Not As 'Scary' As You Thought: CRE Marketing Pros Say AI Fears Are Overblown
The role of artificial intelligence in commercial real estate has exploded in prominence over the past couple of years, and it is beginning to play a major role at one of commercial real estate's top brokerages.
And despite news that AI is already replacing workers and could come for more, CRE marketing executives say it is merely freeing up humans for the things only they do best.
JLL launched its own large language model artificial intelligence product roughly two years ago, the first major commercial real estate brokerage to do so. Now, the in-house model dubbed JLL GPT has users inputting over 300,000 prompts per week into the system, said Shaina Nielson, the company’s creative director for the Americas.
“It's really important that it's just our data, it's all in-house, it was created by JLL, and so people are starting to use it,” Nielson said at Bisnow’s Building Your Brand: Marketing for Commercial Real Estate event this week. “I really think that's the future, especially with other companies, when they're trying to protect their [intellectual property] and really provide value to clients.”
When the company launched JLL GPT, it said it would train its model on internal data supplemented with external resources to create a tool its employees could use to speed up how analysts work, create portfolio dashboards and generate property flyers.
AI isn't supposed to replace humans, it's supposed to reveal what makes humans irreplaceable, Nielson said at the event, held at The Allegro Royal Sonesta Hotel Chicago Loop.
“I know that that's scary, but you can find ways to implement it in your day,” she said.
Miles Bloom, managing partner at Open Seas Advisory, noted that there’s an aversion to tools that might reduce some of the tasks people spend a lot of time on daily. That delegation can bring up existential questions about the nature of a person’s work, whether their roles are still necessary and whether using AI makes them more replaceable.
But those questions might miss the forest for the trees.
“Getting rid of low-quality uses of one's time, so long as it's freeing up time for higher quality uses, is an objectively awesome thing,” Bloom said.
Bloom said he enjoys not having to do much data collection anymore, though his past self would’ve been “scared shitless” at the idea of shedding that role. He gets to spend far more time analyzing, interpreting and using data than he used to because he doesn’t have to spend the time to gather it.
To use AI effectively, people should ask themselves questions about how they use their time and how they might be able to use it more efficiently.
“It shouldn't be scary if you get to do more of what you're best at,” Bloom said.
Home Invest has adopted a growth mindset toward the implementation of AI, Chief Marketing Officer Paige Steers said. No one laments the loss of manual pay stubs or questions the value of social media in building a business in today’s day and age.
AI is similarly a part of modern life, she said.
Steers encouraged marketing professionals to evaluate their technology stack and find AI features they haven’t had time in their day to uncover. Speeding up the usage of AI in tools a company is already using helps maximize the energy put toward high-value creative work, she said.
Steers said the best gift AI gives to CRE is one more valuable than money in many cases: time.
“It has to be used intelligently as a tool so that we can all thrive and flourish and do the absolute best work,” Steers said.
