FEATURE
AI in Real Estate
A
rtificial Intelligence has been a buzzword in the real estate industry and a growing number of retail real estate now offer services backed with AI. According to PwC, the Middle East is expected to accrue 2% of the total global benefits of AI by 2030, which is equivalent to US$320 billion. With AI-based innovation expected to lead to 20-34% annual growth per year in the Middle East, the question still remains, what exactly does AI do? To answer this question, we need to explore two things – computing power and alternative data sets – because AI is all about analysing data sets. In 1965, an engineer called Gordon Moore predicted that the power of computers would double every two years – this was proved to be true in 1975 and Moore’s law was established. According to research by Open AI, the amount of computing power today increases every 3.5 months. It is now 50-60 times faster than Moore’s law and since 2012, the metric has increased by 300,000-fold. This has led to key progress in applications such as speech recognition, computer vision, pattern recognition and much more. At the start of 2017, it cost US$10,000 to classify one billion images on the latest computers whereas by the end of 2019 it was only 3 cents, which is exponential growth at an incredibly fast rate compared to Moore’s law. We now have significant computing power at our fingertips to analyse anything we want. This means we can move away from our current ways of thinking about data and only choose what we believe is relevant. By moving away from out of date, aggregated data, we can start analysing real-time information that provides actionable insights.
Said Haider
Regional Sales Director Yardi
However, computing power is only one side of the potential of AI. The disruption that AI is expected to cause has a lot to do with the data that is being analysed. The sheer volume of data that are generated, and therefore is available, is on a steep upward curve. 90% of all the data in the world has been generated in the last two years, which means there’s data available for nearly anything you can think of.
The way we gather data and utilise AI is evolving rapidly, and as an industry, we need to be ready for that change if we want to keep up with the future of the real estate.
RETAIL PEOPLE . FEB - APR 2022
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