Professional conduct and the responsible use of AI

The awareness and use of AI across the land and property life cycle has steadily grown in recent years, bringing both advantages and risks to professionals and their clients. Andrew Knight, AI, Data and Tech lead at RICS, outlines a new professional standard under development to guide RICS members and RICS-regulated firms in their professional conduct with AI.

Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the imagination of both the public and corporate world. The built and natural environment sector has not been immune from this, and while AI in many forms has been used across the land and property life cycle for some years now, the emergence of ChatGPT, and other generative AI tools, is forcing the sector to examine the opportunities and risks associated with the use of AI.

What is AI?

One of the challenges of understanding how to take advantage of AI is having a clear definition of what we mean by the term. The OECD definition summarises the fundamental nature of AI as follows:

‘An AI system is a machine-based system that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments. Different AI systems vary in their levels of autonomy and adaptiveness after deployment.’

ChatGPT and other tools have made AI accessible to millions of people and democratised access to AI functionality. However, it is worth reviewing how AI has already been deployed across the built and natural environment, a trend that has been hugely accelerated by the emergence of generative AI.

Examples of AI already in use across the land and property life cycle

As we move through the land and property life cycle, AI is used to monitor crop health, land use, biodiversity and the use of nitrates.

In planning and development, AI is bringing together disparate and previously disconnected datasets to help land acquisition, automate the appraisal process and to manage the complex set of documents involved in planning applications.

The construction process is being supported by AI as schedules are created and redefined across the life of complex projects, cost data converted from different standards, and quantity surveyors provided with AI tools to help take off quantities from 2D drawings and 3D models.

AI is allowing certain types of properties to be valued automatically using automated valuation models (AVMs), content for valuation reports is being created using generative AI, and AI is going beyond the traditional concept of covenant strength to create bond-like ratings for occupiers of commercial real estate. Leases and other rent roll information is being automatically extracted and complex analysis of property portfolios is providing greater insight and predictive power to asset managers.

Across property and building management, AI is automating helpdesk and issue management, optimising HVAC, asset identification and supporting predictive maintenance using sensors. Building surveyors can identify defects using drones and computer vision to create powerful visual digital twins.

In addition to these land and property specific examples, AI is supporting a wide range of generic business tasks and processes that are driving productivity gains for all kinds of organisations, including project management, data conversion, language translation, meeting notes and actions transcription, document management, automated customer service using ChatBots, the generation of marketing materials, and recruitment.

How can the profession use AI responsibly?

The profession has a duty to use AI where it is appropriate, but to also manage the risks to their clients, the public and the reputation of their organisation and the wider profession.

To this end, RICS is developing a new professional standard on the responsible use of AI.  While practice information will also be developed to help the profession understand AI in all its forms, this new standard focuses on professional conduct rather than the technical aspects of AI.

The new standard will focus on the following areas:

• how the use of AI, technology and data should be referenced in terms of engagement
• transparency with clients
• human oversight and professional judgement
• issues around the reliability of outputs
• ensuring proper consideration and allocation of liability and risk
• data quality, ownership, copyright, privacy, commercial confidentiality and intellectual property rights and
• governance and ethical considerations.

RICS is committed to helping the profession understand the power of AI and to reinforce their critical role on providing expert professional judgement to stakeholders across the built and natural environment. This standard aims to ensure that RICS members and RICS-regulated firms can benefit from AI as they utilise this technology to provide services, handle data and manage their client relationships.

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