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What advice would you give other CIOs today? I’m pretty lucky that JLL provides us with our technology
The most important thing is that you understand the business infrastructure. This allows me to focus much more on the
and what the business people are saying—and to help them business technology: the actual tools, applications, and
translate that into technological advances within the organiza- the efficiency gainers that can be used so that people
tion. If you don’t understand the business, or what they need become more efficient, more effective and make better
or how they’re thinking, you likely won’t be successful as a CIO. decisions.

GRAY - continued from page 57 calls and allows managers to do a deeper dive on pro-
cesses that might be impeding speed to completion. We
cols and operating systems that are no longer supported— have also been able to vastly improve our response time
you can see the challenges we’re facing as an industry. to calls—all through the data and algorithms that this soft-
ware provides. We signed a contract with Okapi and within
One thing that is different now, is the volume of calls we six weeks were up and running with staff fully trained in
get from technology vendors about the next great thing. the test pilot building. That’s incredibly fast by any stan-
There simply isn’t time to vet them all. I have to get ahead dard. There are many other applications we could use it
of the noise and focus on what fits within our strategic for within real estate, but this was the first initiative for the
plan. It’s challenging from a time perspective. digital innovation team and it proved very successful.

There are consultants who say they understand smart Another project is an app we developed with a partner,
building strategy, but they can be micro-specialists versus Premises HQ. We had previously developed an app with
overall strategists. In three separate projects, we con- Continued on page 66
sciously picked three different consultants so that we
have insight into what their skill set is. Are they helping us
move forward with our agenda and the framework for our
smart building strategy? We work very micro proof-of-
concept; we use these learning opportunities to build upon
our strategy and platform.

QuadReal collaborated with Microsoft and the City
of Toronto. Can you tell us about that?
UPPlift is a program in which we partnered with Urban
Living Futures, the City of Toronto and Microsoft. UPPlift
put out a call to the incubator community and held a com-
petition. Five companies were selected during that com-
petition, and we prepared to pilot their technologies within
our buildings. We’ve had some real successes there. It
brought innovation to some operations and delivery of
services. We found really cool technologies and clearly
helped people who were very committed and passionate
about their product or service and gave them the opportu-
nity to actually implement it. Microsoft also picked three
of those innovators to partner with. It was a great experi-
ence for us and a great partnership with Microsoft.

Innovative companies are applying AI to many different
processes. Can you share the ways you’re doing that?
One of our partnerships is with Okapi. We collaborated
on their AI-based product that focuses on certain KPIs
to improve performance. We currently overlay Okapi
algorithms on our tenant demand system and have imple-
mented it in 25 buildings across Canada. We’ve had more
than 5,000 AI notifications go out to our teams. It’s helped Park Place: QuadReal Headquarters, Vancouver,
them become more proactive because the system tracks British Columbia

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