After e-commerce and remote work upended demand for commercial space, artificial intelligence has emerged as the latest force reshaping commercial real estate. On the surface the sector — physical buildings and land — seems hard to disrupt. But the services that surround property ownership, especially brokerage, advisory and portfolio management, face a new challenge: convincing clients they still need as many people to do work that increasingly can be automated.
In mid-February, shares of major real estate services firms including CBRE, Jones Lang LaSalle and Cushman & Wakefield plunged amid investor fears that AI could undo knowledge‑intensive parts of the business. Valuations have largely flattened since then. Analysts say the anxiety is less about office towers losing all value and more about whether brokers and advisory teams will be displaced. Labor‑heavy intermediary businesses look especially exposed to automation, with potential knock‑on effects for office demand secondary to the threat to advisory revenue streams.
Some startups are already applying AI to core investment tasks. Francis Huang, who began exploring autonomous investment systems while at Harvard in 2019, co‑founded Apers AI with Simon Mendelsohn to build models that screen and evaluate institutional and commercial real estate opportunities. Large investors traditionally relied on a wide broker network to surface a small number of attractive deals; Huang says AI can now automate the bulk of that filtering, acting like an investment committee for deal selection.
Industry experts caution, however, that AI is not an automatic destroyer of existing firms. Yuehan Wang, global research director for real estate technologies at Jones Lang LaSalle, says the sector largely views AI as a tool and that the real risk is falling behind competitors that adopt it. Investors are deploying AI to sharpen market analysis, improve risk models, optimize portfolios and automate valuations — capabilities that can be used defensively or as a competitive edge.
AI’s influence goes beyond advisory work. The computing demands of training and running large models have helped spark a global boom in data center construction, creating new commercial real estate demand. Meanwhile, technology companies remain active office tenants: tech accounted for about 20% of U.S. leasing in the first half of 2025, roughly double its share in 2022, helping ease vacancies in cities such as New York and San Francisco.
Many industry participants describe AI as an upgrade that reallocates capital and attention more efficiently rather than a replacement for human relationships. Real estate value still depends on finding the highest and best use for land over time, as seen in places like Kendall Square where uses have shifted from industrial to research and biotech. Experts expect the full shape of AI‑driven changes to emerge over the rest of the decade — after workflow redesigns and business‑model shifts — but most also believe proprietary data, client relationships and interpersonal dealmaking will remain important safeguards against wholesale disruption.
Edited by Kristie Pladson