AI is bringing big changes to industries across the country. It’s little surprise, then, that AI is changing the way commercial real estate professionals work, too.
An example? JLL‘s new JLL Falcon, the commercial real estate company’s artificial intelligence platform designed to serve JLL commercial real estate professionals and their clients.
JLL Falcon is made up of a suite of AI-enabled software services that JLL professionals can use to compile research for their clients, pull key information quickly out of massive reports, quickly write emails, provide workplace planning advice to clients, improve the efficiency of buildings and generate 3D leasing visualizations.
And the best part? JLL Falcon’s services aren’t designed to replace company employees. They’re designed to make them more efficient.
“People here understand that this is a way to make employees more effective in their jobs. It’s not about taking away their jobs. We want to give them the tech they need to focus on what they are good at,” said Yao Morin, chief technology officer of JLL. “These services free people up to brainstorm with clients, to understand what their clients need. Nobody needs to sit for hours to scroll through a document to find one piece of information. AI can do that for you.”
Yao Morin, chief technology officer, JLL
One of the services offered through JLL Flacon is JLL GPT. This program allows brokers and other JLL professionals to quickly draft documents, summarize documents and brainstorm ideas. They can also turn to JLL GPT to quickly comb through the reams of data that JLL harvests and then use that data to help their clients make key real estate decisions.
The Falcon suite of services also includes an AI-enabled assistant. Morin says that this service can help JLL employees whose first language is not English quickly translate from their local languages to English, an important service considering how much of JLL’s business is conducted in the language.
Falcon includes tailor-made chatbots that employees can use to pull specific information quickly from documents that might stretch for 30 pages or more.
“We deal with a lot of contracts and leases,” Morin said. “Sometimes you want something extracted quickly from a document. We have a tool that does that.”
On Nov. 12, JLL introduced the latest tool in the Falcon suite, JLL Azara. This tool is designed to make it easier for business professionals to access and use corporate real estate and facilities management data.
JLL Azara uses natural language queries so that facilities managers and business analysts can research complicated topics such as portfolio optimization and occupancy planning.
In its pilot testing, JLL Azara quickly showed its promise. According to a press release from JLL, the application’s conversational interface played a key role in helping a company identify a no-fault work order volume anomaly at one of its locations. The company was able to take quick action to solve the problem before it became a more expensive one.
“With JLL Azara, we’re able to put valuable data, decades of client queries and deep industry knowledge directly into the hands of our customers,” said Sharad Rastogi, JLL’s chief executive officer of Work Dynamics Technology.
“JLL Falcon is about reducing the time it takes for business leaders and JLL professionals to make decisions,” Morin said. “Opportunities can come and go quickly. You don’t want to sit on data and wait for a long time. You don’t want to wait for an analyst to turn that data around. You could lose that opportunity if you do.”
Before tools such as JLL Falcon, real estate professionals often had to read through 300 pages of documents to get the information they were seeking, Morin said.
Falcon eliminates that busy work.
“Now, you can ask a question and it will bring you to the right place,” Morin said. “It will summarize the answer to your question and bring you to the right paragraph if you want to cross check the information.”
Morin said that JLL employees have bought into the suite of AI-powered tools. As of the writing of this story, more than 47,000 JLL workers have used JLL GPT alone, Morin said. More than 25,000 use it monthly.
And the future of AI? Morin says that commercial real estate companies have only begun to use this tool.
“We are in a unique position to adopt technology that can advance the efficiency of buildings and help our clients meet the sustainability goals that they have,” Morin said. “We are just starting with that. There is a lot more that we can do.”
Morin compares AI to the early days of the Internet and smartphones. There was a time when most people looked at those tools as a luxury. Today, people rely on them in their daily lives.
“I predict that AI will be something that commercial real estate professionals will not be able to live without,” Morin said. “Just look at smartphones. You’re more upset if you leave your home without your smartphone than you are if you leave without your wallet. This AI technology is similar: It will soon become a part of life. It’s already a part of my life.”