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SPOTLIGHT: Artificial Intelligence

HOW TO THINK

ABOUT AI IN REAL ESTATE

ANTONY SLUMBERS
Co-Founder
PropAI

AI, WHETHER WE REALIZE it or not, is impacting all
our lives in significant ways today. From monitoring your own business and/or applicable to many of your
our credit card usage for fraud, to filtering our email for customers.
spam, to recommending what to watch on Netflix, to • Fourthly, you need to look for use cases where you
recognizing our friends in photographs on Facebook, have or can obtain large quantities of data, and where
to flying our planes 95% of the time, to enabling there are clear metrics by which you can judge success.
self-driving cars. For many day-to-day processes it is
becoming pervasive—behind the scenes. • Fifthly and lastly, if you have all of the above, is that
something that will create significant value?
AI will become pervasive within real estate as well. The
extraordinary new capabilities of computers to under- Let us take these in turn, starting with what is AI good for?
stand the world around them, to see, hear and read as
well as humans, are sure to provide the foundational Over the last five years AI has developed very rapidly in
tools that allow us to build a better built environment. three key areas: Computer Vision, Voice Recognition and
Natural Language Processing. Taking Computer Vision as
But how do you need to think about AI in Real Estate? an example, in 2013 the ImageNet Competition Winner
How do you approach a topic which can be (because it (ImageNet runs annually and quantifies the capabilities
is) somewhat overwhelming? of different systems) had an error rate of 11.3%. In 2017
that had come down to 2.2%. For reference, humans rate
You need to think about AI in Real Estate via a process: at 5%. Similar improvements apply to NLP and Voice rec-
ognition. In practical terms these three skills have gone
• First you need to understand what AI is good for, from ‘Useless to Utility’ and this is why we have seen the
and just as importantly what it is not. rapid rise of driverless cars (or semi-autonomous ones like
• Secondly you need to analyze your workflows and Teslas) and the explosive rise of Amazon’s Alexa.
business processes to see where you can leverage
what AI is good at. A combination of improved algorithms, vast new data sets
• Thirdly, you need to consider which of these use to ‘train’ on, and massive computational power has meant
cases is commonplace and repeatable within that much that was foretold back in the early days of AI
(the term was first coined at a conference at Dartmouth

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