How AI is used, and its boundaries

Every AI feature in HousingSurvey Pro shares the same shape: it drafts, it never decides, and it has no access to anything once a record is sealed.

What it is

AI here means one thing consistently: a suggestion for a human to review, edit or discard — never a determination the platform makes on your behalf. It runs on your organisation’s own AI provider account and key, not a shared platform key, so you control the provider, the cost and the data-processing terms. Three features use it: AI Polish (rewriting a field note into clearer prose without changing what it says), photo analysis (an on-site suggestion about what a photo shows), and executive summary drafting (turning recorded findings into a starting-point paragraph). None of it is required — every feature it touches works fully without an AI provider connected; AI only adds an optional shortcut on top.

How it integrates

AI is drafts-only, by hard rule: once a survey is finalized (sealed), every AI feature against it is refused outright — there is no “AI-assisted correction” of sealed evidence, ever. Nothing an AI feature produces enters the sealed record automatically; a surveyor or manager has to actively accept a suggestion into a field before finalising, and the finished record makes no distinction between AI-assisted and manually-written text once it’s sealed — the platform doesn’t keep a “written by AI” flag, because by the time it’s sealed, a human has already made every word their own. The significant-versus-emergency judgement on hazard triage, and every statutory determination the platform records, is always the surveyor’s and the landlord’s — AI is never consulted for it and never asked to produce one. See AI Polish and Smart Build and AI photo analysis and executive summaries for what each feature actually does, and Connecting your AI provider for how the key itself gets configured.

Common problems

• An AI button isn’t offered on a finalized record. That’s expected — AI is refused entirely on finalized records; open the equivalent draft or revision instead.
• I want to know whether a specific sentence in a report came from AI. There’s no retained flag for this — once accepted into a field and sealed, AI-assisted text and manually-typed text are indistinguishable, by design, because a human reviewed and accepted it either way.
• No AI buttons appear anywhere. Your organisation hasn’t connected a provider yet — see Connecting your AI provider. Every feature AI touches still works without one; you just don’t get the AI shortcut.