Prioritise. The Data House Has to Come First

AI's Inconvenient Truth for Commercial Real Estate

From a career forged in London to fifteen years on the ground in Hong Kong - Emily Gray has seen the EMEA and APAC regions approach real estate from fundamentally different starting points; in the first of the CREATIX Interview Series, she tells us why that gap matters more than ever, and what both regions can learn from each other as technology forces the industry to finally confront its broken data foundations.

You spent your first few years at Cushman & Wakefield in London before moving to Hong Kong in 2011. That’s nearly 15 years in APAC now - equal stints with C&W and CBRE. When you landed in Hong Kong, what was the single biggest difference in how corporate occupiers approached their real estate compared to what you’d seen in London?

I’m stunned it has been 15 years since I moved to Hong Kong! For me the biggest shock was the average lease term. In APAC, typically it is 3–5 years versus 7–10 in Europe. That shorter cycle forces occupiers to treat portfolio strategy as a continuous process - there’s always a deal on the table, far fewer rent reviews and little comfort for tenants from renewal clauses as they are generally at open market rent.

Has that gap between the two regions narrowed over those 15 years, or has it actually widened? Because my sense is that APAC occupiers have moved faster on certain things - particularly around flexibility and portfolio agility - while parts of EMEA are still catching up.

Absolutely. APAC has been the pilot market for flexible space and new standards. Flexible office stock grew double digits through the 2010s. Shorter leases and a growth mindset mean corporates here are quicker to experiment than many in EMEA.

Fundamentally, occupiers everywhere want safe, cost-effective space that supports their business objectives. But dynamics differ: Singapore’s tenant-favoured market drives flight to quality and sustainability has moved up the agenda; Seoul’s tight supply makes renewals and cost control the priority; Mumbai’s Grade A hubs are about scale and talent, with deals that shape brand perception. The common denominator is data - getting the right insights to the right people at the right time to make decisions.

One of the things I find genuinely surprising in our industry is how long everything takes. Lease negotiations that drag on for months, portfolio decisions that stall in committee. From your experience managing large occupier accounts across the region, where does the most time get lost - and is that the same pain point in APAC as it is in EMEA?

I remember once being involved in the contract negotiations for an MSA, by the time the document was signed we were halfway through the term…! Far from ideal.

For transactions, large occupier deals in APAC often take 9-12 months, longer for anything particularly sensitive or significant, which is like Europe. The delays aren’t usually deliberate - I think approvals get lost in matrix structures, quarterly windows are missed, or cross-market holidays add delays. The fix isn’t to grumble - these are fiduciary deals, so complexity is inevitable - but to plan better, clarify processes & accountability, and double down on communication. Technology should be stepping in to provide transparency, workflow discipline therefore enabling speed across the deal cycle.

You’ve recently moved into consulting for SuperByte, a PropTech company focused on getting the right data to the right people at the right time. After 19 years on the occupier advisory side, what was the moment - or maybe the accumulation of moments - that made you think, ‘Right, I need to be on the technology side of this’?

My aha moment was seeing firsthand how SuperByte could deliver reporting in minutes that once took days, strengthen governance, and enable auditable collaboration across organisations - all in a user-friendly way, without juggling multiple systems. The result: CRE teams can focus on what truly drives organisational value. It’s not about duplicating data across systems, but about having the time to analyse what that data reveals. That insight was reinforced when I saw KPMG report that PropTech investment tripled from $4.1B in 2022 to $13.4B in 2023, underscoring both the urgency and the opportunity for transformation. I’m committed to & excited about building the fix: transforming CRE from linear workflows into connected ecosystems.

superbyte.com

There’s a pattern I’ve seen where people build technology for problems they’ve read about rather than problems they’ve lived through. You’ve been on the receiving end of bad data, slow processes, and misaligned information for nearly two decades. How does that shape the way you think about what technology should actually solve for occupiers?

Bad data and slow processes are often the unintended consequence of outsourcing silos. Each service line built its own ‘walled garden’ of best practice technology. That solved for consistency but left CRE struggling to stitch it all together. The future is service-provider-agnostic platforms where CRE teams own the digital environment, but without that, AI’s potential won’t be unlocked.

When we talk about ‘getting the right data to the right people at the right time’ - that sounds straightforward, but in practice it’s anything but. What does that actually look like on the ground for a corporate occupier managing a portfolio across, say, eight APAC markets?

On the ground, this means harmonising diverse datasets across markets - whether eight or eighty - into a single digital environment. Those datasets then need to be reviewed in the context of the specific business objective. Without harmonisation, more time is spent reconciling spreadsheets than making decisions. The data could include market information, lease terms, fit-out costs, occupancy statistics, sustainability metrics, and business performance data. The possibilities are endless, shaped entirely by the business context.

Let’s talk about AI specifically. There’s a lot of noise in our industry about what AI will and won’t do - and frankly, a lot of it comes from people who’ve never had to sit in a lease negotiation or present comps to a sceptical CFO. From your seat, where is AI genuinely useful for occupiers right now, today - not in some theoretical future?

AI can be genuinely useful and game changing, think of things like lease abstractions, smart building environments, carbon tracking to name but a few. That said, the real value only comes once your data house is in order - otherwise AI just amplifies the noise. As an industry we still have a long way to go with the data locked up in those walled gardens.

And where is it not useful yet? I think it’s just as important to be honest about the gaps. What are the parts of the occupier-landlord relationship, or the transaction process, where the human element is still doing the heavy lifting and technology genuinely can’t replicate it?

AI can’t replicate the human element of negotiation, trust-building, or reading a room. Those are still relationship-driven. Tech can support, but it won’t replace instinct and credibility - which once lost to AI will take a long time to rebuild!

Here’s something I think about a lot: the relationship between occupiers and landlords in APAC feels like it operates on different terms to EMEA. There’s a different power dynamic, different cultural expectations around negotiation and long-term partnership. How do you see technology changing that dynamic - and is there a risk it disrupts something that actually works quite well?

APAC landlords range from family offices to REITs, so maturity inevitably varies. Relationships matter, but so does cash flow. My hope is that technology shifts focus to supporting the creation of shared value for the people using the space - to my mind, that’s an opportunity, not a risk.

What about the landlord side specifically? A lot of the PropTech conversation focuses on the occupier, but landlords in APAC are sitting on enormous portfolios and often working with fragmented data across markets. Where’s the biggest opportunity for landlords to use technology to deliver more value to their tenants - and, frankly, to themselves?

For landlords, the biggest opportunity lies in turning fragmented portfolios and diverse datasets into connected, insight-driven environments. They’re no longer just leasing space - they’re delivering services and experiences that make places stand out. Placemaking isn’t just a buzzword; vibrant, well-serviced locations attract and retain tenants, driving stronger occupancy, longer commitments, and premium rents. Technology is the real game-changer here: smart building systems that optimise energy, air quality, and security, and tenant engagement platforms that create seamless digital touch-points. These tools don’t just support the experience, they power it - giving landlords real-time portfolio insights, reducing friction, and creating a cycle where better tech leads to better tenant experiences, stronger demand, and ultimately greater landlord value

You chaired the CoreNet Global Hong Kong chapter and you’ve been a vocal advocate for the market out there. If a European corporate occupier is looking at APAC expansion in 2026, what’s the one thing about the market that they almost certainly don’t understand - the thing that only becomes obvious once you’ve been on the ground?

Until you’re on the ground, I don’t think you really grasp the scale. I’m based in Hong Kong, which is part of the Greater Bay Area, home to 87M people with a GDP of US$2T - somewhere between Spain and South Korea in global rankings and I’m within four hours of a third of the world’s population. That scale changes everything.

Collaboration is a word that gets thrown around a lot in our industry, but the reality of getting an occupier, a landlord, a managing agent, a lawyer, and sometimes a government body to align across multiple APAC jurisdictions is incredibly complex. What does genuine collaboration actually look like when it works - and what breaks it?

Genuine collaboration is about common purpose and accountability - clarity on roles, responsibilities and timelines. When you have this, you can see where any issues lie and solve together. Playbooks help, but they break down without a single source of truth or real-time visibility. That’s when frustration and finger-pointing can creep in, undermining collaboration at best and leading to a toxic culture at worst.

I’m going to put you on the spot. If you could change one thing about how the commercial real estate industry adopts technology - not the technology itself, but the way the industry approaches it - what would it be?

The industry needs to treat technology as core, not an add-on. Outsourcing created silos, and breaking them down is tough when tech is tied to competitive service delivery. The shift has to be toward tech developed and funded as infrastructure for real estate itself.

Relationships and instinct built your career, but tech is the multiplier. PwC predicts 70% of CRE workflows will be digitally augmented by 2030. We’re on the cusp of an industrial revolution in white-collar work - I think this is so exciting if we can use the technology to step up our value proposition and focus on what really matters.