Two great articles to share…one about a prediction and another about a transaction.

Is this what’s coming to CRE tech? Are we heading towards the day when a robot will be able to determine the best lease or sale solution for a company? Some would say that day is already here. It’s certainly here in other industries:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/53782.wss

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/11/why-ai-drives-better-business-decision-making.html

https://www.investopedia.com/news/artificial-intelligence-hedge-funds-outperforming-humans/

In my opinion, the areas where I think technology will have the most profound impact on commercial real estate is going to be data and analytics. It’s not really a question of “if,” but “how.” And therefore, who will be most impacted, what companies will emerge, and what jobs might be vulnerable are important questions for the industry to contemplate NOW.

If AI can better recommend a financial trade or better yet--win at AlphaGo, than you're kidding yourself if you don’t think it can serve up data better than a human. Sorry, just saying that it’s happening everywhere in our world and CRE won't be immune to it.

Many startups are already putting these technologies to use on their own platform. Reonomy is one of the best examples I know, but there are many others. But, to me-- there are still so many questions that remain unanswered…

Will someone from the outside do this? Will Google? Will Amazon?

Will someone build it for tenants and investors and try and cut out the brokerage sector?

Will a brokerage firm build it and be able to reduce their headcount of brokers in substantial numbers?

If there was one tech trend I would pay attention to more than any other, it would be AI and its potential impact on data and actual deal making. More than anything else, this has the real potential to cost jobs in the traditional brokerage sector.

Is it coming tomorrow? Probably not. But will it happen? Absofuckinglutely! Just ask anyone that was at Our Trailblazers Summit in Utah who heard from the leading AI, robotics, and machine-learning experts in the world on how tech will eventually decimate many job categories in CRE tech.

I will leave you with a quote from this really important article:

"Financial giants such as Goldman Sachs and many of the biggest hedge funds are all switching on AI-driven systems that can foresee market trends and make trades better than humans. It’s been happening, drip by drip, for years, but a torrent of AI is about to wash through the industry,” says Mark Minevich, a New York-based investor in AI and senior adviser to the U.S. Council on Competitiveness. “High-earning traders are going to get unceremoniously dumped like workers at a closing factory.”

Just let that sink in.