There’s so much discussion of AI out there that it can make your head spin. Odds are that if you’re chatting with friends, commercial tools like ChatGPT or Gemini dominate the conversation when the subject of AI inevitably comes up. But are those the right tools for your business needs, or are those just the most familiar to the average person?
The right AI tools aren’t simply the ones you read about in the news, or the ones embedded in your consumer technology. Commercial real estate (CRE) professionals need AI capabilities that are specific to our industry and our use cases.
As “The state of commercial property management technology for 2025” found, there’s a major gap between interest and adoption of AI technologies in commercial real estate. That means now is the time to figure out how to best deploy AI in your organization – and that means the right AI tools for your specific work.
Here are four key ways that commercial AI falls short for commercial real estate – and how purpose-built AI for CRE can make a huge difference.
Industry context and intelligence
While tools like Gemini and ChatGPT are becoming more integrated into many workflows, they are not as well-versed in the specific work that property teams do on a daily basis.
Purpose-built AI, on the other hand, should be specifically targeted to the needs of CRE. For example, Prism AI was trained on over 450 terabytes of CRE-specific data. It immediately understands the context of terms like triple-net lease, CAM charges, or tenant-compliant clauses. Because of this, a platform like Prism AI can apply those concepts and deliver accurate, relevant answers.
Putting your operations data to use
The same goes for integrating with your data sources. Purpose-built AI should be able to work directly with your critical CRE tools and data, including financial management, COI management, property management and tenant communications. By working as an AI layer for your operational data, AI built for commercial real estate can easily create recommendations based on all of your key data and workflows. And by tapping into this data, you’ll see actionable recommendations based on your properties – making your data a strategic advantage. This is considerably more efficient than integrations, which are the route you would have to take with commercial AI tools.
Enterprise time to value
The promise of AI is alluring, but it needs to quickly deliver tangible impact for more property teams to make it a part of their work. Customizing a commercial AI tool to your specific needs takes time and energy, meaning months before any actual value is brought to your team.
Instead, effective tools like Prism AI can bring the power of artificial intelligence to your team immediately. Since Prism, for example, already has access to your operations data, Prism AI can instantly bring insights to your team and share useful recommendations based on your specific work. Don’t waste time on difficult customization projects, when you could press ‘go’ on the power of AI today.
Security and compliance
One of the biggest concerns with AI use in commercial real estate is security. JLL research found that 41% of businesses find data and cyber security to be a barrier to adoption of AI tools. Commercial AI tools talk a big game about security and compliance, but many of them still use your data to train their models and are not up-to-date on the highest standards of security that your company requires.
Purpose-built AI takes security seriously, in a way that goes beyond commercial AI tools. Check to ensure that your AI tools never use your documents or data for model training and completely segregate all customer data to ensure no cross-contamination. Other valuable checks include being SOC 2 type II certified, and have capabilities including role-based access and end-to-end encryption.
In short, the best purpose-built AI tools should hold themselves to a higher standard than the other more general AI tools on the market.
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Industry-specific AI, especially in commercial real estate, can much more effectively bring value to your teams and fit into how you work. By looking beyond the most common commercial AI tools, you can better bring the power of AI into your work and work smarter, not harder.
Want to learn more about how Prism AI is built specifically for your property management needs? Sign up for a demo now.
