How the Real Estate Industry Can Effectively Leverage AI

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, in the next 20 years, we’re going to see as much change to the way that we do our work as we have in the last 2,000 years,” said futurist Maurice Conti during “Future of Work, Cities, and Mobility—and the Impact of AI,” the closing general session of the 2023 ULI Fall Meeting in Los Angeles. Conti—who has worked with such companies as Tesla, BMW, Ford, Nike, Arup, and Airbus—spoke about the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems and their potential to affect the development industry.

Conti told attendees that the most important question in this time of global uncertainty, rapid change, and increasing complexity is not “What’s going to happen in the future?” but, despite what’s going on now, “How do we thrive?”

“As human beings, we’re actually pretty good at dealing with this kind of disruption,” Conti said. “We’re equipped with three things that you bring to work with you every day: your toolset, your skill set, and your mindset.”

Technology—the toolset—provides us with resilience in the face of disruption, from the invention of the stone hand ax to the development of architecture and penicillin. Conti sees generative AI simply as a new toolset, one that allows people to solve problems by having an interaction with machines.

“This morning, I imagined myself as an architect working as part of a team at a development firm to pitch a project in downtown Los Angeles,” Conti said. “I asked ChatGPT for advice, and at one point, it said, ‘You should look at the 2040 DTLA plan.’ It summarized the main points and gave me advice on how to incorporate these points into my proposal.” He also asked ChatGPT to create images for the proposal that matched the goals of the plan. “All this took me 20 minutes, in my hotel room, by myself.”

To use this new toolset requires a new skill set, Conti said. “‘What can AI do for us’ is entirely the wrong question. The right question to ask is, ‘What is the problem we’re trying to solve?’ That’s the skill set we need, to get absolute clarity on the problem. If you don’t, you’ll be disappointed by AI over and over.”

By partnering with such companies as Google and Microsoft, ones that are investing in generative AI, real estate developers can leverage these tools effectively. In addition, AI will be increasingly incorporated into the tools people already use every day, such as Microsoft Excel.

The third key is mindset. “If you don’t figure out the human side of the equation, the technology will go nowhere,” Conti said. That means encouraging staff members to work with AI systems and become more accustomed to them, which can help in addressing people’s fear of AI.

“AI is not going to take jobs,” Conti predicted. “It’s going to take tasks.” Automation of simpler tasks will free workers to take on other tasks. “In the end, I think we will have more jobs rather than less, and they will be higher-value jobs.”As more tasks are automated, however, expectations are likely to rise. “The expectation will be that you need to do more than you used to, and the only way to do that is with AI. If you’re an architectural firm, you’re going to be expected to show clients designs that are more developed, in less time, for less money.”

Conti acknowledged the problem of bias in AI systems. “I was working with a company that uses AI to make decisions about who to lend to,” he said. “‘Are you a good risk? What is that risk? What should your interest rate be?’ If there’s bias in those decisions, that’s pretty bad. But the AI is not biased—the dataset is biased.”

A good data strategy is essential to fighting bias, Conti noted. “If AI is using a single, homogeneous dataset to make decisions—[say,] a FICO score, which is highly biased—then it’s going to spit out a biased decision about lending you money or not. But if you layer on lots of other data—like where you went to school, what your job is, your employment history, et cetera—then the biases tend to cancel each other out.”

Another common fear is that a superintelligent AI will take over the world. That kind of artificial general intelligence is at least 50 years away, and possibly a century away, Conti believes, which potentially gives humanity plenty of time to develop a strategy to avoid annihilation. “The thing I would worry about, if I were you, is not the existence of AI,” he concluded. “Worry about your competitor down the street [who is] making better use of this technology than you are. That’s the risk. The companies that take advantage of AI are the ones that are going to be most resilient.”