BIGGEST RISK with David Blumenfeld

Commercial Real Estate Pro Network

J Darrin Gross

I'd like to ask you. David Blumenfeld, what is the BIGGEST RISK?

David Blumenfeld

We're going to answer it a couple different ways, if that's okay. So I think I mean, and this, this first one might, might seem like a self serving answer, but I think the risk for real estate companies in general for not looking at technology. And again, it doesn't have to be the biggest, you know, the biggest, the newest, the the flashiest, but if you're not incorporating technology into your your your day to day operations, whether it be from a marketing perspective, a company, a leasing perspective, Building Management, etc, you are getting left behind and and the good news for you is that the real estate industry moves slow, but as it gets more and more competitive from insert certainly In certain asset classes, office being one of them to not be investing in kind of future proofing your building and your company is going to come back and bite you in the long term and so and both from a just an operational perspective, but also eventually, eventually from a recruiting perspective, where people who are going to you're going to want In your company are not going to want to work. Want to work at your company if you're not forward thinking. From a tech perspective, I think the biggest concern right now, excitement and concern certainly is with AI and things like conversational AI, like chat GPT, we have, we have clients who their legal departments come in and we can't use AI at all. And I think the concern, the practical concern there is, there is a risk of, if you're using kind of a, you know, chat GPT, or Microsoft co pilot, one of these, or Google Gemini, is it, depending on the information you're putting in to have, let's say you're like, I want to put, you know, I use it a lot for writing better copy, maybe of writing a better email than I wrote already, because I realized I'm just not saying that quite right. But you know, there's it's much more powerful than that. You can put in financial data, for example, that would spit back a spreadsheet for you, or different analysis that might you know normally take hours on in Excel. There is risk when you start to upload proprietary information from a financial perspective, but the but you need to kind of balance that risk with what you're what you're using those tools for, because they are very powerful and very efficient as well. So I think it's making sure you don't swing the pendulum one way or the other, like you need to certainly use AI in your business. But I think if you're going to start to do a lot of things through AI, you know, there are ways to protect the information that you're you're putting out there, and you don't have to just throw something in chat GPT. You can have an application that's specific to your company, that leverages AI, but may be able to spit out kind of your your own private version of chat GPT, so to speak. So you just need to be, you just need to understand the implications and the risks of of if you're using kind of a generic service, you know, be, you know, there is a risk that you're putting that data, not it's not necessarily means that those companies are going to use it against you, but you are uploading that information into into the cloud. And I think it's funny, you've seen a lot in America around like, Oh, we're going to ban Tiktok because we're worried about China, you know, stealing all this data. Well, China's come out with a lot of new AI platforms. Lately, nobody's talking about the data privacy implications. Like, I would be much more concerned about using, putting anything in a in a Chinese AI software platform versus, you know, my social media via Tiktok. So it's, it's just funny how people are not thinking about things holistically. And I think that's, that's just what you need to make sure you need to do. But again, as I said in my earlier very common beginning of, you know, the beginning of the conversation, don't get into analysis paralysis, where you justify doing nothing because you have to overthink it over and over again.

[email protected]

https://nextrivet.com/