From left: Ywo Morin and Raj Singh of JLL Spark.
Yao Morin and Raj Singh
Chief technology officer at JLL; managing partner at JLL Spark
While JLL remains a tech power in the commercial real estate brokerage field, it is JLL Spark, the company’s venture capital arm, that often steers both the company and its clients’ digital future, especially with artificial intelligence.
“The elephant in the room continues to be AI,” said Raj Singh. “The biggest change for me is dealing with the real estate industry that has been basically technophobic for a long, long time. People have suddenly gone from, ‘Well, I don’t see why I should bother with this tech. I’m making money and doing things I’ve always done.’ Now they’re like, ‘I’m building agents with Claude, so I don’t need any of the software that you might provide because, hey, I can do it all myself.’
“Respectfully, it’s a little bit of a honeymoon period and it will change,” Singh added. “Meanwhile, I think it’s been fascinating to see how people have adopted AI as a technology because I think it is empowering. Of course, it has underlying issues: Once you’ve developed something, how do you maintain it? How do you ensure it’s consistent and correct? How do you protect it against cyberattacks? How do you ensure the data that you have collected is shared properly within your organization? And how do you ensure that enterprise rules are being followed when an individual builds something? So there’s a lot of very boring stuff that none of us really like to think about. That all has to happen in order for this to really work long term.”
JLL and JLL Spark are taking a dual approach to aid their and their customers’ AI journey. Among their dozens of investments are Acelab, ALICE Technologies, Dealpath, EliseAI, HqO and OpenSpace.
A year ago, Yao Morin described JLL’s ambition as every employee building their own agents. This year more than 50 agents are live across the enterprise, including an HR team-built agent that reads a vendor’s statement of work, checks it against what was agreed in meetings, and produces the follow-up email and a scorecard. It now runs for any vendor. No engineer wrote it.
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