Originally published on March 13, 2024, by Kathryn Atkins for NAIOP.
How do you know if you are optimizing the space in all your properties worldwide? How long would that take you to figure out with your current analytical tools?
While everyone might think they know what AI is, a session at I.CON West this week in Long Beach, California, did the job of defining it. Taylor Odegard, founder, CEO, chairman and head of innovation for NavigatorCRE, said that AI needs two things before it can be defined as such: data analytics and machine learning. AI learns from each of these to deliver its “product.”
For William O’Donnell, managing partner with Prologis Ventures, AI helps them optimize their decision-making, customer engagement, and operating efficiency. Clifton Harness, CEO and co-founder, TestFit, Inc., jumped in with a real-life example: How could their client mitigate the parking problem where parking spaces are laid out effectively, minimizing land use, while avoiding banging car doors and fender-benders? Using AI algorithms, the problem went from “If we cut off two inches on each side…” to “What do people do in the building for which we’re designing this parking lot? What does each end user say about the size of the parking spaces? Doesn’t Costco need wider spaces than the local movie theater? If it’s a hospital, then what? Is it a shopping mall?”
AI allows critical thinking at lightning speed to provide blazing-fast – yet actionable – intelligence. AI invites us to ask better questions to achieve better solutions.