Commercial Real Estate Is Still Learning to Read Its Own Data — A Chicago Summit Aims to Close the Gap
Every intelligence layer starts somewhere, and for commercial real estate, that starting point still looks surprisingly early. According to Deloitte’s Commercial Real Estate Outlook, 76 percent of CRE firms are only researching, piloting, or in the earliest stages of implementing artificial intelligence. Almost none consider themselves mature users. That gap between ambition and execution is exactly what a Chicago gathering, hosted by the DePaul Real Estate Alumni Alliance and the Real Estate Center at DePaul University, is trying to close.
The event, called The Intelligent Edge: AI Strategies for Commercial Real Estate, brings together practitioners from brokerage, development, investment, and management to move past AI’s most basic use cases, scheduling, note taking, administrative shortcuts, and toward something with real analytical weight. That distinction matters. Administrative automation saves time. Applied intelligence changes decisions.
The numbers suggest the industry is already leaning in, even if maturity lags behind. JLL’s 2025 Global Technology Survey found that 88 percent of investors and landlords are now piloting AI in some form, and 87 percent are increasing technology budgets specifically because of it. That is not a fringe experiment. That is a capital allocation signal, one that data-minded readers should not overlook. When budgets move ahead of stated confidence, it usually means the value case is already understood, even if the internal capability has not caught up yet.
What stands out most in the program is who is speaking and how they frame the problem. Adam Foret of CBRE and Aaron Tucker of Tucker Development are not positioning AI as a mysterious black box. Foret’s framing is refreshingly plain: anyone can become proficient, but it takes going beyond the surface to actually build tools around specific goals. Tucker’s line is sharper still, and worth sitting with if you work anywhere near this industry: AI is not coming after your job, but the people who use it well are.
AI isn’t coming after your jobs, people who leverage AI to their benefit are coming after your jobs.
That is the real intelligence layer conversation, not whether a model can summarize a lease, but whether a firm can structure its own data well enough to make AI worth deploying at all. The panel discussion closing the event, featuring voices from DePaul’s AI Institute, Simon, and Moderne Ventures, is expected to focus on exactly this: how small and mid-sized firms, not just the majors with in-house data science teams, can build or adopt AI-powered tools without needing a full research division behind them.
For an industry where the signal-to-noise ratio around “AI in real estate” is often high, this event is a useful data point in itself. It confirms what the survey numbers already imply: budgets are moving, curiosity is genuine, but the organizational muscle to actually use these tools well is still being built, one firm, one dashboard, one workflow at a time. That is the pattern worth watching, not whether AI arrives in commercial real estate, it clearly already has, but which firms turn early piloting into a durable analytical advantage.
Source: citybiz.co
