ICSC Panel: Keep Your Eyes Wide Open with AI

From the stage at an overflowing conference room at The Wynn in Las Vegas, Ethan Chernofsky, chief marketing officer of Placer.ai, made a declaration that might bruise some egos when it comes to their AI expertise and usage:

“You’re not an early adopter anymore.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with it, Chernofsky said. There are plenty of people who are using it smartly. But the “early adopter” ship has long since sailed.

Chris Ressa, executive vice president and chief operating officer at DLC Management Corp., disagreed. And he was willing to put his money where his mouth was. He took his phone out and asked AI platform Claude to weigh in: “Would someone who is currently using AI for three hours a day qualify as someone who got in on the ground floor?”

The audience waited patiently as Ressa typed the question and switched the answer into voice mode.

“You are an early adopter,” Claude answered, “and possibly a power adopter!”

There were chuckles from the audience.

“You cannot believe everything you hear from AI,” Karly Iacono, senior vice president of the Investment Properties Group at CBRE, replied archly.

This little exchange might get to the heart of the panel called “CRE Tech Unfiltered: Podcast Powerhouses on AI, Data & Digital Transformation” at ICSC in Las Vegas on Monday.

Chernofsky, Ressa and Iacono were joined by James Cook, senior director of Americas retail research at JLL, for a conversation moderated by Commercial Observer’s Edward Cohen, where they asked some of the critical questions for an industry that has, at the very minimum, been obsessed by AI implementation, data usage and more technological advances in real estate’s evolution — including podcasting for transmitting their message. (All the panelists, including the moderator, host their own podcasts.)

But all agreed AI is certainly a fact of life at the major real estate firms. And its adoption has driven efficiencies.

“There’s so much more than we could do a few years ago,” said Cook. “The amount we’re able to process [has exploded]. We’re doing so much more because of Claude. In our greater business [like] lease abstraction, it’s getting used all over the place.”

Workflow is certainly sped up; Chernofsky noted that in the old days when one of his staff would meet a potential client, they would sometimes wait days to follow up.

“I can now ping the person,” Chernofsky said. Find the right person at their company, “pull something from [our] dashboard” that’s most useful to the client.

“I can have my AI respond to your email,” said Cook.

This comes with a few caveats.

“Me and Claude, we hang out a lot,” said Cook. “There’s a lot of inaccuracy in Claude’s reports.”

A good broker can spot the mistakes, but one of the things that fool a lot of real estate professionals is AI’s certainty in offering an answer.

“I had a first meeting with a client who came to me with a list of five properties he wanted to buy,” said Iacono. The list had been curated by AI. The client “was kind enough to share his conversation with AI — and it was terrible. Absolutely terrible. He came in and said, ‘These are good investments.’” But Iacono had to painstakingly explain to his client why these properties were flawed.

“The myth side of AI, if it gives you an answer,” it’s the right answer, said Chernofsky. But, as Chernofsky noted, if you could trust CNBC every time it said there was a “stock you must buy…. There would be more very, very wealthy people.”

The same could be said of data. It gives an answer that is sometimes flawed.

But one rule of thumb came from Chernofsky at the end of the panel when he was asked about the usefulness of data.

“It empowers professionals and human decision makers,” Chernofsky said.

Max Gross can be reached at mgross@commercialobserver.com.