Gartner Trends: Adaptive AI for Real Estate
Among Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends 2023 is adaptive AI, an evolution of artificial intelligence that works by learning continuously from new data, making it more agile in the face of real-world change.
What is Adaptive AI?
Traditionally, all software – including AI – has relied on developers to revise the code and algorithms. Adaptive AI “can revise […] to adjust for real-world changes that weren’t known or foreseen when the code was first written” (Gartner). Businesses are increasingly needing to be able to adapt to changing conditions – something highlighted by the extremes of the pandemic, the climate crisis and the destabilizing effects of war. So businesses need adaptable technology. Erick Brethenoux, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, says, “Adaptive AI systems aim to continuously retrain models or apply other mechanisms to adapt and learn within runtime and development environments — making them more adaptive and resilient to change.”
Why is it Important for Business?
In today’s world, we are collecting ever more data, from the web, from the internet of things, from past machine experience and past human experience. Adaptive AI can autonomously sift through this data, learn from it, and optimize its application. Adaptive AI decision-making is broader and more flexible, resulting in improved UX and productivity. These are vital in many industries, particularly in real estate and property management, with their ever-changing factors, both human (changing residents) and market (unit availability, market price trends).
Digital entrepreneur and founder of Spread Great Ideas, Brian David Crane explains adaptive AI: “By analyzing social, behavioral and past interactions, adaptive AI uses continuous interactions to predict and anticipate customer behavior and provide highly personalized solutions.” This looking at the data of human interactions, of consumer behavior – be it purchases online, in a mall, or even choosing a new apartment – will give businesses advantages in real-time, with the adaptive AI learning and adapting continuously, adjusting goals and outcomes.
Case Study: Dow Inc
According to Crane, brands like Amazon, Netflix and Google are already using adaptive AI. But so are other businesses with a less visible presence in the home. Dow Chemicals Company may have been founded in 1897, but it is at the cutting edge of deploying new technologies. This was recognized when it was among the organizations garlanded in the Business Intelligence Group’s Artificial Intelligence Award in March 2022.
The multinational, which has its headquarters in Michigan, produces chemicals, agricultural products and plastics. The latter’s division, Dow Polyurethanes, deployed its adaptive AI Predictive Intelligence to address customer input directly. It can model product properties in real-time, and Gartner trends report it “has resulted in a 320% increase in value generated by the analytics platform.”
What’s Next for Real Estate?
While business leaders obviously can’t argue with a statistic like that, Adaptive AI will also simply speed up processes. Adaptive AI will therefore be another area of IT that will require investment, as it can’t simply be bolted onto existing AI.
Gartner says, “it is critical to develop less rigid AI engineering pipelines or build AI models that can self-adapt in production.” Gartner predicts that businesses adopting adaptive AI will have a performance advantage of at least 25% over their peers. That’s another statistic it’s hard to argue with.
Businesses in the real estate and property management market could begin to embrace adaptive AI with the ambition that its real-world flexibility and digital resilience will likely pay higher dividends in industries - like real estate - that are prone to disruption.