MRI Software Expands Data Platform Under New CIO Nihar Malik

Real estate tech services giant MRI Software announced Thursday that it is rolling out two new artificial intelligence data products. Recently named Chief Innovation Officer Nihar Malik is the man behind the push.

Ohio-based MRI announced that MRI Agora Intelligence, which alerts owners to trends and issues across property operations and recommends actions, along with MRI Agora Orchestrator, a real estate-specific agentic workflow system that includes the governance and audit trail enterprise software operators require, now are part of MRI Agora, its AI-powered real estate platform.

“We are going to leverage the portfolio that we have — the breadth and quality of this portfolio — and essentially utilize generative AI to augment our offering for clients in a way that essentially brings the true power of a strong foundation of unified data and AI solutions to our clients,” said Malik, who was named CIO at MRI in January. “We want to generate much more value for our clients than what they have experienced in the past.”

Prior to joining MRI, where a large part of his role will focus on AI enablement for MRI’s data and software solutions, Malik was the chief product and transformation officer at automotive software firm Solera, leading its corporate strategy, product road maps, operations and M&A. He’s also held senior leadership roles at XPO Logistics, and Hertz. Earlier in his career, Nihar was an associate principal with McKinsey & Company, advising global businesses on technology.

MRI Agora is designed to help real estate organizations operationalize AI safely, securely and at scale, according to the company’s announcement. Its shared real estate data combines intelligence, workflow execution and governance in a single platform, with recommendations and actions traceable to its source. Rather than requiring organizations to build their own semantic layers, validation rules, governance frameworks and automation logic, it provides those capabilities as part of the platform.

The Agora Intelligence and Operator features are the latest expansion of its cross-product data and analytics dashboarding solution, Agora Insights.

“We have been working on it for some time and can now begin to utilize these technologies to essentially take these natural next steps where we convert our Agora Insight solution into Agora Intelligence,” said Malik. “An AI agent essentially works on top of our data. We provide a translation layer, or what it is called a semantic layer, on top of our data, converting the data into such that a [large language model] can work with it — essentially doing the work of data interpretation. AI agents do that interpretation work, so that our clients don’t have to spend time querying the data, looking at dashboards and trying to sort of decipher those dashboards.”

Having been CIO for a relatively short time, Malik is looking ahead to what he can accomplish at MRI.

“By the end of the year, I would like to see continued growth in our portfolio in terms of intelligence and orchestrator penetration across the products that we have, but I’ll be truly delighted if more clients work with us in terms of giving us feedback — essentially make these solutions really deliver the value that they hold,” Malik said. “The demand is actually increasing every week, and we are getting more and more inquiries.

“So, real success for me will be that we have enough proof points that this technology is bringing real value to our clients,” Malik said. “It’s finally freeing up our colleagues who work at our clients’ companies to do the work that they’ve always wanted to do: Think about how to grow their business, think about how to create better experiences for residents, tenants and other stakeholders, rather than chasing invoices, which can be done by a machine.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.