The world is ‘in the foothills’ of the biggest transformation since the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Not my words. That’s according to Sir Tony Blair, who urged Britain this week (3rd June 2025) to embrace AI.
Speaking at the SXSW festival in London, the former prime minister claimed AI could have an ‘absolutely transformative’ impact on public services by making them better, cheaper and more efficient.
He said, if he was in power today, he would be thinking about ‘how you reorganise the whole government around how you embrace and access this revolution’.
His Tonyness outlined how ‘all the routine jobs’ in Whitehall could be freed up by technology.
ALL ABOUT PROCESS
“Government’s all about process, so you could use AI to speed up the process of the government, making sure that we do, for example, all the routine jobs of government much more efficiently.”
Blair rounded that off by saying the country cannot afford to be squeamish about the power of this emerging technology.
He’s right – the surveying profession can’t afford to be squeamish either.
As a profession, we need to find ways to become more effective. At the end of 2021, there were 77,000 chartered surveyors in the UK. By the end of 2024, there were only 67,000.
That may sound like a significant number, but the number of those involved in the residential valuation & survey market is much lower, perhaps 3,000.
SKILLS SHORTAGE
If we don’t find a solution to the skills shortage the sector faces (and realistically, how are we going to conjure back 10,000 experienced chartered surveyors?) property transactions will start to experience extended waiting times for valuations.
In the run up to the stamp duty deadline, industry insiders were already reporting valuation delays in areas such as the North East and East Anglia.
These bottlenecks threaten the entire lending process and can derail property transactions at crucial moments. Without significant change, they will only become more common.
At SXSW, a recent government experiment with AI was mentioned – one that involved 20,000 civil servants across 12 major organisations.
The study highlights AI’s potential. It saved officials an average of 26 minutes a day and showed how AI tools could free up Whitehall staff from ‘repetitive administrative tasks’ and deliver greater value for British taxpayers.
FORCE-MULTIPLIER
This is AI as force-multiplier. A force-multiplier is a resource that enhances the effectiveness of a group beyond its individual contribution.
In military contexts, it refers to tactics, tools, or technologies – advanced weaponry, intelligence, or logistics – that amplify a force’s impact, allowing smaller units to achieve big results.
In business, it can describe technologies that boost productivity, enabling a team to handle tasks that would typically require a larger workforce. AI force-multipliers in surveying could boost productivity in a similar way, allowing fewer surveyors to handle more cases.
Modern tablet-based reporting systems for on-site inspections are already delivering efficiency gains along these lines. These can reduce report preparation time compared to traditional methods, enabling surveyors to complete more valuations every day without working additional hours.
SPEEDING UP THE PROCESS
And our existing ‘AI agents’ are already insisting that the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed during a survey, prompting surveyors to report accurately and consistently – and offering suggestions linked to their inputs.
Technology like this, speeds up the process: the average time it takes HouzeCheck to deliver a report is just over two and a half days – not bad considering a building survey takes a day to complete.
But there’s more to come. We’re developing AI agents that will act as a professional guardrail for surveyors. If a surveyor mentions a crack near the front door of a property, the AI will prompt a roof check, too.
It will ensure surveyors don’t miss things (they’re only human after all). These ‘contextual suggestions’ linked to surveyor inputs reduce the chance of human error while providing more consistent results across different valuers.
“A conspiracy for inertia.”
It’s not all plain sailing. Where Tony Blair singled out the civil service as ‘a conspiracy for inertia’ saying it has ‘a genius for absorbing the impetus for change and suffocating it’ AI in surveying could be held up by high up-front development costs or by smaller firms lacking technical expertise.
Think of all those surveyors struggling with legacy systems: the ancient IT is holding back proper technology integration and the effective utilisation of data. Sir Humphrey eat your heart out.
Just as AI promises to streamline Whitehall by automating routine tasks and enhancing decision-making, it is already proving to be a force-multiplier in surveying – empowering professionals to deliver faster, more accurate valuations without sacrificing quality.
Richard Sexton is Commercial Director of proptech surveyor HouzeCheck
