AI in Commercial Real Estate: What I've Seen, What I've Built, and What I Actually Think

There is a version of the AI conversation in commercial real estate that happens at 30,000 feet — keynotes, think pieces, predictions about what the industry will look like in a decade. I've sat in those rooms. At MIPIM 2026 in Cannes, I watched Nobel Prize laureates and institutional fund managers debate AI's growth potential in front of 20,000 professionals from across global real estate. The most striking thing wasn't the optimism — it was the gap between the enthusiasm and the actual adoption. Experienced firms were talking about AI as transformative while running workflows that hadn't changed in years. According to PwC's Emerging Trends in Real Estate report, the industry is at an inflection point, improving fundamentals, but significant structural change ahead. That tension is where the real opportunity lives.

When I returned from Cannes to my internship with CBRE's Healthcare Real Estate team in San Diego, I started paying closer attention to where time was going. A significant portion of it went to things that were important but repetitive — scanning publications like Bisnow and Costar, pulling market data, tracking healthcare tenant activity across the county. So I started building. The first tool was a weekly intelligence brief — an AI-powered prompt that synthesizes relevant news and formats it with citations for direct team distribution. From there I built tools for comp pulling, prospect list building, and lease expiration tracking. None of it is glamorous. All of it saves real time and moves the conversation from search to analysis faster.

What I've come to believe — after sitting in those Cannes sessions and then doing the actual ground-level work — is that AI won't replace the commercial real estate professional. It will make very clear who has done the work to develop genuine expertise and who hasn't. The firms that will win aren't necessarily the largest ones. As Barry Gosin of Newmark put it at MIPIM, the most computer-literate people are going to be the real introducers of opportunity and change. For those of us just entering this industry, the window for building that fluency early — before it becomes table stakes — is still open. I don't plan on letting it close.