The RICS AI Standard¶
Chronity Connect exists because of one document: the RICS professional standard Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence in Surveying Practice (1st edition, September 2025). It became mandatory on 9 March 2026. If your firm is RICS-regulated and your people use AI on client work, the Standard applies to you whether or not anyone has read it yet.
This page is a plain-English summary of what the Standard asks for and how Chronity maps onto it. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for reading the Standard itself — but it should make the rest of this documentation make sense.
What the Standard asks a firm to do¶
In broad terms, a RICS-regulated firm using AI must now be able to show that it:
- Has assessed the material impact of each AI use case and written it down — a Material Impact Assessment (MIA).
- Protects confidential client data — encryption, access control, restraint on what is uploaded, and annual staff training.
- Produces a written reliability decision for every material AI-assisted output — the assumptions made, the reliability concerns, the mitigations, and a conclusion — prepared by, or under the supervision of, a named qualified surveyor.
- Maintains a risk register, reviewed at least quarterly, covering likelihood, impact, a RAG rating, and mitigation.
- Dip-samples high-volume AI use rather than scrutinising every output.
- Documents third-party AI supplier due diligence.
- Discloses AI use in terms of engagement and honours client opt-outs.
- Can respond on request with an explanation of how AI was used on a matter.
Why this is hard to do by hand¶
In a twenty-person practice, doing this manually means a partner tagging every client matter, chasing a sign-off queue nobody fills in, writing quarterly risk registers from memory, and hoping the audit trail holds up. In practice it doesn't happen — and the worst outcome is an auditor walking in, finding an empty sign-off queue, and reading it as "nobody did any AI work" when the truth is "nobody logged it."
The existing tooling doesn't fit either. Legal-AI review tools are built around per-output partner sign-off and priced for City firms. Data-governance tools detect sensitivity labels but can't tell a letter of advice from a meeting note. AI-governance platforms audit AI systems, not individual AI-assisted outputs. None of them answer the written-reliability-decision requirement for a small surveying practice.
How Chronity maps onto the Standard¶
Chronity is built around two ideas. First, your MIA is the rulebook: every AI-assisted action is classified against your firm's own signed taxonomy of use cases, not a generic ruleset — so classification authority rests with a document a qualified person has signed, not with an AI. Second, compliance is passive: sending work out under your own name is the professional sign-off, and Chronity documents it afterwards rather than interrupting it.
| The Standard asks for… | Chronity provides… |
|---|---|
| A Material Impact Assessment | The taxonomy — your signed MIA, version-controlled in the portal. See AI Lead reference → The MIA & taxonomy. |
| Data protection & annual training | Zero-knowledge encryption of all stored content; per-user training-acknowledgement records. |
| A written reliability decision per material output | An auto-drafted reliability file note on every Track 1 deliverable, naming the responsible surveyor. See Your reliability notes. |
| A quarterly risk register | An auto-drafted quarterly risk register the AI Lead edits and signs. See AI Lead → Risk register. |
| Dip-sampling of high-volume use | Automated quarterly dip-sampling of Track 2 work. See AI Lead → Dip-sampling. |
| Third-party supplier due diligence | A generated, downloadable due-diligence pack. |
| Disclosure & client opt-outs | A keyword-driven client opt-out list, enforced on every AI action. |
| Explainability on request | The full, searchable observation record and audit reports. |
Each of those links goes to the page that explains the feature in detail. The mechanism that ties them all together is the observation pipeline.
A word on responsibility
Chronity produces the evidence and the drafts. It does not, and cannot, take professional responsibility for your firm's work — that always rests with a named qualified surveyor. The auto-drafted reliability note is a starting point a qualified person stands behind, not a substitute for professional judgement.