TL;DR

Britain’s largest built-environment consultancies have increased AI budgets for the third year running, according to Building’s annual Top 150 survey. Some 87% put more money into the technology than last year, and 36% describe the increase as significant. The share calling AI extremely or very important to their business has climbed to 91%, from 75% three years ago.

The numbers behind the trend

The headline measure is firms rating AI and machine learning “extremely important” to transforming how they operate: 54% this year, up four points on last. That is a modest annual move, but it is the third consecutive rise, and the wider measure has travelled much further. A sixteen-point gain across three years, to 91%, marks the point where a technology stops being a pilot and becomes an assumed cost of doing business.

Cyber security spending rose too, with 66% of respondents putting in more than the year before. The pairing is not coincidental: expanding the number of systems that ingest project data expands what has to be defended.

Why this survey is worth more than most

Vendor-run adoption polls are abundant and largely worthless, since the organisation asking the question sells the answer. This one comes from a trade title surveying a defined population — the UK’s largest consultancies by fee income — with three years of comparable results behind it. The trajectory is the finding, not the single-year figure.

It also captures a sector where AI claims are testable. Consultancies in architecture, engineering, project management and surveying bill for time; tooling that genuinely compresses the hours shows up in the numbers rather than in a case study.

Looking forward

Set this against Deloitte’s finding that UK employees are paying for AI tools out of their own pockets. Where large consultancies are funding adoption centrally, staff elsewhere are buying it themselves. The gap between the two is a competitive one as much as a governance one.

Building publishes its full tables on Friday, including a ranking by UK fee income and separate Top 50 lists by discipline, alongside sentiment data on risks, recruitment and pay. Firms were also asked what they want from the Labour government, which is where the sector’s own view of the constraint should surface.