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With artificial intelligence having moved well past its formative stage, real estate industry executives now face the challenges of anchoring AI to strategy, driving real outcomes and promoting AI transformation within their organizations.
A panel of real estate industry leaders, including Yardi Commercial Vice President Brian Sutherland, tackled these issues in a recent “Leading Beyond AI” webinar hosted by BG Staffing. The other panelists were Kelly Brown, co-CEO at BG Staffing; Collin Campbell, CIO for Cushman & Wakefield; and Connor Hall, CBRE’s vice president of data, AI and proptech.
Interview excerpts
What’s the biggest leadership decision organizations should be making about AI today that maybe they just weren’t making even just a year ago?
Sutherland: Over the last 18 months, there has been a lot of execution of AI at a small scale. What we’re seeing now is larger-scale execution of AI across organizations. We’re seeing our clients make sure that objectives are clearly outlined, and that the business partners and the IT group are aligned when they take on AI initiatives. The scale that we’re seeing is going to be the most exciting part of the next several months.
Campbell: The focus has pivoted from who gets access to AI to who owns the outcome. The real decision is, can I attach AI investment to a particular business outcome to achieve success. That can be defined any number of ways, whether it’s a savings target, a new market opportunity or competitive differentiation.
What should leaders be thinking about now with regard to how people learn, grow and develop as work itself evolves?
Brown: There are many resources out there. You’re not in this alone, so leverage your partners to make sure that the strategy you plan to execute is producing the outcomes that you intend. And if it’s not, take a step back and identify why. That discipline can really pay off, because there are so many tools out there that it’s tempting to feel like you have to be doing all of it all the time.
Hall: People need to have a baseline understanding of what AI can do, how to use it responsibly and what it can’t be expected to do.
What foundational work has to happen first with AI before you can deliver meaningful business value?
Sutherland: AI adoption needs to be well orchestrated from the top down in terms of how it’s going to transform a business and make it credible with other real estate organizations. That means bringing everyone together into a conference room, talking about why an AI initiative is being considered and the impact it could have, and really making it a collaborative effort.
Brown: As you’re updating and changing your technology, it’s easy to have a very inward focus. But are you still solving your customers’ problems? It’s good to have that feedback loop continually going as you get down the AI path because it may or may not change fundamentally how you’re solving your customers’ problems and meeting the needs of your internal stakeholders.
How do today’s leaders empower their teams to look at long-standing processes, experiment with new possibilities and create a culture of continuous learning?
Sutherland: The challenge is not just a technical view but people looking at the way they’re doing things, and challenging that as well, and having a forum to bring ideas, take risks and roll things out. With AI, there’s going to be a big shift, and those willing to take the risks and have the agency to make decisions and roll out initiatives are the ones that are going to have success.
Brown: If you see pockets of noncompliance, dig into them because they may turn into an opportunity to unveil curiosity. Maybe somebody didn’t follow the process for a certain reason, but they built a different process that’s working better for them.
What do you hope for leaders to start doing in Q4 as they lead into 2027?
Sutherland: Look for a problem within your organization where AI can have an impact, and roll it out, hopefully get a win, and build on that.
Hall: Quantify some of the highest-value use cases, because I don’t think that communication has made its way to the appropriate stakeholders. It’s incumbent upon the decision-makers and leaders to create a forum to source information.
Campbell: It’s very simple: Is AI even the answer? Don’t start with “How do I use Claude to solve this problem?” Start with “Let me clarify what the problem is,” and then you can approach it, and you will end up with a much higher success rate and much higher ROI.
Brown: Ask your customers what their pain points are and what you can do better as a business. That approach will uncover feedback that you can use to go and source tools that could possibly involve AI to solve. That will help you look at your business in a whole different way and identify the problems you can solve. So get very people-centered answers and use them to advance your strategy, and that’s likely going to involve AI.
What do you hope that today’s teams will say about how leaders led them through this process five years from now?
Campbell: I hope they will say the leaders remained grounded. The real test of governance isn’t what you said yes to, it’s how many times you said no. Did we chase every idea, every pilot, say “yes” to every partner? I also want to say that we weren’t too restrictive and said “no” to everything, that we gave our teams an opportunity and emboldened their curiosity, because that’s where we’re going to solve the problem.
Brown: I hope they say wow, we’ve come such a long way, and we’re still here, and we’re still solving customer problems with the same efficiency we did five years ago, but maybe with a whole new process or in a whole new way that we don’t even know about yet.
Gain more insights into AI’s emerging role in property management from the complete webinar.
