Is it Worth Getting a Professional Qualification in the New AI Age?
In a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO, entrepreneur and business strategist Daniel Priestley made a deliberately arresting claim: that plumbers will soon earn more than lawyers. His argument was not really about plumbing. It was about the coming disruption to knowledge-based professions, the idea that artificial intelligence will systematically erode the premium that society has traditionally paid for expert human judgement. For those of us who have spent years qualifying, building expertise, and earning professional trust, this is not an abstract debate. It is an urgent and personal one. And if you are a school leaver currently trying to decide what to do with your working life, it may be the most consequential question of your generation.
I write this as a Fellow of the RICS and as the founder of Orange Peel Consultancy, a business built around strategic procurement and dispute avoidance and resolution in the construction sector. My professional world spans complex public procurement processes and dispute resolution. It is a world built on specialist knowledge, professional judgement, legal accountability, and above all, human trust. All of which raises the question: how much of that world is AI about to reshape?
The Automation of Expertise
Let us be precise about what AI is actually doing. It is not yet replacing the experienced professional wholesale. What it is doing is systematically automating the tasks that were once the apprenticeship of the professions: legal research, contract analysis, document review, tender evaluation, market benchmarking, report drafting. The activities that once took a capable graduate days to complete can now be produced in minutes by an AI agent with the right prompting. The work that trained people's professional instincts is disappearing.
This is both the opportunity and the threat. For experienced professionals who understand how to deploy AI tools effectively, the productivity gains are substantial. A single well-equipped consultant can today handle a scope of work that previously required a team. The question — and it is not a comfortable one, is “who captures that value.” The professional who adapts, or the platform that eventually replaces them?
Priestley's broader warning, that a significant economic disruption could arrive as early as 2029 as AI-driven change hits white-collar employment at scale, should not be dismissed as hyperbole. We have seen the pattern before: technology does not destroy professional work overnight, but it restructures it in ways that ruthlessly punish those who are slow to adapt. The premium shifts from the person who holds the knowledge to the person who knows how to direct and validate the machine that holds it.
What AI Means for Procurement
Take strategic procurement as an example, one of the core services at Orange Peel Consultancy. The work of designing a compliant procurement process, drafting tender documentation, evaluating bids, and managing the complex requirements of the Procurement Act 2023 is exactly the kind of structured, document-heavy, rule-bound activity that AI tools can increasingly assist with. Already, AI can review tender responses against evaluation criteria, flag inconsistencies, draft award decision letters, and summarise complex regulatory requirements.
But here is where the experienced procurement professional still commands an irreplaceable premium: in the exercise of judgement at the boundary of the rules. Knowing when a procurement challenge is credible and when it is not. Understanding the commercial dynamics between a client body and its supply chain well enough to design a process that achieves the right outcome rather than merely a defensible one. Advising an organisation that has been treated unfairly in a procurement process and helping them decide whether to challenge; that requires not only legal and procedural knowledge, but a reading of the situation, the client, and the risk that no AI currently possesses.
The same is true of collaborative procurement, where Orange Peel works with framework and alliance contracts including FAC-1, TAC-1 and PPC2000, in the role of Independent Adviser and Partnering Adviser. These roles exist precisely because the relationships between parties in complex construction projects are human relationships. They require someone who can sit in a room, read the dynamics, and help a project team navigate disagreement before it hardens into dispute. That is not a task that can be delegated to an algorithm, at least not yet. But “at least not yet” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Dispute Resolution and the Question of Human Oversight
The dispute resolution context is where the question of AI and professional accountability becomes most acute and most legally significant. As an adjudicator, mediator, and expert witness, I operate in environments where the professional's role is not merely to provide information, but to exercise independent judgement, to stand behind that judgement in formal proceedings, and to be accountable for it.
Under current UK law, this accountability must rest with a human being. An AI system cannot be an adjudicator. It cannot be a mediator. It cannot be an expert witness. These roles carry legal and professional obligations that require a named, qualified individual who can be questioned, challenged, and if necessary, sanctioned. The expert who gives evidence before a tribunal or in litigation owes a duty to the court that overrides any duty to the client. That duty and the moral weight that comes with it cannot currently be discharged by a machine.
This has practical implications that are already live. AI tools can now synthesise large volumes of contract documentation, correspondence, and site records extraordinarily quickly. In an adjudication, where the timetable is compressed and the documentary burden is often enormous, this is a genuine and valuable capability. The experienced professional who can direct an AI to do this analytical groundwork, and who then applies their own judgement to interrogate and validate the outputs, is more effective than one who does not. But the professional who relies on AI outputs without fully understanding and owning them is in serious jeopardy.
Consider the expert witness scenario specifically. If an expert's report is substantially generated or structured by an AI tool, and that expert is unable to explain and defend every aspect of it under cross-examination, their credibility and potentially their professional registration is at risk. The duty is to provide the court or tribunal with the expert's own, independent opinion. That opinion must be genuinely the expert's. AI can inform it. It cannot substitute for it. This distinction, between AI as a tool and AI as the decision-maker, is the central legal and ethical question facing the professions in the immediate future.
The Question Every School Leaver Must Now Ask
If you are seventeen or eighteen, sitting your A-levels, and trying to decide whether to invest three or four years and significant sums of money in a university degree, you are navigating one of the most genuinely uncertain career landscapes in living memory. The traditional calculation, degree leads to professional training leads to secure career, is under real and increasing strain.
Daniel Priestley's argument cuts to the heart of this. The jobs most vulnerable to AI disruption are precisely those that involve significant information processing and pattern recognition: document review, standard contract drafting, routine research and analysis, middle-management reporting. These are historically the destinations of university graduates entering professional services. The roles least vulnerable are those requiring physical presence, embodied skill, and genuine human relationship including the skilled trades.
This is why the plumber comparison resonates beyond its initial provocation. A master plumber, electrician, or stonemason with a strong reputation has something that is becoming increasingly scarce: skills that cannot be automated, work that must happen in a physical place, and a direct human relationship with the client. AI cannot fix your heating. It cannot diagnose why a historic building is moving. These skills will not depreciate as AI improves. They may become significantly more valuable.
But this does not mean that university is simply the wrong choice. It means that the question of what one studies, and what one intends to do with it, has never mattered more. A degree that develops genuinely irreplaceable human capabilities, complex reasoning, ethical judgement, the ability to navigate ambiguity, deep domain expertise backed by professional accreditation, remains a sound investment. A degree that principally trains graduates to do tasks that AI can already perform more cheaply and quickly is a different proposition entirely.
The surveying profession is an interesting case study here. The route to becoming a Chartered Surveyor, degree, structured training, Assessment of Professional Competence, produces professionals with a mix of technical knowledge, practical experience, and professional accountability that carries legal weight. The degree alone is not the product. The qualification, the registration, and the ongoing professional obligation are. That combination is harder to automate than any individual skill within it. An apprenticeship route that leads to the same destination may, in fact, be the shrewder path for many school leavers, combining earning with learning, and arriving at the same professional standing without the same level of debt.
As for universities themselves, they are not immune to this disruption. The traditional model was designed for a world in which access to expertise was scarce and expensive. In a world where any student can query an AI for a sophisticated explanation of almost any subject at any time of day, the competitive advantage of a university cannot rest on knowledge transfer alone. The institutions that will flourish are those that offer what AI cannot: genuine intellectual community, mentorship, practical experience, and the credentialling that still matters in regulated professions. Those that merely sell access to information will struggle to justify the price.
Adapting Rather Than Retreating
The temptation for established professionals, particularly those who have worked hard and long to build their expertise, is to retreat into credentialism, to treat the letters after their name as sufficient protection from disruption. They are not. A professional who refuses to engage with AI tools will find themselves slower, less competitive, and ultimately less useful to clients than one who deploys those tools intelligently. The qualification provides legitimacy and legal standing. It does not provide immunity from the need to keep learning.
The opportunity, on the other hand, is real. Professionals who combine genuine domain expertise with the ability to use AI effectively are already commanding a premium in the market. The procurement specialist who can manage a complex AI-assisted tender evaluation process, while applying professional judgement to its outputs and advising the client on the risks, is more valuable than either the AI or the specialist working in isolation. The same is true of the adjudicator who uses AI to process a large documentary record rapidly, while exercising genuinely independent judgement on the decision. The hybrid professional, expert and AI director simultaneously is what the market is beginning to demand.
At Orange Peel Consultancy, we are already thinking carefully about how these tools can enhance the services we provide to clients in procurement and dispute resolution, while being clear-eyed about the limits of what AI can do in contexts where professional accountability and human judgement are not optional extras. That balance, embracing capability while maintaining accountability, is, I think, the central professional challenge of the next decade.
A Final Reflection
Priestley's warning is ultimately not that expertise becomes worthless. It is that expertise without adaptability becomes worthless. The professions have survived previous waves of technological change, the computer, the internet, digital documentation, not by resisting them but by absorbing them into professional practice and refocusing on what only a qualified, accountable human being can provide.
The AI revolution is faster and more fundamental than any of those waves. But the core of what a professional qualification represents, accountability, trust, ethical obligation, and the readiness to stand behind one's judgement when it is tested, remains stubbornly, essentially human. The question is not whether to get a professional qualification. It is whether, once you have it, you are willing to earn it again, every day, in a world that is changing faster than any of us anticipated.
That capacity for continuous reinvention, more than any particular credential or any particular skill, may be the most durable competitive advantage of the coming decade.
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This blog was written in response to the Diary of a CEO podcast episode featuring Daniel Priestley: 'Plumbers Will Earn More Than Lawyers! I Predicted 2008, Now I'm Warning About 2029', published 16 March 2026. Neil Thody FRICS is the Founder and Managing Director of Orange Peel Consultancy Ltd, a specialist consultancy providing strategic procurement, dispute avoidance and resolution, expert witness, and business advisory services to the construction sector.