Artificial Intelligence has become one of those subjects that’s almost impossible to avoid. Hardly a day goes by without another headline announcing that it’s changing the way we work, communicate or run our businesses. Property is no exception. From analysing development opportunities and interpreting planning policy to producing cash flow forecasts and marketing material, AI can now complete tasks in minutes that would once have taken hours.
I’ve noticed a change in the conversations I’m having with aspiring developers, too. Increasingly, people are asking whether they still need to invest in education or mentoring when AI appears capable of answering almost any question they can think of. If you can ask a computer how to appraise a site, structure a development loan or assess a planning strategy, why would you want anything more?
It’s a fair question, and one that deserves a balanced answer. The truth is that I’m enormously enthusiastic about AI. I use it myself, and I genuinely believe it will transform the property industry over the next decade. Developers who ignore it altogether will almost certainly find themselves at a disadvantage. Used intelligently, it can save a huge amount of time and help us work more efficiently than ever before. But there’s an important distinction that I think many people are missing. AI is an extraordinary source of information. Property development, however, is not simply about information. It’s about judgement, and that’s the critical point.
That difference reminded me of an incident from many years ago, long before anyone had even imagined artificial intelligence. Back in the 1980s, I was working in a structural engineering practice when we bought what was then a state-of-the-art computer. It was a major investment and represented a huge leap forward. Until then, most structural calculations had been carried out manually, so the prospect of producing complex designs in a fraction of the time was incredibly exciting.
As luck would have it, we’d recently recruited a young engineer straight from university. He’d already worked with computers during his studies, so he quickly became the office expert. One day, he used the new system to design a steel frame for a building we’d been commissioned to produce. After entering all the relevant information, the computer generated the calculations and produced the required beam sizes. Pleased with the result, he printed everything out and handed it to one of our senior draftsmen, a gentleman called Clive, so that he could prepare the drawings.
