RICS Responsible AI Standard Comes Into Force: What It Means for Surveying and Construction

AI doesn't automate the past.

It should make the impossible possible.

 

The RICS has just raised the bar for how we get there.

 

Today, the RICS Professional Standard on the Responsible Use of AI in Surveying Practice comes into force. Mandatory. Global. Effective now.

 

The construction and surveying industries have spent years debating AI. Whether to adopt it. Whether to trust it. Whether it threatens the profession. That debate is over.

 

The question now is whether you're using it to replicate what you've always done, or to do what you've never been able to.

 

Here is what this standard actually requires.

Firms must assess and record why AI is the most appropriate tool for material uses in service delivery, considering data risks, environmental impact, stakeholder effects, and the risk of erroneous or biased outputs. A named, appropriately qualified surveyor must take responsibility for reliability decisions on material AI outputs, with written assessment or sampled assurance where use is automated or high-volume. Private and confidential data must not be uploaded to AI systems unless express written consent has been obtained in advance and the firm is satisfied the risk is acceptable. Clients must be told in writing, before work begins, when AI will shape the service they're receiving, and how to challenge it.

 

This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the profession drawing a line between AI as a shortcut and AI as a capability.

 

The standard also aligns with the EU AI Act and broader global regulatory direction, signalling that responsible AI governance is no longer optional in any jurisdiction.

 

And that distinction matters enormously in construction.

Our industry carries real accountability, for safety, for compliance, for built assets that people live and work in. The post-Grenfell landscape has made clear what happens when professional responsibility is diluted by process, assumption, or over-reliance on tools that aren't properly understood or governed.

 

AI used irresponsibly in this context isn't just a compliance failure. It is a professional one.

 

But here is the opportunity.

The firms and professionals who grasp this standard not as a burden but as a framework will be the ones who use AI to do things the industry has never been able to do at scale, surfacing risk earlier in complex projects, interrogating building data more deeply, bringing rigour to valuations, inspections and supply chain decisions that have historically relied on incomplete information and professional instinct alone.

 

That is not automating the past. That is building a better profession.

 

The standard sets the floor. What you build on it is up to you.