, you could adapt all of this. And it had great effects because suddenly you had more regular transport, you had transport that was better adapted to the number of people that were waiting. You then also had bus drivers that were driving different types of routes throughout the day. So there were far fewer accidents because bus drivers got very bored running the same routes. And it was an extraordinary thing, and it dropped the cost of running misfield transport by something like 30 or 40% because you used a lot less fuel, you had a lot less empty buses running the streets and so on. So we did lots and lots of projects like this. I absolutely fell in love with it. When I came back to the UK, I wanted to continue working in AI or data and cities. I did a master's in Oxford, which I really enjoyed in sustainable urban development, where I sort of got to put the academic theory behind it. And then I started working for a private sector consultancy because it pays better. And my job for the last six, seven years has been all about how to help property companies better use AI in day-to-day operations. Right. And it's been very exciting, it's taken me all over the world, uh, still does. And it's fun to be able to help companies actually implement AI.

SPEAKER_02 6:37

Yeah. I mean, well, what what's do you still see many of those moments of like the light bulb moments or the oh wow? Like Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 6:46

Every week, nearly every day. I have lots and lots of intro sessions with execs who sort of call us in and says, Well, what's this new fango thing about AI? Everyone's talking about it. Is it a hype? Can he actually do anything? And then you go and do sort of demos and you show them what the art of the possible is. And you see execs who've done things a certain way for a very long time, who go, Oh wow, this is this can really change things. This is really exciting, particularly in the last six months. I think the capabilities of AI tools has dramatically improved over the last six months, particularly with Gente coming on, and just the models have gotten better and better and better. So the quantum of things you can do is just exponential. I mean, I maintain a spreadsheet of sort of AI use cases and property, and I think I'm now sort of 300 to 350 potential use cases that can be deployed across property companies.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

I think there's this, I think there's this perception, sorry, Chris, that with regards to it's just a tool to speed up reporting.

SPEAKER_04 7:45

No, far, far more than that. I mean, the amount of things you can do, just there's two, I always talk about it as two different sort of personas you can have. There's one which is the assistance. So similar to having a really good PA, you have a base layer system that will help you write emails, find files, compile some reports, put some graphs together, those sorts of things. But they're fairly sort of mundane things that can maybe save you half an hour to two hours max a day. But the the quality of life improvements that if you don't have a PA, you suddenly have actually a hyper-personalized PA that has access to your files, access to your calendar, access to your emails, understands your tones of voice, and can do lots and lots of admin things for you. But then you have sort of the more the tuned gentic AI or the sort of the GPT models, which replace a really good analyst, sort of junior to mid-level analyst, yeah, by doing, of course, compiling reports, but also automating workflows, finding out fraud, finding out changes in data sets, writing draft lease contracts, interacting with your customers, setting pricing strategies, telling you what to invest and what to divest from, portfolio management, property management. There's so many, so many different applications today which are becoming increasingly mundane. And I think for us as an artifact, one of the things that we've seen as a dramatic change is that we used to charge half a million pounds to build a machine learning model for a big read, let's say, that will predict market movements, that will do fairly significant things, but fairly targeted things. Today, most of these capabilities can be done by people within the firms themselves. They don't really need outside consultants like myself. The challenge that still exists is the change management is the adoption. But actually, today, if you hire a fairly smart young intern or young surveyor that is switched on, you can do nearly everything yourself. You don't need external support to do it. Uh, you can build agents, you can build dashboards, you can build SaaS solutions or software solutions, you can build automated invoicing and reporting, you can build CRM systems. All of these things that used to cost a lot of money, we'll have to plug in a lot of things, you have to pay a firm to come and set it up for you, import all your data, might do the migrations, do all of those sorts of things. All of this can now be done in-house at a fraction of the cost and is far, far more tailored to your own needs and your own circumstances than it ever was. So for me, that's that's exciting. Incredibly cheap. Incredibly cheap. I speak to my clients and the sums of money they pay for CRM systems or for dashboarding for BI, and you go get a 20 quid a month license on GPT and you're done. Uh or get paid 30 pounds to lovable, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I I use Lovable all the time to do demos and things. It's actually extraordinary. And I do a course for the RSCS and I demo lovable. And I think lovable is the most, it's the tool that everyone goes back to saying, oh wow, I can have my own dashboards, I can do my own system. Even basic things like, for instance, I'm working with a property management company today. They will say the service charge accounts, all the statutory accounts they have to do, they're moving them into lovable. Lovable will give you a really nicely formatted, very pretty narrative description of your service charge accounts, of the building accounts, of the service management accounts in a tone of voice that's adapted to you, that is specific to your unit, to your schedule, to everything that you are doing, and so on. And you see the engagement of people typically, I'm not going to name the property, but the they have about 16 to 20% click-through rate of people opening the emails when they send the accounts through. They've started this about two months ago, and now it's something like 80% because people actually enjoy reading through it. There's a chat bar that's linked into it where they can ask questions about the accounts and say, Why have my service charges gone up by £2,000 and where does it come from? And I'd like to see the bill for the lift repairs, and I'd like to see how it's a proportion to my schedule. All of this now gives so much more transparency, so much more information at the fingertip of people and removes a lot of the friction that companies exist or that companies have today in their operations.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

I think it's so much of what what we're doing, what I've been doing, and a lot of people in this space, it's kind of spreading that awareness of of these tools because as soon as you see them and start to use them, then it really does hit home.

SPEAKER_03 12:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

Doesn't it? You know, it's like it's in there in good, they're still they they constantly wow me because as things come out every five minutes. And I'm like, you know, can't be able to do that so fast.

SPEAKER_04 12:29

Yeah. And I mean, it's I always recommend to people just start using it personally, subscribe to 20 quid a month ChatGPT or Claude or or Gemini, it doesn't really matter which. And then just start using it to do your shopping, to do, to ask questions, to generate weather apps, to do all sorts of things. And then the more you play with it, the more you work out actually, I can probably use this for work. But I think the challenge today, and it's interesting because I work with lots and lots of companies, and there is reluctance to turn it on because they're worried about data security and or data sovereignty. They're worried about GDPR, they're worried about data leaking being used to train models and so on. So there is a bit of a learning curve in how to use it. But the challenge is that when you go and see companies, you go and speak to the execs and say, So are you using Copilot or ChatGPT or Gemini or any of them? And they go, no, no, this is too risky for us. We'd like to, but it's a bit risky and so on. And then typically I turn around and says, okay, so who is actually who has a personal license that they're also using for work? And usually about half the people in the room are copying and pasting away because their firm don't allow them to have copilots, so they're using their own. And it's one of these things that you can't stop. Far less secure. You have to embrace it, otherwise you place yourself at risk. And so if there is ever a message to sort of property execs, is it's no longer a hype. It's we now have proven good use cases, we know what they're good at. You need to embrace it because your fees are being pressured down because your clients are now expecting you to use it. Yeah. Because if you don't use it, others will and you'll be pushed out of the markets. You won't, you're not gonna be able to recruit younger people if you're not using it, because I think it's a it's a massive requirement now for anyone coming out of university. If your firm is banning the use of AI, I think they're not going to work there for long.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

No, I think it's putting people off. I think it's literally you need to be forward thinking, don't you? I think it's it it will be a positive that you uh adopt it, use it, have policy. Open about it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:28

And this is actually a a big part of this was the reason why we why the RSCS was keen to write the responsible use of AI standards. Because there was so much of a call from the industry saying we want to start using it, but we're not sure how. We're not sure how we use it safely, responsibly. Do we tell our clients? Will our insurance cover it? All those sorts of things, that you had to put something in place as cardrails and as a as a way of achieving a minimum baseline of responsible use so that I think the industry then feels more comfortable using it. And when we were writing the standards, this was front of mind for us.

SPEAKER_02 15:06

Yeah, because I think it's what I like about it is that it's not stifling.

SPEAKER_04 15:09

And it's not supposed to be.

SPEAKER_02 15:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:11

And it's part of a wider gambit of different things the RCS is doing to sort of embrace AI. Some might say a bit late, but better late than never. But it's important. The standards are there to a degree to be the stake. It's lots of shoulds in the standards. As a surveyor, you should be doing this, you must be doing this, etc. Because you need to have a minimum baseline of uh disclosure to your clients. How do you disclose it? What do you disclose? What do you have to understand? There has to be a minimum level of training and awareness within your firm of we are using AI, these are the risks of it, this is what it does, and so on. And then you need to have things like risk registers and understand that things like a risk register may sound like more paperwork, but in actual fact, it's just an artifact to force a conversation within the firm as to we are using this AI, this is the data it's using, this is the output, these are the risks that it can place us in, and this is how we will mitigate that risk. You need to have these conversations in firms.

SPEAKER_02 16:11

Risk workshops. I used to do that years back, early careers, used to run risk workshops for exec teams, and it gets everybody in the room and you really start to think about it. Where are we using it? Who's using it?

SPEAKER_01 16:21

Yeah, exactly. Otherwise, people do it on autopilot. You know, yeah. But I mean, it isn't rigid, is it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:29

Exactly. And I've heard people say, Oh, it's just adding more paperwork to our already busy workload. And you're like, no, it's actually there to protect you. The core thing is if you do these things, it protects you, it makes sure your PIs remain in place, it makes sure that you are aware of the risks of using it, because there are a lot of risks of using AI. It makes sure your clients are aware that you're using it. Uh, so you again you protect yourself and so on. So it's definitely not about preventing the use of AI, it's about encouraging it, but encouraging it in a way that's safe to our members.

SPEAKER_02 16:56

I think one of the things I'm hearing a lot, and even some of the some of the some of the words. I did a post the other last week on LinkedIn and things kind of kicked off a little bit in a good way because it's spreading awareness, but there was there has been some commentary and some some today saying, Well, I'm gonna be advertising that my firm doesn't use AI. And I'm like, that's like saying you you don't use the internet. Yeah, I mean it's short term. I understand the perceptions, but clients and depends on your clients and things like that, and public perception. Some people are wary, some people are fearful, distrustful, but then others are like black employees, are like, well, I only want to work for you if you're very forward-thinking with AI.

SPEAKER_04 17:35

But there's a big distinction in terms of surveying and use of AI. I'm I'm a chart and value as as my training, as my background, as my pathway. You cannot, and I suspect, will never be able to use AI to arrive at an opinion of value. That must be driven by you as a valuer. You, the opinion of value must be yours because you need to be able to go to court and defend it and defend your assumptions and why you've gotten it. Now, can you use AI to help with your invoicing percent? Can you use AI to validate that your reports are meeting all of the required standards? Can you use it to draft market report sections or market research sections of your evaluation reports? Absolutely. So there's lots of elements in evaluation reports where you can use AI very safely, very well, to save you lots and lots of time. What you cannot use AI for is to do what your clients are paying you to do, which is have an opinion of value. That you need to do yourself. Uh, because that's where you get sued at, that's where you have to go to court, that's where you have to defend it, and that's where your experience as a valuer comes in. But what your clients will pay you for is for you to use AI to automate all of the admin tasks, all of the invoicing, all of the contract management, all those sorts of things so that you can focus on what you're actually good at and what clients pay you for. So when firm says, I will probably not use AI, for me, it's a bit like a firm saying, I will not use Excel and I will not use PowerPoint. They are tools, they are there to make your life easier, faster, better, and to allow you to focus on what's important rather than do the meaning, repetitive tasks that are really adding no value to you or a client. And so when when people say this, I always sort of smirk a little bit because I think it's a bit it's people who don't really understand the value of AI.

SPEAKER_02 19:15

I think that's it, and but that's where we are. I think there's such a broad range of the early adopters that can't definitely count itself as one of them. And then there's the ones that are so skeptical, three-handed than sand, avoid it, fear, fear of losing jobs. And I'm like, we need to move beyond that now because I think there's enough talk about that, it's been done to death. But what I would like to ask, just one final thing before we move on. Um I'd like to ask one thing about the standard materiality. So it talks about the use of AI being material to your firm. How would you explain that?

SPEAKER_04 19:47

How would you so it is a it is a bit subjective, and we had lots and lots of discussions around the the wording of materiality from from my own perspective, is where it has an impact on the outcome, where it changes the outcome or it influences the outcome in the If it saves you 10 minutes, but the outcome will have been the same, I don't I wouldn't consider this material. If you're suddenly changing your services or you're you're changing your report or or it's doing a big section of the report, then I think you need to declare it. I think the way I see it, as I'm still a produced valuer, I still publish, I still write valuation reports. The way I think about it is if my if I feel like my clients will want to know that I've used AI for this, I need to declare it and I need to tell them. And I think at least in the initial stages, there is benefit in being slightly over the top in defining materiality as an over-reporting rather than underreporting. And all it takes is what I have in my evaluation report is a simple paragraph saying I am using certain AI tools, such as Gemini, to help me drive the email correspondence, to help me search for files, to help me do these various aspects. I am not using AI in order to do calculations, to arrive at my opinion of value, or to find my comparable properties. This is still done by a human. So all I have is a paragraph that states what I think is material in this and what isn't. Every value or every surveyor had to come up with their own slight definition. But my guide guide rail is if you think your client will want to know about it, tell them. There's no harm in telling them. And I think your clients expect nowadays expect you to use AI. They just want to know where and how you're using it. And if everyone isn't it? Exactly. And if ever you are brought to court, can you replicate the outcomes of the AI? Can it can you explain what the AI has done, or is it a black box for you and you can't? If it is a black box for you and you can't, then that's a significant risk to you.

SPEAKER_02 21:46

That's really helpful, thank you for that. I think that makes that explains it really well because it's it's one of the things I've been asked quite a bit. And I think because it is subjective and people see materiality, it's like, well, what does that mean? Because a lot Surveyors are using AI, but they they don't necessarily think about the fact that they're using it. I mean, yeah, if you just come out and copile it, yeah, which everyone uses anyway, Microsoft. So it's and it's like, well, what does that mean now?

SPEAKER_04 22:11

Yeah, I mean, if it helps me, if I could I I can write an email, if it helps me write an email faster, it's all material in my mind, I will still declare it to the client in a general paragraph. It's not material to the outcome of my evaluation. If it helps me generate an invoice, again, it's not material. If it helps me do market generic market research, it's it's material enough that I need to declare it, but I can gener I can I can justify all the market research. And if I were to do it myself, it will take me a lot longer, but I will come out with a very similar output than the AI. The challenge is, for instance, when you say it as a value again, I talk as a value, but you say, find me five properties on the market that similar to comparable properties to this target property, and I can't replicate the steps myself or know where's found them because it might have hallucinated them, it might have found them from different markets, it might have done all sorts of things.

SPEAKER_02 23:01

So there's all there is always like like they say with everything, there's got to be human in the loop at the end. You've got to, it's it's your opinion at the end of the day, and it's you that are liable.

SPEAKER_04 23:10

Yeah, and actually I will say, as a surveyor, I will replace the human in the loop with the expert in the loop.

SPEAKER_02 23:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 23:16

You are there to be an expert, not just a human.

SPEAKER_02 23:18

I like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:20

And at the end of the day, your clients are paying you for your expertise. And so you have to think about where where's my added value in this process, where's my expertise coming into bear? That's what needs to be done by you as the expert.

unknown 23:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:33

That's good. I like that. That's better. Especially playing it to survey. So one of the other things is around obviously the use of AI and the new practice that came out on the use of AI by APC candidates.

SPEAKER_04 23:46

Yeah, I'm I was I was disappointed by that. Yeah, I was disappointed by it. So 70% of the practice alert was about designations and how they call themselves and so on, which is fine. I don't care. Yeah, that was fine. Yeah, that's that's that's good to remind everyone, why not? We we have a number of problems within the profession as a whole. But one of the problems is we're just not attracting enough young people into the surveying profession. And I know, particularly as a valuer, it's if you if you'll pardon me, it's often male, pale, and stale as a profession. There's very few young valuers coming in who are really excited about the profession and who see a career in it. I've often thought the process of the APC itself needed reforming because it's a two-year process where everything hangs to an APC at the end. And I'm I'm an APC assessor, so I've sat on many, many panels as an APC assessor. It's very stressful. It doesn't replicate real life as a valuer, because at no point as a valuer will you be asked to show your room on the laptop and make sure you have no supporting materials and you have to be able to sort of not quite memorize, but be able to point to bits of the red book and all those sorts of things, right? And you get grilled about evaluations you've done and you get grilled about all sorts of things and so on. And there is merit in having that base knowledge. I just disagree slightly with the assessment method that everything is weighted towards that single interview at the end. Where the practice note, I think for me was disappointing is that it made very clear that if you use AI in any way, shape, or form, you risk being disqualified and removed from the process. This is to someone who's then, by that stage, has probably spent two years putting their materials together, preparing for the APCs and so on. And I think for me, this goes completely against the principles of using AI. And I think for me as an APC assessor, I really don't care if the report was drafted by an AI or drafted by a human. Because for me, what's important is that they can defend it, they can understand the assumptions that were made, they've prompted it properly, they've used the right references, they have done the legwork to check that the assumptions are correct, that it's gone out, that they've gone out to the market, they've walked the pavements, they've they've understood the market, they've understood the influences on the property prices or the property values, they understand all the variables. So for me, it's the principle of someone who's gone through two years of training and so on. If they use AI in drafting their reports, in checking the spelling, the grammar, improving the readability of it, those sorts of things, for me it really shouldn't matter. What matters is that they understand the reports, they understand the assumptions that have been made, they understand the variables that impact the market, they've walked around and they've understood the market, they gone through the due diligence of the Red Book and everything else. Because at the end of the day, this is what the surveyor's job is today. I would expect surveyors to use AI. That's why we have the standards, that's why we've published them. The RSCS is making this whole concerted effort to bring surveyors into the age of AI. And then we're telling young candidates who have grown up with AI now at school and increasingly at university that they can't use it and they'll be disqualified. And I think this sounds completely the wrong message.

SPEAKER_02 27:04

It doesn't make sense, does it? Because they're going to be using it as soon as they go out to the workplace. Exactly. And they'll be expected to use it.

SPEAKER_04 27:10

Yeah. There will be if I if I worked for evaluation, for a big valuation firm and my young surveyors were not using AI, I say, why are you wasting time? You know, this is the point of using AI is to speed up and to have better report, to have to bring credibility back to the industry to a degree. I I'm also an examiner for UCL, for the Bartlett School of the Built Environment at UCL. And it's interesting because I've been on an exam, an external examiner for the past four years now. When I started, it was AI, we need to stop AI because we need our students to be able to memorize passages, to write essays, to have all of those aspects. And then over the past four years has been we need to stop AI to they will use it anyway, so we might as well find ways of integrating it. So now it's we need to embrace it, we need to teach it, we need to make sure that the assessments we do and everything integrate AI into it because it's a fact of life. And if you need people who are trained for the professional services today, they need to be able to use AI in their professional services. Of course, I work for an AI firm, but if anyone in my teams is not using AI on an hourly basis, I will have serious questions as to why I'm employing them.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

There's a lot of anxiety around this, though, because I've I've I'm on a a number of sort of groups, some of them WhatsApp groups were for APC. And these questions, this comes up time and time again, whereas some people are saying, Oh, I've been using it, it's great. And then other people are like slating them. Why are you using AI? It's cheating. And it just doesn't, this is not, you know, this this PraxElate is not sort of doing the the right attitude towards it. Saying you're doing something wrong.

SPEAKER_04 28:46

It's really the wrong message.

SPEAKER_02 28:47

That is the future tech, you know. Well, well, future, you know, that it's here to stay, it's not going to change. It's like using the internet, isn't it?

SPEAKER_04 28:54

No. It's uh for me, the practice note that went out is really the wrong messaging. And all it says to young surveyors is you can't use it. We are a very backwards-looking industry, and you can't possibly use it. It's like saying to APC candidates 10 years ago that they couldn't use PowerPoint or they can use Microsoft Word. It's ridiculous. We need to embrace it. It's what's important is what is in the young surveyor's brain. Do they understand what they're doing? Do they understand why they're doing certain things, do they understand how the market moves, they understand the various variables and so on. You can get this out of a conversation. AI won't help them there. If they use AI to better draft the submission, go for it.

SPEAKER_02 29:32

Yeah. What's this kind of the word out there with assessors though? Because I'd imagine there's a sort of a difference in opinion from assessors themselves as well, as to because if they're not up to speed with AI as well, it could be all driving this. So they they because they're not up to speed, they don't feel equipped to be able to question it.

SPEAKER_04 29:49

Yeah, and I think you know, there is that. And there's there's an element of testers have typically been in the market for a while, as in they've been valuers for a long time. They've grown up, they've learned things a certain way, and it's very difficult to teach a dog new tricks to a degree. And so there is a bit of, well, I've I've had to learn the Red Book, and I've had to learn the IVSC, and I've had to do all of these sorts of things. So you should too. And you need to learn the proper way of doing it, et cetera, et cetera. I think realistically, if we pursue down that route, we'll find ourselves in a situation where actually AI will completely take over the profession because there'll be no no humans left to do it. We are a regulated industry, which means not everyone can just turn up and and be a valuer. You have to be chartered, etc., to practice. But if there's fewer and fewer chartered people because we push people off, then at some point the RSCS will say, well, we have no, we have no choice, or the industry will say we have no choice to approve AVMs.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Yeah, that's an interesting, yeah, that's a really important point there.

SPEAKER_04 30:48

But we need we need to attract younger people to the profession. It's really, really critical. And I mean, I have lots of young people in my office. The ability to use AI is critical for them because that's what they've used in university, that's what they use in their daily lives. Google is going the way of Facebook. Oh, you're still Googling things. How boom are you?

SPEAKER_02 31:07

Yeah, very much. It's like old school now, isn't it? Like Google do you? How many ever using that?

SPEAKER_04 31:12

But so there's that perception. And if we if we then put out a practice alert saying you can't use any form of AI, I think it's silly. Anyway, soon soon enough it will all be it'd be baked into everything we do and it'd be impossible not to.

SPEAKER_02 31:23

Yeah. I think it's just a case of there's a lag, there's quite a big lag, isn't there, of adoption of understanding. I think misunder I think one of the most dangerous things is is misunderstanding. Like the surveyors that just try it once and say it's rubbish. They tried it like probably when ChatGPD came out in 22 to everybody, and they've tried it. And and I think that's one of the things that concerns me is that Chinese whispers and people spread, oh, it's rubbish, you know, it's not gonna be it's I think there's a lot of it defensive position, isn't there, about it's gonna take my job, so therefore it must be rubbish. It can't replace me, but that's not the point, is it?

SPEAKER_04 31:55

It's not about replacing me. Yeah, a couple of things to that. I think the first one is it's still rubbish at lots of things. But unless you experiment and you try them, you wanna know what it's good at and what it's rubbish at. The fact that it's this technology that's taking over the world that billions of people are talking about and using means it can't be that rubbish at everything. And so you need to find the things that you like about it and that you think it's not rubbish at, be it from generating videos, generating pictures, generating reports, all those sorts of things, right? I use agentic workflows across so many of my things, and it just saves me lots and lots of time. But I spend a lot of time filing out some things, it works at some things, it doesn't work at other things. So I think that's the first thing. And then the second thing about it taking jobs, the last two weeks have been interesting because commercial real estate stocks have dropped significantly with the release of the new Claude 4.6 because suddenly everyone said SaaS is dead, software is dead. So if you saw this annihilation, yeah. JL Cushman, CBRE, they all took a 20 to 40% tumble in their stocks, billions, billions of dollars. And they recovered a little bit since and so on. Property is not unique in that. Lots and lots of software companies have seen their stock massively devalue because the perception is now you can now do the same amount of work with far fewer people. And if you see Jack Dorsey fired 40% of his company for Square, the payment providers last week, publicly on Twitter, and he was very blatant and said, AI is taking over your roles. I'm not firing you because we're not profitable. I'm not firing you because you're doing a bad job. I'm firing you because I can employ agents who will do your job far better, far cheaper than you, far faster. And this will happen. There will be massive displacement in jobs in the next two to five years, particularly in property. There's the old adage of it's not someone, AI won't take a job, it's someone who knows how to use it. But if I go slightly beyond that, it's I'm I I was speaking to a friend of mine yesterday who told me he had seven analysts in his team, property company. They they invest in industrial and logistics and they do asset management. He had a team of seven analysts. By the end of this year, he expects to have four. By the end of next year, he expects to have one to do the same amount of work. And for him, it's either we scale up and we do a lot more work, at which points I can keep a few, or I just go down from seven to one, because he has a very clear roadmap of I can actually automate a lot of these workflows. So the question is who is the remaining one? And he's already told me. He said it's the young guy that we hired six months ago that uses AI for absolutely everything he does. And he's already doing the job of three people. So I think the reality is that there will be massive displacement. I think the the scary bit is that unlike previous labor displacement technologies that we've had, like the car, transport, internet, all those sorts of things. Printing press, printing press, etc., it's happening much, much faster. And there is no clear new job creation at the end of it to compensate. And I think for me and for a lot of people, that's what the scary bit is, right? It's not like your your horse pharaoh becomes a car mechanic, even though there might not be the same people, but a new technology brings a new a new job. Industrial revolution happened. There were lots of manufacturing jobs that we created, and so on. Of course, there was at a loss at agricultural jobs, but you created something new and new forms of employment. With the AI revolution, I'm I'm not sure yet, and I hope we'll get there, but I'm not sure yet of what are the new jobs that we are creating on math.

SPEAKER_02 35:27

There's been some talk, there's been some suggestions around like the expert and the verification of the outputs, but I don't think that's but that's that that will but also that will be limited to the people that have built the experience pre AI.

SPEAKER_04 35:40

And that's true in financial services, it's true in legal, it's true in surveying. The people who will keep their jobs to degree, people like me, who have 20 years of surveying experience and who can tell when a model is going wrong or going right. The young surveyor coming into the industry today doesn't have the benefit of that expertise. And that's who I'm worried about.

SPEAKER_02 35:58

Where do you think, where do you think are the opportunities in surveying with AI, would you say?

SPEAKER_04 36:03

I think there's let me turn the question a little bit. There's lots of sectors of surveying that are ancient and need to be revolutionized. I think property management is incredibly inefficient in its processes and systems and its property management is a is an administrative task. It's about paying for certain things, it's about onboarding suppliers, paying for things, and then charging the right tenants for it, right? And the charging them the right amount and so on, the right schedule. Why service charges are the prices that they are today? Beggars' belief. How inefficient property managers are is extraordinary to me when I know the technology that exists today to automate this. And so I think there's going to be so property management for me is one, state agencies is another. And but I think there's going to be sectors of surveying, which, if not, will disappear, but they will become very much expert-driven with far fewer people in the future. But I think by contrast, this is also where the opportunities exist. If I was a young surveyor today, AI native, this is where, if I was entrepreneurial, is where I will try to disrupt these industries because there is so much low-hanging fruit to be done in a lot of these. I think construction will continue. I think development will continue, generally speaking, in the way it is to a great degree, because it's lots and it's not very human-heavy development and construction. It it might seem like it, but in actual fact, it's not that human-heavy. When you consider the amount of capital being deployed to build a building, a very small proportion of it goes towards the human aspect. So that's not where the efficiencies are to be made. You can use AI to drive efficiencies and in the construction process and development process, particularly in the planning process and those sorts of things. And if you're a young surveyor, you will do well within those spheres and they would probably be fairly resilient to change, at least for the next five to ten years. But if I was a young surveyor coming into the market today, I look at valuation, I look at property management, I look at the state agencies, I would look at asset management, I would look at those sorts of things, because I think there will be massive disruptions and big segments of these industries will disappear. Which sounds it sounds it sounds counterintuitive. Why will you enter something that's is bound to disappear? But if you're not part of the legacy teams, if you're not the incumbents, this is where you have the most opportunities to actually disrupt and actually have a good life and drive a new career with a new form of AI-driven property management and everything else.

SPEAKER_02 38:32

What are your thoughts around a QS? Quite Sivane, because it's so analytical-based. Yeah. I mean I feel like that's one that's quite under threat.

SPEAKER_04 38:42

Yeah, completely. I mean, I built for one of our clients an agent where you just put in CAD reports, you put in benchmark data, and it fits out QS reports. I think QSs are one of the areas that will be very, very disrupted because it's very analytical, but it's it's based on the understanding of supply chains, on the understanding of costs, and on being able to read through complex CAD drawings and so on. All of this can be done by AI today to a great degree. I think, again, the experienced QS surveyors will continue to do well because they'll be the experts in the loop because you'll still need someone to sign off, someone to agree on it. But I think what will likely happen is that the way the UK system works, you have a developer who's the orchestrator of many, many different contractors. A developer in the UK typically will have very few people working within it, yet they will build massive mixed-use projects and so on. But that's because they are orchestrating lots and lots of contractors, including QSs. But all of these very often act as silos. And it's it's a sequential process where you first get your planning consultants in, you get your disk consultants, your your your massing, you do all those sorts of things. And it's a very sequential process that involves different actors at different stages, and you can't start the next part of the sequence until you finish the previous one. And I think that whole life cycle will dramatically change over the next 10 years and will be massively compressed. We work with a developer today who it takes about 80 weeks to go from I want to build something in a site to actually having planning consent. 80 weeks is a huge amount of time to have capital locked up in your site, in the people, and to have just a cost base. This could be, can be, should be 40 weeks at most. You can automate so many parts of it, but you can only do so if you start doing things in parallel if your various different contractors stop working in silos, but they actually start working with each other, amongst each other, sharing systems, sharing data, sharing knowledge, and being able to make changes on an ongoing basis. Because architects, QSs, and so on, they wait until someone has signed off on a plan or done something to then do their bit of work and then something else changes, and then you have to go back to the QS, then you have to go back to the architect, and then you start the whole process again, and so on. It's extraordinary inefficient. There are far better ways of achieving this.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

That brings me on to the just one final thing before we before we end today is around the comparison with the UK and and Saudi Arabia, which we've spoken about before.

SPEAKER_04 41:11

Yeah, I mean it's interesting. So I spend about half my time in in Saudi Arabia at the moment. I work with a mega project out there. We're building sort of theme parks. It's very exciting, it's huge. It's one of many, many projects taking place in Saudi Arabia. As of the last few weeks, they've sort of taken a bit of a pause and a rethink around which projects they're doing and which ones are overly ambitious and which ones are realistic. And I think as the price of oil has come down, their funds have sort of started to be slightly more limited and they've had to rethink some of their projects, which is interesting. And it's part of the maturity of the growing maturity of the country. I work on a project that hasn't been impacted because part of our project is already live. But what's what's extraordinary is the level of conversations I have there versus here. When I speak to property execs in the UK, I have a really hard job convincing them to embrace AI, to embrace data, to embrace new systems. Because, oh, but we are regulated, we've always done it this way. It sounds expensive, it sounds complicated. We have our ways of working, we have our processes. If I go and see a developer and I tell them you have to break your siloed processes and so on, they go, well, no, because that's just the way we were. That's that's the way the industry worked, that's the way it's embedded in everything we do. From the planning process to the QS, you have specialists that do all of their tiny little corner of that thing. And it's bureaucratic and so on. And that's why it takes so long. But everything is priced in, which is also why real estate is so expensive and which is why it's so difficult to build and so on. Whereas if I and so when I speak to, and I'm I'm generalizing, but if I speak to UK property developers or property actors, it's a series of barriers that I have to overcome and demonstrate as to why AI can make it better. And even then, it's very, very so in the water, side of desk. We'll try it in a small pilot thing to see if we like it. Then you go back to the execs who are sort of two to three years away from retirement and really don't want to rock the boat. And it gets drowned out into sort of series of pilots and things. So they can talk publicly about how they're embracing AI, but in reality, they haven't changed operating model, they haven't changed their ways of working. It's just an add-on, which actually in the end ends up costing them more because they have to hire new people, they have to run things in parallel and so on. So AI becomes an add-on to existing processes and systems as opposed to completely changing them and replacing them. The Saudi is the opposite because they have the benefit of starting from scratch. So they have no legacy ways of working, they have no behaviors and societal aspects of where we have to go through this process because we've always done it, and this has to be filled in by paper and those sorts of things. So the the mentality is very, very different. The the average age in Saudi is also very young. So most of the people I work with are younger than me, which is which is wonderful. But so they also come in with lots of questions of why would it do this way when we can do it differently? Way, which is so much faster. So I find my role in Saudi to be slightly reversed in the sense of I'm not trying to convince them to use AI. I'm trying to convince them that they still need an expert in the loop, that they still need to do things with people, and they still need to go through compliance and regulatory and they still need to check that things actually make sense. And then when there's a development appraisal, they still need someone with some gray hair to go through it and check that the development appraisal makes sense and then the supply chains and so on. Because they're much more ready to embrace AI in its full, because that they they have no benchmark or no previous ways of working against which to measure it against. So they're starting from scratch. And the scale of ambition, there, of course, they have tons of money. But if I can give you an example, Riyadh Metro is 81 stations, is the longest automated metro system in the world. So no drivers. It was built in about three years at a fraction of the cost of building a bat tunnel for HS2. Now, of course, you don't have the planning, you don't have the community engagements, you don't have all of those sorts of things. But when you see how complicated it is to build HS2 in the UK and how much planning time is required and planning costs and all of these regulatory, administrative, political barriers that exist within that process, and you see how fast Saudi can go, I'm of the strong mind that there is a happy medium between the two. You need to have some community involvement, you need to have some protections, you need to have some environmental studies, you need to have some planning, you need to have all those sorts of things. But in the UK, we are so embedded with it, we are we take it so much for granted that planning officers in the UK, the government, developers, QS's, surveyors, they look at ways of chipping little things out of it. Whereas I think we need to be far more ambitious into what the potential is. Whereas Saudi is all hell for leather, all ambitious. Let's spend the money, let's try, let's experiment, let's see what works. And if it works, great. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter, we're frightened. But it can move really quickly and they can do really big ambitious things, which we wouldn't have a hope in hell of doing what we're doing in Saudi in the UK. It will just never happen. And I think if you then look into the next few decades, where will the growth be? Where's the potential? It will not be here. I think it will be in the Middle East, it will be in Asia, and it'll be in places where they're trying to strike a a more mature balance between the use of AR in tech and the needs of building infrastructure, built environments, and everything else we need.

SPEAKER_02 46:30

I think that's the that's the problem though, isn't it? The challenge we've got in the UK. We're just we're stifling it with we're not willing to deal with it at all.

SPEAKER_04 46:38

Massively. And why do we still have planning committees in the way that they are? It becomes so subjective, it becomes so silly. Why do we have planning decisions to change the colour of my of my windowsills? There's so many things here that just have no right to be and and have they might have made sense at the point, but either you completely automate the decision making around these sorts of things. Like my neighbor is repainting its door, and we need to have a planning approval to paint it a different colour. And it takes months. There's a tree in my courtyard which has a protected tree order, and I need to ask planning permission every year to prune the tree, but I'm legally required to prune the tree. These things make no sense to me. So if I don't prune the tree, I'm foul of it. But if the planning decisions come back saying, no, you're not allowed to print, I mean, is ridiculous. But so many of these things, I will I will argue, we have no evidence, that probably half of planning decisions in this country can be really easily automated and have and and will speed up growth, will allow us to build, will allow us to invest, will allow us to build more housing, willow us to focus on the planning decisions that are actually important and consequential for our community and for our built environment.

SPEAKER_02 47:48

You just look at it, all the home buying and selling process, all of it, it's so broken. And everyone's protecting their own area.

SPEAKER_04 47:53

I know. It's ridiculous. And all the whole agency model, why why is there such a big agency model that just takes fees everywhere? Why it's conveying still such a pain? Why does it take so long? Why does a property purchase take so long here? I used to live in Mongolia where I could buy an apartment in an hour. I just go to the property office, buyer and seller. Seller says, I want to sell my apartment, buyer says I want to buy the apartment, here's the tax, and then the government will issue a new certificate. It was done within 45 minutes. And I'm not saying this we need to be quite that extreme, because we still need some safeguards and so on. But there must be a middle ground that takes us away from where we are today. And for me, and I'm biased, but for me, AI is the answer to a lot of this.

SPEAKER_02 48:34

I think that's I think that's inevitable. That that that that it's going to be the disruptor, it is the disruptor already. We're we're already seeing it play out globally. But I think in the UK we are slower because of all the constraints, of all the laws, the rules, the processes, a committee for a committee's sake, the whole bureaucracy of everything. When I look back, I did a very short stint in public sector. I absolutely didn't like it, I'll be honest. Because I just the bureaucracy, just to get a new laptop, I think there was like six different forms we had to get signed off. I'm just I know it's ridiculous. It just cannot be true. It cannot be true.

SPEAKER_04 49:07

There's a lack of people with the incentive to change things here because no one knows the whole life cycle, no one owns all the bits of it, right? So yeah, people with ambition and with the vision might chip away at certain aspects of what they control, but only control a tiny bit of it. Unless there's really is a government plus industry focus on we are going to dramatically take this process apart and rethink it and start it again from scratch and so on. We will be we'll make small, minute improvements here and there, but we will not really change it.

SPEAKER_02 49:39

No, because it needs a big overhaul, but nobody wants to take that on.

SPEAKER_04 49:42

No, no, because it's politically dangerous and you put jobs at risk, and you have God knows how many hundreds of thousands of people working in the civil service and working in planning committees and all sorts of things. You'll have lots and lots of people screaming high and low saying, Oh, this will destroy our cities, it will do this, it will do that, and it's dystopian. Like everything, there's a there's a happy middle ground in all of this, and you need someone with sort of the vision to bring that happy middle ground together. Unite the public and the private sectors in doing so. And that's a really hard job.

SPEAKER_02 50:13

What an episode, what an episode this has been. Brilliant. We've done like a proper whirlwind of topics. Exactly. What I've what I've really, really enjoyed talking to you is that you were you are very much ahead of the curve with AI, AI adoption, understanding, you're you you're seeing it play out, you're helping businesses adopt it. But I also think what's really good is that you you you co-chair the new standard. So you you come at it from both sides from surveying and then actually the implementation of it and the positive side of it as well. And obviously, obviously there's also risks. So I I think we need more of these voices that like you've got, because I think more surveyors, and this is why I'm really glad we we did this episode, because I want surveyors to hear from other surveyors and valuers who are using AI that you can use it, that it's not a dirty word. I mean, there is still so much negativity. People are judging each other on them using it, and I think that needs to stop. Yeah, we're all all here to help. We should be supporting each other, not pointing fingers because you're using it, you must be taking shortcuts and being lazy. I've heard the words lazy, and it's not ideal. No.

SPEAKER_04 51:23

And I agree. I think we need to spend our time giving each other tips and tricks of how to better better use it.

SPEAKER_00 51:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:30

AI is not a magical pill that would suddenly do everything perfectly for us. It it makes mistakes, it's good at certain things, it's not good at other things. It's about working out where does AI fit into our workflows, where can it help us to better focus on what's important, where can it abstract from it, where can it augment my decision-making abilities? And everyone's experimenting. And I would encourage everyone to continue experimenting. Experiment in sort of low-risk ways. Do things in parallel. See, my partner works for law firms, and they've run an experiment recently where they've asked the partners to give out drafting instructions for contracts to trainees and to an AI. The partner will just send out an email saying, I need a contract that has these clauses and does this and does this and this. And then someone behind the scenes will feed this into an AI, paint for the legal world, et cetera, et cetera, and then give it to trainees. And then they will get the results of both and they will anonymize it and give it back to the partner and say which one do you prefer? And it was really interesting because the partner said in about 85% of cases, they preferred the AI version, but the human versions had lots of points that the AI had never thought about or considered, which were really important and really interesting. So, like everything, the answer is somewhere in between. It's having AI-augmented trainees and surveyors who it will do the 80% boring, tedious bits that you need to do in your drafting contracts. But when you really need to think through a clause very carefully and come up with something quite clever, you still need a human to do. And I can't see an AI being better than human anytime soon in doing those sorts of things. And so when people be little AI is because they don't understand the value it can bring. And also it doesn't quote the expertise.

SPEAKER_02 53:06

Sorry, the answer is somewhere in between. It's almost like the name of a film.

SPEAKER_03 53:10

Probably.

SPEAKER_02 53:11

I quite like that. Yeah, we're gonna use that. Right. Well, I mean, there's loads. Anything else you want to mention before we we finish off for today?

SPEAKER_04 53:19

No, no, I think for any surveyors that's out there, just start playing with it, start experimenting. It's not it really isn't as scary as people think it is. And it's not an all-in thing. Just test it on small things. There's millions of YouTube videos, there's Reddits, there's really good newsletters that come out every day, sort of things. If you search online, you'll find prompt libraries, which I think are really good for surveyors. So people have sort of put together spreadsheets of libraries that work for LLMs that save some time. Some of them are surveying specific, some of them are just generic. But experiment, try it out. If you have a spare half an hour, try it because it will save you half an hour on that first day.

SPEAKER_02 53:58

I actually put together only recent some free, just some five prompts for surveyors to use for the ne with the new standard to get them to think.

SPEAKER_01 54:07

Good, good.

SPEAKER_04 54:08

I mean I have I have a very basic agent that I've built in 20 minutes, which includes the RSCS Red Book, the IVSC, the IPMS, the AI standards, and a couple of other sort of seminal Bible text that's that valuers use. And whenever I write a valuation report, before I send to the client, I always push it through that agent and say, find areas in which my report's not compliant to these five documents. And it then gives me back my report with sort of highlighted areas where I might be at risk. That saves me, that saves my PI because it reduces my risk significantly. It highlights to me area where I might have missed about or where I haven't followed through. And it's really good because it tells me this particular section in your departures doesn't mention these things that the Red Book says you have to mention, etc. So it's about for me managing my risks, about speeding up what I do, it's about making day-to-day work a lot more fun because I remove so many of my tedious things I have to do every day. I can actually do on the best focus on the best which I enjoy. And for me, that's why AI is so liberating and so fun.

SPEAKER_02 55:17

Doesn't it? It enables you to so much more. I do like so much more now than I ever could do like a few years back.

SPEAKER_04 55:22

But completely. But I think where where the big change will come for surveyors is that your clients increasingly will say, Well, I expect you to do this much faster because I expect you to use AI. And if you're not using AI, I'm going to look at you weird and say, I'm not sure about this. Why aren't you? Because if I was a client and I was speaking to a surveyor who says, No, no, I don't use AI because that's lazy, are you also hand-drawing the plans and are you sort of ruler and pencil to make your tables? You have tools available to you. If you're not using them, why am I if I'm paying you by the hour and paying you for a piece of work, why am I paying you to spend your time doing this and not spending it on actually thinking through my problem?

SPEAKER_02 55:59

Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point because those firms that do adopt it and they are saving time, they save costs, they can be more competitive. They're going to be more competitive. Well, they are, aren't they? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 56:09

Because their overheads are lower. But the benchmark, the benchmark is going up. Everyone will use it, which means if you're not using it, you'll be out of business very quickly.

SPEAKER_02 56:17

Yeah. Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you today, Chris.

SPEAKER_04 56:21

My pleasure. Thank you very much, Nina.

SPEAKER_02 56:22

No way. But thank you very much. Appreciate it being on. Thank you for listening to this surveying. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. It really helps more people discover the podcast and supports the work we're doing to raise awareness of the profession. You can also join the surveying room, the free and independent community from Survey UK, bringing surveys together, breaking down silos, and of course making surveying visible. Just head over to surveyorsuk.com to learn more and join today. All the links discussed in today's episode are included in the show notes.