The Laptop-Throwing Moment: When AI Dreams Meet Reality

Have you ever been so close to a breakthrough, so tantalisingly near to a solution, that you could almost taste it, only to have it slip through your fingers again and again? It’s a feeling of frustration so acute that the impulse to hurl your laptop out of the nearest window becomes almost overwhelming. This is precisely the scenario that Tom Haley, the forward-thinking Managing Director of quantity surveying firm Quantix, confessed to when he recently returned to the Project Flux podcast. Here is a man at the vanguard of his industry, an early and enthusiastic adopter of artificial intelligence, admitting to the raw, hair-pulling reality of turning AI hype into a practical, working tool. “So close, yet so far away,” he lamented, a sentiment that will resonate with anyone who has tried to build something genuinely new. What happens when a pioneer, an industry leader, hits the wall of technological complexity? The answer, it turns out, is far more interesting than a simple story of success.

Tom Haley is no stranger to the cutting edge. As one of the earliest guests on the Project Flux podcast, appearing way back in episode 16, he has long been a vocal proponent of technology’s transformative potential in the construction industry. Over a year later, his conviction has only deepened, but it is now tempered with the hard-won wisdom of experience. His journey from a theoretical enthusiast to a hands-on innovator, currently building a bespoke ‘Quantix GPT’ for his team, forms a compelling narrative of modern leadership. This is a story about a business leader wrestling with the messy, intricate, and often maddening process of creating. Interestingly, this passion for building the future of construction wasn’t his first love. As a boy, he dreamt of playing football. While that particular dream remains, as he humorously puts it, on hold, the same drive and ambition are now channelled into transforming his profession. It is this blend of visionary thinking and grounded pragmatism that makes his perspective so valuable. He even shares his struggles with his team, using his own challenges with the new technology as a powerful lesson in the importance of continuous learning and resilience, no matter how senior you are.

One of the most powerful insights from the conversation is Tom’s firm belief in the superiority of custom-built AI for professional services. While generalist models like ChatGPT have captured the public imagination, he warns of the “pollution” that can seep into their knowledge base. A general AI learns from the vast, often unreliable expanse of the public internet, whereas a custom GPT, like the one he is painstakingly developing, is curated. It learns from a specific, high-quality dataset – a firm’s own documents, its unique processes, its accumulated expertise. This distinction is crucial. For a quantity surveyor, whose advice can make or break a multi-million-pound project, the provenance of data is everything. You simply cannot afford to rely on an AI that might have learned its trade from a random forum or an outdated blog post. This leads to his second key insight: AI is not about replacing professionals, but augmenting them. He uses a brilliant metaphor, the evolution of the quantity surveyor’s toolkit from the scale rule to digital drawings, and now to AI. The core skills of a QS, measurement, costing, and commercial acumen, don’t disappear. Instead, their application evolves. The QS of the future, in Tom’s view, will spend less time on the drudgery of data processing and more on the high-value tasks of curating the AI’s inputs and critically evaluating its outputs. The skill is no longer in wielding the scale rule, but in designing the system that does the measuring, and knowing the right questions to ask of it.

Perhaps the most arresting moment in the discussion is the evocation of the “BlackBerry moment.” It’s a stark and powerful reminder of how quickly industries can be upended by technological shifts. BlackBerry, once a titan with 43% of the smartphone market, was reduced to virtually zero in just a few short years by the arrival of the iPhone. The anecdote about BlackBerry executives dismissing the buttonless iPhone as a ridiculous gimmick, only to later rush out their own buggy, failed version, the BlackBerry Storm, is a cautionary tale for the ages. Tom is convinced that a similar moment is coming for the construction industry. “Someone is going to find a way to use AI in a transformative way like that,” he predicts, “and completely zero an established business or industry or player.” It’s a chilling thought, but also a galvanising one. It underscores his philosophy that in an era of rapid change, the greatest risk is not in trying and failing, but in standing still. You don’t have to predict the future perfectly, but you do have to “get stuck in.”

This conversation is a crucial touchstone for our current moment. The gap between the promise of AI and its practical application is a challenge every industry is grappling with. Tom Haley’s story is a microcosm of this wider struggle, offering a candid, behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to innovate. It’s a narrative about leadership in a time of uncertainty, demonstrating that the path forward lies not in having all the answers, but in having the courage to ask the right questions and the resilience to keep going when the laptop-throwing moments inevitably arrive. His journey is a testament to the idea that true progress is born from a willingness to embrace the complexity, to learn from the failures, and to maintain an unwavering belief in the potential for a better way of doing things.

This article only scratches the surface of a deeply insightful and refreshingly honest conversation. In the full podcast episode, Tom delves deeper into the specific technical hurdles of building a custom GPT, discusses the evolving relationship between clients and tech-savvy consultants, and expands on his vision for the future of the quantity surveying profession. To hear more about the coming disruption and how to prepare for it, and to gain a more nuanced understanding of the opportunities and threats that AI presents to the construction world, we highly recommend you listen to the entire discussion. It's a conversation that will leave you feeling both sobered by the challenges and inspired by the possibilities.

Watch the full podcast with Tom Haley now!