An AI-assisted operating system for residential surveying
A UK residential surveying practice
A single-firm operating system running the full job lifecycle for RICS Home Surveys, where AI assists at five bounded points and the surveyor stays accountable for every word.
Append-only
RICS-aligned AI decision ledger
Auto-generated
AI-use disclosure on every report
5
bounded AI touch-points — never a free-form chatbot
The challenge
The work this system had to absorb.
Surveying runs on fragmented admin — enquiries, quotes, field capture, drafting and versioned reports. The firm wanted AI to speed the work without compromising the surveyor's professional responsibility for the report.
What we built
A system in production, not a slide deck.
One jobs record carrying the whole lifecycle, from enquiry and quote through field capture to a versioned PDF delivered to the client.
AI assistance at five bounded, structured touch-points — drafting and suggestions, never a free-form chatbot.
Structured authoring with field evidence capture and graceful fallback to deterministic heuristics when AI is unavailable.
Governance, in the code
The controls are written into the architecture.
This is the part most firms can’t show you. Governance here isn’t a policy document. It’s constraints the system enforces on itself, every time it runs.
An append-only AI decision ledger records the model, input, output and the named surveyor's accept, modify or reject decision — with no update or delete path.
Human verification is sticky: once a surveyor verifies content, it cannot be silently cleared.
An AI-use disclosure is auto-generated from the real decision records, asserting that the surveyor takes full responsibility for the report.
Prompt-injection sanitisation, least-privilege per-job access, short-lived signed URLs and a file-access audit log with 90-day retention.
Outcomes
What it has done.
Honest and labelled: dated where the figures are point-in-time, and described as controlled tests or early-stage where that is the truth.
AI drafts and suggests; the surveyor decides and signs off — and the ledger shows exactly what the AI proposed and what the surveyor did with it.
Every report carries an accurate, automatically generated statement of how AI was used.
How it’s engineered
The approach under the hood.
A bespoke operating system using leading Google and OpenAI models through the Vercel AI Gateway, with structured outputs at each AI touch-point and a deterministic fallback path.
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