This is a daunting time to be embarking on a career as a graduate surveyor in the property industry. My cohort, I realise, is not the first to have left university to find an unhelpful economic backdrop subduing the graduate recruitment market. However, I suspect it is the first to find itself confronted with articles in the press questioning which jobs will exist a few years from now; and whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform the world of work to such an extent that entire professions will simply cease to exist in due course.

For those who qualified back in the 1990s, or earlier, the question of whether AI will make the surveying profession obsolete is probably of little more than passing interest; they can realistically hope to be retired before AI’s influence becomes too pervasive. But my generation can’t afford to take a “head in the sand” approach. Most of us are going to need to work for the next 40 years or so. As Bill Gates once famously observed, although society tends to overestimate how much impact a new technology will have in a one-year timeframe, it tends to underestimate the impact it will have over a decade. So, if AI is going to make the role of surveyors redundant by the time we are in our mid-30s, it would be pretty futile for us to be setting out on this career path now.