Could AI run a real estate company 2/3
Hi!
Two months ago, I gave a keynote about AI at Entralon Club’s CEE Business Retreat event. It’s an exclusive off-site gathering for top real estate investors and developers. Many attendees said the presentation was eye-opening, so I thought I’d transform it into a post and share it broadly.
Enjoy, Tom
Could AI run a company?
To challenge the idea of AI running a company, I took two mindsets of successful leaders, inspired by the book “CEO Excellence” (C. Dewar, S. Keller, V. Malhotra), and challenged them against AI (not only LLMs, but also the ones that can predict things).
Mindset 1: Exceptional Futurist
Let’s start by breaking this down, and take a look at what “exceptional” means. My definition might be controversial, but I’m ready to defend it:
Exceptional = Crazy Enough Futurist
*“When building a company you can’t pay attention to the odds of finding the answer. You just must find it. It matters not whether your chances are 9/10 or 1/1000. Your task is the same.”
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– Ben Horowitz
The formal definition states “exceptional” means “much greater than average”, and it makes sense when describing some CEOs as they represent 0.065% of the US population.
Meanwhile, LLMs are trained on general data produced by the remaining 99.9% of the population. These AI models are biased to satisfy an average user , that is, the most promising consumer of their product.
LLMs rely on their general and average knowledge able to create only another average idea.
So can AI be an exceptional futurist?
I’m pretty sure there will be humans in charge for a very long time, though it doesn’t mean AI can’t be helpful. It’s a great assistant that can do the work of dozens or thousands of people. Especially in areas like:
macro trends overview
data-related predictions
anomaly detection
advanced data analytics
work on large document datasets
This is what happens across industries:
Lilly is McKinsey’s project using all digitized resources to help managers and analysts in building better business insights.
“Lilli aggregates our knowledge and capabilities in one place for the first time and will allow us to spend more time with clients activating those insights and maximizing the value we can create.”
– Erik Roth, a senior partner with McKinsey
The same case with JLL GPT introduced in the US.
*“Our global real estate experts will be able to deliver faster, smarter insights to our clients. (…) This is the latest innovation demonstrating how we tech-enable our most valuable asset – our people – to provide unmatched products and services to our clients.”
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– Yao Morin, JLL CTO
These solutions will automate some jobs, but more importantly, they will increase people’s productivity and satisfaction. In 2020, Aleksandra Przegalińska and Konrad Sowa conducted research that showed almost 60% higher work performance achieved when working in collaboration with AI.
Mindset 2: Crisis manager
To be continue in the Part 3… Stay tuned!