In the proptech sphere, AI hogs the spotlight, but entrepreneur and investor Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and an early Facebook employee, believes getting caught up in the AI hype might relegate other innovations to the shelf. She said: “I’ve often seen in life that when everyone is going toward something shiny, the opportunities are over here: for the things that are less sexy, less shiny.”
Zuckerberg delivered a keynote address to a capacity crowd at ICSC LAS VEGAS, where ICSC launched ICSC+PROPTECH, a new event connecting commercial real estate decisionmakers and technology founders. “We are proud to have built the world's largest proptech event within the world's largest commercial real estate event,” said ICSC president and CEO Tom McGee.
Though Zuckerberg encouraged attendees to consider all kinds of opportunities in innovation, she is a champion of AI. She compared the current AI era to the 2007 rollout of the iPhone, calling both once-in-a-generation shifts. “All of us are on the front lines of an era,” she said. “You don’t get a lot of opportunities in your life to be on the cutting edge of truly transformational technological change. Every one of them gets its own chapter.”
Drawing on her own experience, Zuckerberg said AI has lowered the barrier to building tech. The non-engineer coded her first app in two days with the help of AI. “With AI, we’re bypassing all of the hassle and getting right to human spirit and creativity,” she said. Just as the iPhone lets everyday people create videos without technical skills, she argued, AI opens the door to innovation for anyone willing to experiment.
Where AI Is Delivering for CRE — and Where It Still Falls Short
At an ICSC+PROPTECH session titled CRE Tech Unfiltered: Podcast Powerhouses on AI, Data and Digital Transformation, four commercial real estate professionals who do double duty as podcasters spoke frankly about AI capabilities in commercial real estate. Their conclusion: The gap between what AI can do and what real estate companies are actually doing with it comes down to people, not the technology itself.
Commercial Observer’s Edward Cohen, Placer.ai’s Ethan Chernofsky, JLL’s James Cook, CBRE’s Karly Iacono and DLC Management Corp.’s Chris Ressa on the CRE Tech Unfiltered panel
AI Is Helping CRE Teams Work Faster, Not Make Final Decisions
Panelists didn’t agree on everything, but they did agree on this: AI fuels efficiency, but it doesn’t yet function as a decisionmaking engine. Placer.ai chief marketing officer Ethan Chernofsky said he overcame skepticism about AI to tackle something that had given him trouble: building dashboards. Today, he said, “something that would have wasted four or five hours of meetings now doesn’t.” JLL senior director of retail research for the Americas James Cook shared another AI advantage: “We’re able to do so much more than we could just a few years ago [thanks to] the amount of data we can process now. It’s not high-level insight creation, but [it’s] all the grunt work of data processing.”
The Next AI Shift: From Efficiency Tool to Decision Driver
Some panelists looked ahead to a time when AI will take on decisionmaking. CBRE Capital Markets senior vice president of investment properties Karly Iacono described the current iteration of AI as “the efficiency stage.” She anticipates a time when AI will pass that stage, driving choices about real estate investment and development that might not otherwise have been considered.
DLC executive vice president and COO Chris Ressa added: “The technology is way more advanced than anyone has adopted right now. Whatever you think it can do, it can do that plus. The challenge is that corporately, it’s very difficult from an infrastructure perspective to roll that out beyond people just using it to summarize emails.”
How Real Estate Teams Can Start Building AI Fluency
So where does that leave real estate companies that bypassed early AI adoption? Chernofsky argued that the first-mover window has closed, meaning anyone just beginning to engage with AI is a mainstream adopter, not a trailblazer. The issue is no longer whether to engage, he added, but how. “We’re in the next stage on the crossing-the-chasm graph,” said Chernofsky. “You need to be playing with it, understanding it. It should be [piquing] your curiosity.” Ressa acknowledged that early AI adopters hold an advantage, “but you have to have the balance sheet to get through the pain.”
There’s still an on-ramp, however. Iacono urged individuals to experiment with different AI tools, saying it’s the one way to get “comfortable being uncomfortable” with ever-evolving technology. “You’re not going to figure out the right program or workflow today. It’s going to be different in six months,” she said. “Be fluid. Be part of the conversation. That’s the most important thing we can all do individually right now.”
By John Egan
Contributor, Commerce + Communities Today