AI Polish and Smart Build

Smart Build and AI Polish are easy to confuse because they sit next to each other in several places, but they do genuinely different jobs — one needs no AI at all, the other only ever tidies what’s already there.

What it is

Smart Build is a chip-based preset builder: tick the categories and options that apply to a hazard type, and it assembles plain-English wording from a fixed, curated set of phrases — no AI provider is called, and no AI provider is needed. It exists in the portal (building a scope of survey) and in the capture app (building narrative sections like remedial recommendations, from the same chip-picking pattern). AI Polish is different: it takes text a surveyor or manager already wrote — free text, or the output of Smart Build — and rewrites it into clearer, more professional prose, deliberately instructed to preserve every fact and add nothing new. It’s an optional button next to a text field, never a replacement for writing the field yourself.

Before you start

Smart Build needs no AI provider connection and works identically with or without one. AI Polish only appears once your organisation has connected a provider — see Connecting your AI provider.

How to do it

1. Use Build from presets (Smart Build) wherever it’s offered next to a text field, to assemble a starting point from tick-box options rather than writing from a blank box.
2. Edit the generated text directly — nothing from Smart Build is locked once it lands in the field.
3. Where an AI polish button is offered next to a text field, use it to tidy wording you’ve already written or generated, then review the result before it’s used anywhere.
4. Never treat a polish result as a fresh draft to accept unread — its whole design goal is “no new facts”, so if it reads like it added information, something unexpected happened and the original text should be checked.

How it integrates

Because Smart Build’s option sets are hazard-specific — damp & mould’s long-standing chip set is different from every other hazard type’s own purpose/standards/limitations chips — the same builder produces different, methodology-appropriate wording depending on the job’s hazard type; see Scope of survey and Smart Build for the portal-side version in full. AI Polish calls your organisation’s own connected provider through the same drafts-only, sealed-record-refusing path every other AI feature uses — see How AI is used, and its boundaries. Text produced by either tool becomes an ordinary field on the survey once accepted; nothing distinguishes it afterwards from text typed by hand.

Common problems

• Smart Build’s chip options look wrong for this job. Confirm the hazard type is set correctly — the option set is chosen by hazard type, not shared across all of them.
• AI Polish isn’t offered. It only appears once your organisation has connected an AI provider; Smart Build works regardless.
• AI Polish changed what a sentence actually says. That shouldn’t happen — its instruction is to preserve facts and add nothing. Revert to the original text and report it if you see this.