RIBA’s latest research captures likely impacts of AI on architecture

• AI’s ascendancy will lead to human relationships, communication skills, ethical decision-making and critical thinking being even more important in the future
• 88% of architects believe that AI use will become increasingly important for their organisation’s business by 2035

It comes as a survey for its Future Business of Architecture programme showed that 88% of architects believe that AI use will become increasingly important for their organisation’s business by 2035, closely followed by business development, sustainability consultancy and client asset management.

Conversely, the quantitative data indicates that architects foresee traditional business tools, such as marketing and project management will be less important than AI to achieving business success during the coming decade.

Architects anticipate that AI will have a significant impact on both design and construction, with 50% of architects surveyed predicting that technology will have a ‘transformational effect’ on how the profession work at concept design stage and 51% on manufacturing and construction. Only 10% of architects thought that the briefing, concept design and spatial coordination stages of projects would not be affected by AI, digitalisation and automation.

The research paper, Artificial Intelligence: The unreliable outlier driving the future of architecture maps out three likely future scenarios for architecture in the wake of advances in AI – good, bad, and largely unchanged – and explores how other innovations are transforming architects’ work by causing ‘technological disruption’.

It is the third evidence-led white paper to emerge from the Future Business of Architecture.