Can we go from ‘Zero to One’ in Real Estate?

Antony Slumbers / Midjourney

Peter Thiel wrote a book about ‘Zero to One’, a term that represents a leap from nothing to something, creating a novel product, service, or idea that did not previously exist. And he compared it to ‘One to N’ which is about scaling, improving, and distributing existing products and services.

In real estate we’ve traditionally done a lot of ‘One to N’ - in the future, and as a consequence of AI, we need to be thinking more ‘Zero to One’. Technology is so fundamentally changing the nature of real estate demand that we need to be thinking much more boldly about the products and services we deliver, and how we deliver them.

We need to be developing entirely new models of real estate usage and development, redesigning our urban spaces to accommodate future works patterns and lifestyles, and thinking how we can offer unprecedented levels of efficiency, convenience and sustainability.

Instead, and for understandable reasons, we are mostly looking at how we can digitise the past. Can this new technology, this PropTech, enable us to do X better, faster, cheaper; rather than considering should we even be doing X.

With most technologies this makes sense. That is exactly what they are designed to do. Allow you to do more of what you already do.

AI though is different, especially Generative AI. This type of AI is probabilistic, not deterministic. To say it is just a ‘stochastic parrot’, a ‘next word prediction machine’ is to underplay how capable it is, but it is not in the business of 2 + 2 = 4, or performing a database lookup. It is, fundamentally, a creative tool. And that is what people find hard to get to grips with. We are used to getting answers that are ‘factual and neutral’ - that is not what this technology is all about. This root characteristic is why it is much more likely to lead to ‘Zero to One’ scenarios than ‘One to n’. It’s not dull enough for that. If you want to add up, get a calculator.

If you want to really innovate though, this is the way to go. It can enable things hitherto impossible. It doesn’t lend itself to doing things for you, though it often can. Where it shines is when you use it as a sparring partner, a confidant, a consigliere, a sounding board. At best it acts as a Socratic Mentor. Where it encourages deep thinking, self awareness and logical reasoning. It empowers you to take ownership of your learning and decisions. It’s a powerful flywheel of intellectual curiosity and critical thinking. And that’s where innovation is going to come from.

Probably you are not using it like this. And likely have not considered it thus. More likely it has been promoted to you as helping you reply to emails, or taking notes in meetings, or summarising or writing reports. All of which are useful and worthwhile, but ultimately very thin gruel. This is ‘One to n’ territory.

Richer use cases might involve:

Transforming Tacit into Explicit Knowledge - codifying all your companies expertise, whether structured or unstructured into dynamic knowledge graphs. These would democratise access to critical expertise, especially amongst less experienced employees, allowing them to leverage the organisation's collective intelligence.

Virtual Mentorship Programs - Use LLMs to simulate the decision-making processes of experienced professionals, creating interactive scenarios where less experienced employees can engage in problem-solving exercises guided by the model. And then backed up by in-person human mentoring. We hear so much about the supposed problems mentoring younger employees in a hybrid working world that completely ignores the potential of AI to develop hybrid mentoring programmes that are orders of magnitude better than the norm. Done well we should be able to turn 2 years experience into 20.

Autonomous Insight Discovery - Anyone can work hard and discern the obvious. What we want is to uncover the non obvious, the unknown unknowns. Financial data, market trends, consumer behaviour, and operational metrics can all be mined at unprecedented levels, uncovering opportunities for cost savings, investment, and strategic pivots that were previously hidden. The machines can act autonomously but the ‘human in the loop’ uses their experience to guide and cajole. Much of our future value will come from our curatorial skills and wisdom. Oftentimes ‘we know more than we can tell’ - AI can help us make visible the previously invisible.

Innovation Catalyst Systems - Real estate is famously siloed. Left hand does not talk to right hand. We cut ourselves off from discovering novel combinations of existing technologies, processes, and business models. Machines have no qualms about who they talk to; and they’re stupendous at synthesising data. Set them free.

Hyper-Personalised Real Estate Services - How good are we at analysing client behaviours, preferences, and market dynamics in real-time? AI enables personalisation that humans cannot. But humans are definitely better at face to face. The key here is playing to each others strengths. Few of us have staff constantly briefing us about what we need to know about a given situation or people we are set to meet. AI can give us all this superpower.

Enhanced Decision-Making Frameworks - all of the above can and should feed into our decision making. A continuous feed of relevant data, predictive analytics, and scenario simulations available to all.

Two key points come from all of this (and the myriad of other advanced AI use cases):

First is that AI is our most useful assistant as we strive to go Zero to One. It simply offers capabilities that did not exist before, and ‘should’ enable more of us to reach a level of innovative thinking that maybe we never thought we could. Being extremely well briefed and informed is becoming much easier.

And secondly, it emphasises the critical role of us ‘humans’ in shaping the AI tools we use. Creating and curating the AI we want is down to human agency. WE need to do it. WE need to decide what we want, how we want things to work, what we want to prioritise and what we want to deprecate. Everything about how we want our lives, our companies, and our societies to function is OUR responsibility. And is in our hands. Fundamentally the User Experience of the world is down to us.

So instead of thinking what tech you can buy to do what you do now better, faster, cheaper think about what you could do if you could do a lot more. Because with AI you will be able to do a lot more. It represents a massive software upgrade to humanity. Most notably it represents a massive upgrade in intelligence; we can access more, we can utilise it better, and we can spread it around like never before. But this requires a great process of redesign.

Let’s stop aiming at being 10% better - let’s 10X everything.