Efficiency AI Tech to Opportunity AI Tech

The bar to AI adoption is the floor and can't be ignored

Earlier in the week I attended London Live: Spring Edition hosted by Love Ventures. The theme for the evening: AI is everywhere. Profitable AI is not. What’s the gap between the two.

A highlight of the evening was a fireside chat, with Adrian Love interviewing Dan Cobley during which Dan identified something. The context (not verbatim quote) was:

"We are seeing companies and employees begin to adopt 'Efficiency' AI technologies, but it is actually the 'Opportunity' AI technologies that presents the more exciting frontier, where the value creation is as yet undefined and by its very nature a journey of exploration."

I found it very interesting - especially when applying it to the context of Commercial Real Estate.

What if the AI 'efficiency' tools that are easiest to understand are actually the least interesting ones?

There is a growing category of technology that is efficiency tech. Tools whose value you can assess in about ninety seconds, whose onboarding takes less time than making a cup of tea, and whose impact on your working day is immediate, measurable, and frankly difficult to argue with.

Wispr Flow is one. I mentioned it in an earlier newsletter piece (Keyboards going the wax of the fax machine?). Granola is another prime example. In a Ronseal way, it does exactly what it says on the tin. You download it, you use it in your next meeting, and you walk away wondering how you ever survived without it. The smile-to-effort ratio is off the charts.

And that is precisely why 'efficiency' AI tech, while valuable, is the easy part.

The bar is now on the floor

Here is where I am going to be slightly uncomfortable for a moment, because this needs saying. The effort required to adopt these tools is so small - we are talking minutes, not days - that business leaders should genuinely be questioning the value of any team member who is not at least trying to improve their efficiency with them. Harsh? Maybe. Fair? Absolutely.

Obviously large enterprises need to establish a policy and framework for their employees with regards to autonomy of trialing such products - especially when it comes to data and security.

If a tool takes five minutes to set up, costs less than your morning coffee, and saves you an hour a week on meeting notes or drafting follow-ups, the decision to ignore it is not caution. It is complacency.

And in commercial real estate, where your week is already carved up between tenant enquiries, property tours, proposals, comp analysis, and the endless admin that nobody warned you about when you got into this business, complacency with your time is the most expensive mistake you can make. See my earlier newsletter (How AI give Leasing Agents back their most valuable commodity: Time)

The good news is that the efficiency argument is basically won. Some great tools exist, more will follow. The value is clear. You do not need a strategy deck or a six-month pilot to start using them. You just need to crack on.

But efficiency is table stakes. And if we stop there, we are missing the bigger picture entirely.

Welcome to the less comfortable bit

Efficiency tech has a clear destination. You know where you are going before you start. Opportunity tech is a different animal altogether. The destination is not mapped. The ROI is not sitting there waiting for you in a product demo. The value has to be found, tested, sometimes built from scratch - and often the people finding it are the ones willing to step into the breach before anyone else has worked out there is a breach worth stepping into.

This is where it gets genuinely exciting for commercial real estate!

Think about what opportunity tech actually means in our world. It is not about doing the same things faster. It is about finding seams of value that were not previously tapped.

New ways to identify occupier demand before it hits the market. New ways to match capital to assets using data patterns that no human agent could process manually (no matter how many fellow Etonians they see at the club). New ways to compress transaction timelines (yes, I am banging that drum again, and no, I will not stop) from months to weeks.

The difference between efficiency and opportunity is the difference between saving time and creating it. One optimises your existing workflow. The other changes the workflow entirely.

The innovator's job description just changed

I have been reading Matt Lerner's new book, Growth Levers: And How to Find Them, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone thinking about where technology-driven value actually comes from.

One of Matt's core arguments is that growth is not about doing more things. It is about finding the specific levers that move the needle disproportionately - and most organisations are not even looking for them because they are too busy optimising what they already have.

That lands hard in commercial real estate. We are an industry that has historically rewarded doing the same thing, slightly better, year after year. Relationships, market knowledge, persistence. All still valuable. But the arbitrage opportunity right now sits with the people who are willing to explore, test, and find those growth levers before the rest of the market even knows they exist.

Two mindsets, one market

What I see forming is a two-tier approach, and both tiers matter.

Tier one is AI efficiency. Adopt the Wispr Flows and the Granolas of this world. Get to work using Claude Chat and CoWork. Remove friction from the tasks that eat your hours. This should be non-negotiable across your team by now. If it is not, you are leaving time on the table, and time is the only currency in this business that you cannot earn back.

Tier two is AI opportunity. This is harder, messier, and less certain. It requires people in your organisation - maybe you, maybe a hungry associate with a knack for technology - to spend time exploring, testing, and occasionally failing. Not every experiment will pay off. But the ones that do will create a competitive edge that efficiency alone never will.

The firms that treat technology purely as an efficiency play will get faster at doing the same things. The firms that embrace opportunity tech will start doing different things altogether. And in twelve months, those two groups will look at each other across a widening gap and wonder when the split happened.

Spoiler: it is happening now. The real estate companies at the forefront are creating new roles within their organisation to embrace Opportunity AI Tech, or bringing in the consultants to steer them in the right direction

Efficiency tech tells you where the value is. Opportunity tech makes you go and find it. Both matter - but only one of them will change your position in the market.

So the question is not whether you are using AI yet. The question is: are you using it to run faster on the same track, or to find a completely different race?