Most of the AI conversation is a numbers game: licences bought, people "using AI", whether the firm has a strategy yet. James Garner thinks that is the wrong number to watch. The money is flowing and the strategies are written, but the thing almost no one is funding is capability — whether ordinary professionals can actually use the tools well. That gap, he argues, is widening, and it is where the real risk now sits.

James is Head of AI at Gleeds, a Fellow of RICS, and co-founder of the Project Flux podcast. He has been a quantity surveyor since 1998, a profession he jokes you could pull someone into from 1890, give a day's training, and they would manage fine today — which is exactly what makes this moment different. He sat on the RICS working group behind its new responsible-AI standard, in force since March, which for the first time makes baseline AI literacy a requirement for every chartered surveyor, not a nice-to-have.

James walks Maryrose through why an "AI strategy" that is not a business strategy powered by AI will fail, the difference between transparency and explainability (and why he prefers "bookending" to "human in the loop"), the model-cost reckoning coming for anyone on a flat monthly plan, and the eight Claude files every professional should set up to get real value from Claude Code. Along the way, the habit that keeps him ahead: half an hour, every Friday, to do nothing but experiment.

A practical, clear-eyed and genuinely useful conversation about closing the gap between owning AI and actually using it, before it widens any further.

James Linkdln

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