How he believes artificial intelligence could change commercial real estate, according to CBRE’s top technology expert

RICHARDSON As generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have entered the public consciousness, the masses have glimpsed the technology’s potential to increase productivity and transform the way people work.

Dallas-based commercial real estate giant CBRE Group is pioneering the potential of technology to increase efficiency and time savings across its business, from property management to lease administration and marketing.

Executives expect generative AI, which can create text, images and other content through deep learning, to have a big impact on their businesses. The technology is already used across the industry, for example on real estate search platforms.

According to one study, nearly two-thirds of US executives believe generative AI will have a high or extremely high impact on their organization in the next three to five years, and 77% believe it will have a greater impact on society than any other technology emerging. survey conducted by accounting and consulting firm KPMG LLP.

CBRE has been working with artificial intelligence and machine learning technology for years. The company in August said its Smart AM property management AI tool is now being used across 1 billion square feet of customer space at more than 20,000 sites to better track maintenance requests and process construction data.

Throughout the real estate lifecycle, we’ve been saying: Where can we see the impact of AI? This was stated by Sandeep Dav, chief digital and technology officer of the CBRE group The Dallas Morning News at its technology office in Richardson. He took a look at a new playground of generative AI tools that the company launched for its employees a few months ago.

Employees can ask a chatbot about office buildings in the city and ask it to generate, for example, a paragraph of text about the buildings’ features that intermediaries can use as a first draft. It can also summarize or answer questions using information from long documents, including those the company has accumulated from negotiations over the years.

Endless reports come out, investment reminders come out, there are Q&As with clients who have been hooked, Dav said. You upload the entire content and say: what are the five things? What are the five most important things the customer was worried about in this conversation?

CBRE has access to many of the same language models used by OpenAI and Google. Its new self-service AI tool offers many of the same features as ChatGPT and other public tools, including text generation, image generation and translation, but within the CBRE network, so employees don’t enter the data private companies in public systems.

It’s safe. It is within our environment. Our data is protected. “The customer data, if we enter it, is protected,” Dav said. This is very important.

Dav and the CBRE technology team have been experimenting with virtual reality and creating digital replicas of buildings. Last year, the company created a virtual office space where employees can wear a headset and interact with each other using virtual avatars, and a similar implementation is now being tested in its London office.

All of our technology investments are driven by the same philosophy, which is that they need to be aligned with a strategy, Dav said. We need to see a clear ROI and there will be areas where we will experiment, because it’s important to experiment and just learn something new and see whether it works or not.