How AI is changing the property industry forever
It is a natural human condition to iterate. Early in our lives we iterate to learn — repeating our ten times tables over and over at school is one simple reminder of this approach. For many of us, the iteration used at schools extends into adult life — for example, through the daily ritual of dropping off our children at school. However tiredness, boredom, anxiety, hunger, or just a loss of interest get in the way of optimising these iterations. Belabouring the school drop off metaphor: sometimes we might try to optimise by changing our route to avoid heavy traffic — often just finding that our new route has even heavier traffic than the original path. We quickly turn to technology to assist — pulling out our mobile phones and traffic apps to show us a faster way.
When Clayton Christensen famously opined that the future of work started with identifying the ‘jobs to be done’, he was acknowledging the fact that much of our life revolves around iterative actions, and that disruptive innovation and optimisation of these jobs was required for companies to survive and thrive. His 1995 article on Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave — co-authored with Joseph L Bower — paved the way for a swathe of disruptive innovation which presents itself today by way of digital transformation.
At the top of the list of disruptive technologies that are changing our world is artificial intelligence. With apologies to the purists amongst us, permit me to extend that oft used term to cover the full gamut of technological developments which assist humans in optimising repeatable, iterative tasks. If I may, there exists a continuum which starts with the humble spreadsheet macro, extends through robotic process (or intelligent) automation, and ends with singularity. As Wikipedia states, artificial intelligence is “any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximise its chance of achieving its goals”. The value of such a system lies in the ability to undertake these tasks faster and more accurately than a human — in part because the system doesn’t get tired, bored, anxious, hungry, or lose interest. Even more importantly, the big data that can be supplied to the system enables optimisation on a grand scale, factoring in many more iterations than any human could undertake in a very short period.
A computer doesn’t care if it does the task five times or five million times.
So what are the ‘jobs to be done’ in property which are highly iterative, but are not yet fully optimised? There are many! To name a few: identifying suitable sites for development, deciding upon the optimal building layout for a site, optimising the construction process, and streamlining building operations and maintenance. In all these areas, where common tasks are repeatedly undertaken within a defined set of parameters, artificial intelligence is already assisting in optimising iterative outcomes.
If you want to determine an optimal approach to selecting the best place to develop a new building or precinct, you may see value in the Masters Level Real Estate Data Science course offered by PropertyQuants in Singapore.
