Owner Fisher Brothers Launches AI Innovation Lab

Real estate owner and operator Fisher Brothers announced Tuesday that it has launched an in-house artificial intelligence-native innovation lab.

The 111-year-old Manhattan-based company’s AI Innovation Lab will operate across its commercial and residential enterprise, as well as at Area15, its Las Vegas entertainment venue.

Rather than adopting off-the-shelf tools, Fisher Brothers’ technology team is developing proprietary applications and AI agents capable of automating multistep workflows, connecting previously siloed systems, and turning the company’s data into a resource employees can access and act on in real time, according to the firm. In doing so, Fisher Brothers joins other larger operators and owners in taking the proptech in-house more. 

“I feel like when ChatGPT went public to the consumer, that it was a watershed moment,” said Winston Fisher, a partner at Fisher Brothers, referring to the AI vehicle’s 2022 debut. “I quickly said that I think this is one of the most transformative technologies in the world. Our AI Innovation Lab is a culmination of working, becoming educated, and doing individual initiatives. Mark Stutzman, as our global chief technology officer, has been working on projects with our team over the last three years. That led us to the point where we could really take the next step: have a full-time dedicated resource over and above the existing team to really accelerate the transformation that we had already started working on.”

In deploying a dedicated internal engineering team to develop company-owned AI applications, the lab will develop custom apps, foster agentic automation of repetitive workflows, connect internal systems, and expand AI fluency across the organization. The goal is to continue to integrate AI across the firm to support growth.

“I think it’s a flywheel of transformation that leads to transformation at a faster pace,” said Stutzman. “It starts to roll out basic things to be used in their day-to-day workflow and to replace these large SaaS applications that we’re paying a lot of money for.

“AI-assisted development has been a game-changer, and that rolls into how do you build these additional workflows for the team, where it’s doing the things that are time consuming and frees them up to really focus on the strategic things we need them to do to grow the firm. At some point, Winston’s vision is that this goes from being an internal optimization project to creating new business streams for Fisher Brothers by using AI — whether it’s proptech, data analysis or whatever happens. But, obviously, it will always be things that are complementary to what Fisher Brothers is doing today and what we know well.”

Fisher Brothers’ decision to bring agentic AI in-house was due to a combination of economic, operational control, and tech development factors.

“As a lifelong kind of CTO guy, I have seen that initially founders tried to boil the ocean,” said Stutzman. “We’ve seen this happen across thousands of organizations trying to implement AI. They treated it like pilots. What we’re doing is unique because we’re taking a very practical kind of position on this. We’re not working on projects that take longer than two weeks to get from idea and spec to actual deployable solution. We are taking these manageable bite-sized chunks one at a time in the context of an overall architecture that can improve on itself as we build out more solutions.”

As part of the initiative, Fisher Brothers is also launching a structured AI training program for employees, including baseline AI literacy for all staff, department-specific workshops, and advanced training for AI champions within each business unit.

“We kept hearing from the team that they just don’t know how to write prompts, and so we actually built a shared prompt library to get the value out of those prompts,” Stutzman explained. “We released a home plug-in for Claude. So whenever someone from Fisher Brothers is in Claude, they can see that button and they can do two things: save a prompt to the library, or use it to optimize their existing prompt. It looks at our prompts, uses a framework to improve the prompt, and it spits it right back into the cloud. So they get better results than the first time.”

In addition to AI literacy across silos at Fisher Brothers, its employees had to see clear and fast benefits from all the change, said Fisher.

“In the early days — a year ago — two weeks was nothing,” he said. “Today with the right team, both a resource that’s focused and an internal workforce that now has buy-in, they get excited that you can tackle these very high returns on investment and produce income quickly. That’s a strategy about success to advance our business through enhanced revenue, efficiency or cost reduction. I don’t think you can hire somebody to do that externally. The cost of it would be astronomical. It’s a whole commitment that actually is deeper than a consultant. It’s a transformation of how you process business initiatives.”

Looking ahead in Fisher Brothers’ technological evolution, the firm is also exploring the launch of a real estate technology innovation program that would give early-stage companies hands-on access to its portfolio, operational data and industry network.

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