The One With... the QS Who Went All In On AI

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:** → Why the real picture of AI adoption is "jagged" — brilliant and broken inside the same firm → The capability gap: everyone has the tools, almost nobody has the skill → Why shaving 20% off a process misses the point entirely → Cutting 10% off a building's carbon vs asking whether you need the building at all → The RICS AI standard, broken into four plain-English parts → Where your agency actually sits when frontier labs are becoming empires → A half-hour exercise anyone can do today to make better decisions **Timestamps:** \[00:01:00] Twenty years a QS — and a 1990s dissertation on digitising construction \[00:05:00] How a friendship at Imperial College produced his first machine learning model \[00:09:00] Where AI is genuinely working right now — and why there is no gold standard \[00:17:00] The capability gap, and the risk of a two-tier industry \[00:26:00] Susskind's question, the drill and the hole in the wall \[00:28:00] Procurement, beauty parades, and buying car insurance before the internet \[00:37:00] Why technology was never the bottleneck — culture was \[00:41:00] Wrong decisions made early, then defended for a decade \[00:45:00] Build your own AI board of advisors — the half-hour exercise \[00:47:00] The RICS AI standard: literacy, governance, use, and bias \[00:55:00] Closing questions: education, and ripping up the curriculum *The Future We Build is a podcast exploring sustainability, innovation and systemic change in the built environment, hosted by Alex Edds.* *New episodes released weekly. Filmed at Mute showroom, Great Sutton Street, London.* *Produced by the team at Atalor* **FOLLOW THE SHOW** 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-we-build/id1877617346 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-future-we-build **CONNECT WITH ALEX** 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexedds **MORE ABOUT OUR GUEST** James Garner, Senior Director and Global Head of AI and Data, Gleeds 🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesgarner1976 🌐 Gleeds: https://www.gleeds.com 🌐 Project Flux: https://projectflux.ai