The One With… the QS Who Went All In On AI
With James Garner, Gleeds.
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About this episode
If AI has only made us 20% faster in five years, James Garner calls that abject failure. Everyone in the built environment is talking about AI. Very little of that conversation is about what people are actually doing with it today. James Garner has spent 20 years as a quantity surveyor and now leads AI and data at Gleeds. He sits on the RICS panel that wrote the profession's new AI standard, and hosts Project Flux. This conversation is about practice, not projection — where AI is genuinely changing decisions, and where the industry is quietly kidding itself.
In this episode
- 01Why the real picture of AI adoption is "jagged" — brilliant and broken inside the same firm
- 02The capability gap: everyone has the tools, almost nobody has the skill
- 03Why shaving 20% off a process misses the point entirely
- 04Cutting 10% off a building's carbon vs asking whether you need the building at all
- 05The RICS AI standard, broken into four plain-English parts
- 06Where your agency actually sits when frontier labs are becoming empires
- 07A half-hour exercise anyone can do today to make better decisions
Short clips
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