Generative artificial intelligence won’t take your job in the Marketplaces Industry, but someone who uses it might, panelists at ICSC NEW YORK agreed this week.

Centennial, for one, uses AI to find suitable job candidates, according to president Whitney Livingston, pictured at top right with Kimco Realty president and chief investment officer Ross Cooper, center, and JLL Retail Advisory Services America president Naveen Jaggi, at left. “You can use predictive analytics to determine the strongest contributors to your team” by feeding information about candidates into the system and parsing the data in various ways, she said.

Kimco Realty tasked an AI council with presenting ways AI could make various divisions’ operations more efficient. Construction documents and leases were an obvious place to start, according to Cooper.

Brixmor’s first AI win was in lease abstraction, according to Sean McLaughlin, senior vice president of data analytics and reporting. The landlord uses AI to carve up language in leases and “look for things that trip us up,” McLaughlin said. “We’re not beholden to lawyers.” Brixmor encourages its leasing team to gather information for its AI system and to use it to generate leads.

Privacy is key, according to Daniel Fenton, senior director of product management of JLL Technologies. Companies want to put sensitive data into AI to be analyzed but don’t want that data to be used to train the technology’s algorithm out of fear of exposing proprietary information. To solve for that, JLL created its own in-house AI for employees called JLL GPT.

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“The adaption curve has been fast,” Fenton said. Two months after rolling the technology out to all JLL employees, the most common use is for writing emails, especially for international employees seeking to communicate more effectively in English. Marketing is the most prolific user so far, as 27% of that department uses it. Companywide, half of those who use JLL GPT use it daily, he added.

He recommended companies build their own GPT platforms, even though third-party providers can “wall-garden” sensitive data for an extra price. Be crystal clear on how your data goes into the training model before using any AI technology, he advised.

In any case, AI is replacing tasks not jobs, said Clara de Soto, product marketing manager for Google Assistant and Google’s Bard. Letting the machines do the searching and scanning of large amounts of data allows employees to focus on more strategic endeavors, she explained.