“There is plenty of interesting opinions and discussions swirling around about the ways in AI can change the ways in we work and live,” Soren Olsen, chair of ULI Poland, pointed out when welcoming the guests of the completely sold-out ULI Poland Places+Spaces “AI – What does it mean to the real estate sector?” event, which gathered both investors, developers, brokers, consultants, architects, and lawyers. While eying AI-enhanced business opportunities and risks – they wonder how to best navigate the still early days of AI to truly gain advantage and resilience, and not marketing gimmicks, in the years to come.

“If the training data contains biases, generated content will likely amplify those biases leading to outputs that may be discriminatory or unfair. The AI’s potential is vast, but as with any transformative technology – it brings along ethical and practical challenges that we must address with care and foresight. (…) These are just statistical models – they are blind to intention. They don’t distinguish between a lie and truth. They don’t know when they are producing something that is completely fictive and non-existent and human supervision is crucial,” she elaborated.

Does it mean that the labour market will not see any major AI-driven shakeups anytime soon as feared? Not necessarily. The market might drastically change, but not in the ways most expect: AI is likely to free up human workers’ time resources spent on repetitive or manual tasks once the technology’s advanced assistive features develop, rather than to replace them. But for this to succeed, the machine learning algorithms would need an enormous assistance too: the right prompting from human engineers, which could create a new job market demand.

Something new, something old

But due to the local market specifications, the Polish AI aficionados might encounter a bumpy road ahead, before the IT revolution gets into the full swing in the country. Poland’s irrevocably ageing building stock would be one of the first barriers to the effective introduction of any AI-driven property innovations at a large scale. “If a building features a 20-year BMS then we would probably be looking at investing into a new one first,” said Renata Hartle, technology solutions director at Colliers, who shared her presentation highlighting, among others, a significant digitalization gap observed in app. 50% of the Polish real estate assets. “This year, I audited over 25 buildings, and most of them had disconnected systems, still relied on manual processes and work, even with such tasks as the meter read-outs,” she said.

Speed of change

While the pandemic years might have accelerated digitalization efforts in the property industry in Poland, the urgency to prioritize IT solutions didn’t last for long. As pointed out by Tomasz Ogrodzki, founder, and CEO of REDD Group, who cited in his presentation the ULI’s  2023 Emerging Trends report, digital transformation is one of today’s least pressing issues for the Polish property industry. “We know that inflation and economy are more important,” he said. This short-sighted perspective will likely continue to be a major roadblock standing in the way of companies trying to tap the full business potential of AI transformation.

Worth all the money?

In the following expert discussion panel, moderated by Tomasz Aleszczyk, an ULI Poland executive committee member, guests faced a round of questions from the host, and audience members. The kept coming like waves: What do companies spend on AI rollouts in Poland? How and when would it pay off? How much quicker would property transactions become with the help of AI? What does the future hold for AI-powered workforce

Meanwhile, according to Michał Jaskólski, co-founder, vice president and CPO at Morizon-Gratka Group, there could be two ways of looking at the AI spending commitments companies try to make. “You can take your R&D budget and decide to spend as much of it as you can on AI. The other approach is a boarder analysis: ask yourself how much differently you would build your company and processes with AI, if you were to build them from scratch right now, so you could outcompete yourself and your competition,” he told the event’s participants. In his eyes, the sacrifice of app. 50% of R&D budget seems “just right.”

But at the end, although AI investments are now made mainly with meaningful cost reduction and revenue increases in mind, projects which serve a higher purpose of, say, improving consumer protection and antitrust policies in respect to AI, and lead to better corporate controls over the technology, should not go unnoticed either, Michał Jaskólski added. To strengthen his point, he mentioned Zillow’s failed algorithmic house-flipping business, whose executives allegedly had convinced developers to alter the risk precautions for higher gains.

Greater responsibilities  

Audience members also shared their reflections and AI experiences with the conference, providing an even more wholesome it pictures of where the Polish market and AI stand today. “I think development is an art. A machine is never going to replace an artist. You can ask it to do it, but I don’t think there is going to be a satisfactory result there,” said an audience member.  Another, a lawyer, admitted that the tool he had used had made “horrible mistakes when it comes to accuracy.” As the models employed by AI still lack sufficient expert data, it is very difficult to see it taking over the legal profession any time soon. “However, at the same time, I believe there is a huge potential there: to me the law is about data and logic, same as AI,” he concluded.