Practical ways you can start leveraging AI for real estate
Incorporating AI is crucial for real estate companies that want to stay relevant both as an employer and a competitor. But figuring out how to apply AI to your business practices for the greatest impact can be overwhelming.
To create your AI roadmap, begin with your current state. Addressing key areas such as your existing solutions and data governance will help you create an effective strategy for how you can start adopting AI today and prepare for future innovations.
The AI opportunity cost
Embracing AI isn’t just a trend — it’s a necessity. A shifting labor market and continued labor productivity challenges are forcing companies to adopt new technology if they want to stay relevant as a competitor and an employer.
Realistically, AI isn’t at the point where it can provide a full-time equivalent for all the roles you need to fill; however, it can provide ways for you to do more with the workforce you currently have. AI can help your staff eliminate some of the more mundane or repetitive tasks they have and focus on more business-critical work.
It can also help you attract the next generation of talent.
Millennial and Gen Z workers — who have grown up in an era of rapid technological advancement — value efficiency and are motivated by the opportunity to be productive and make a meaningful impact with their work.
To successfully attract and retain these younger generations, you need to have the technology in place to remove friction from their roles, maximize their output and help them achieve their goals more effectively. Otherwise, they’ll be more inclined to choose a technology-enabled workplace over one that relies heavily on manual processes.
Starting your AI adoption
Adopting AI doesn’t have to be complicated. You can simplify your AI roadmap by starting with two crucial considerations:
1. Your current solutions
Understanding the tools that you already own, their capabilities and how you use them is the first step in adopting AI effectively.
Your firm is likely already using tools such as CRM, financial systems or property management solutions — Identifying how AI can fit into these existing solution roadmaps will help you better determine how you can apply it to improving your business.
You should also be working with your vendor to understand how they’re incorporating AI into their product roadmaps. Many solutions are already embedding AI, for example, Salesforce with Einstein GPT. Leveraging these opportunities is an easy way to start introducing AI into your organization. And understanding how your existing tools may evolve can help you determine how they align with your long-term AI and technology plans.
2. Your business strategy
Rather than having a broad-based, generic AI strategy — be intentional.
Your AI adoption should be directly tied to your business strategy so that it benefits functional areas of your business. This makes it easier to test and measure AI use cases, so that you have a better understanding of the actual impact on your organization.
Preparing for the future of AI
As AI continues to evolve, it’s important to prepare your organization to take advantage of new innovations. You can improve your AI readiness by evaluating the processes you use for key functions such as:
Data governance
Having effective data governance will help you minimize risk, even as you adopt new ways to leverage data in your business operations.
Real estate companies often handle sensitive data, such as financial information, social security numbers and credit reports, making evaluating the privacy and legal risk management issues in your different markets crucial.
Effective data governance will also help you take advantage of emerging opportunities.
In real estate, you have the potential to use AI for everything from pricing properties to capturing data and streamlining processes for ESG. But being able to use powerful AI solutions requires that you have strong data integrity and that your data is centralized and accessible.
Software selection
When navigating the AI solutions market, do your due diligence. Remember that one-size-fits-all is rarely the best approach to technology. Instead, consider which tools will best serve your business and stakeholders and how those tools integrate. Establishing these clear priorities can help you avoid investing your resources into an AI-enabled tool that can’t deliver on your goals.
How Wipfli can help
Open new doors for your company with Wipfli. Our seasoned team can help you address your biggest concerns, from advancing your digital roadmap to maximizing your tax credits and incentives. Contact us today to learn more about the unique breadth of solutions we bring to helping you grow your company.
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