AI is a Power Tool, Not a Robot

I’m not sure there’s been a technology as misunderstood as Artificial Intelligence, especially for the users of PropTech. To be clear, I’m not here to get into the differences between AI, Machine Learning, Deep Neural Nets, and every other piece of technical jargon describing this corner of the tech space. Rather, this is my attempt at predicting their real-life impacts on your work.

Despite the amazing things that AI has to offer, a lot of mistrust is placed in these systems, for better or worse. I’m sure a lot of you reading this have worked with AI tools in the past, which promised amazing results with zero effort from the user. While this is certainly an admirable goal, it’s just not reality today. I’m not sure AI ever will be. Progress in AI tends to be asymptotic, and many technologists agree that the best AI use cases are those where 80% accuracy is fine.

But if that’s the case, is there a place for AI in Commercial Real Estate, an industry that requires more than 80% precision? (Spoiler: yes!)

It’s a Power Tool

Whenever I’m not working on building something for LoanBoss, one of my favorite ways to spend time is woodworking. I’m no master carpenter by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a great way for me to channel some creative energy. Sometimes I’m working on something really detailed and precise, other times it’s something crude and functional.

In building these items, I use a variety of tools. For certain jobs, I use a lot of hand tools. For example, in building this mallet I had to create a precise, square hole through the head of the mallet to fit the handle, and then carve a matching handle to precisely fit in the hole (fun fact: the entire mallet is made from a single piece of oak stock I brought back from a family trip to WV). This kind of work took time and precision, and nearly all of it had to be done by hand.

A skilled woodworker would have been able to make this in a quarter of the time it took me…

In contrast, I built this gate after I hired a landscaper and we realized he couldn’t get his equipment through the small garden gate. This is just a few treated 2x4’s and some fencing staples to the back. This was a job that needed done quickly, and was built completely with power tools. It needed to fit the span in the fence accurately, but the level of precision required didn’t necessitate me being holed up in my shop for hours and hours carefully shaving layers of wood back. 80% precision was fine.

Two different projects with two different approaches. I could have used the same set of tools on both of these projects, but one would have turned out wonky and ineffective, and the other would have taken way more time than it needed to.

AI is no different. AI is a power tool. AI to PropTech is the same as the power drill is to a woodworker, or the tractor is to a farmer. It’s a tool to help us do more work in less time. It makes us better, faster, and more efficient. In none of these examples is the human removed from the equation. The power drill means the woodworker can drill a hole in one or two seconds that used to take them minutes. It means that they can change the way they build things, since drilling holes is no longer a problem.

Human in the Loop

The term we like to use for an artificial intelligence process that requires human intervention is “Human In The Loop”. HITL just means you need a person somewhere in the workflow to make sure things are going smoothly. If a company uses AI to abstract information from a document, they’ll have a human in the loop to QA the results. After all, given the asymptotic progress of AI, we can’t expect the AI to be correct 100% of the time. We’re killing it if it’s right 90% of the time.

This type of relationship with AI means that the human is able to use the AI as a power tool. Instead of a screwdriver (their eyeballs and a keyboard), they have a power drill (checking and correcting the AI). A loan specialist is now twice as fast as before, and can spend more time on quality control instead of scrolling through page after page of legal definitions.

Where some companies have gone wrong with AI is ignoring this relationship. Despite promises by its pundits, AI is not most effective when left completely unsupervised. At the end of the day, AI is just a probability model (Sorry AI nerds — it’s the truth). Just like I wouldn’t expect my power drill to complete a project on its own, neither would I expect AI to be able to do an entire workflow on its own.

AI cannot replace humans. It just makes them more efficient.

AI in the Future

We’ve seen massive growth in the AI space in just a year or two. For those of you that have followed AI trends in the last several years, you know what a massive leap models DALL-E 2 and GPT3.5 (ChatGPT) were over their predecessors. GPT4 (projected release in Q2 2023) is supposed to be a 10x improvement. What are we going to be able to do this time next year that looked like sci-fi this year?

ChatGPT is probably the most viral AI products to be released ever. It’s a general chat model created by OpenAI that can intelligently respond to questions asked of it, and generate different types of written outputs based on natural language prompts. It is the best AI chatbot ever created by several orders of magnitude. Just enter a prompt, and ChatGPT will output some pretty impressive results. I’m sure there are some professional writers out there that are wary of this, and even more nervous about the next evolution of the product. Will this ever replace writers?

I decided to ask ChatGPT itself — “Will you ever be able to replace human writers?” It feels very strongly about this one.

Even the greatest chatbot of all time recognizes that it’s a tool that makes writers better and more efficient. Any other AI tool is the same. Its job is to take the boring, mundane parts of our jobs away so that we can spend our time and energy on the creative, original work that only humans are capable of.

AI is a Power Tool. Treat it like one.

Disclaimer: This article was NOT generated by AI. It’s 100% human written. Sorry if you were expecting a surprise at the end.

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