Keep An Eye on Emerging Technology

LOS ANGELES—Emerging technology is the key to staying ahead, according to Devin Fidler, director of the workable futures initiative at the Institute for the Future, who spoke on the Are You Ready for 2018 and Beyond? panel at the CoreNet Global Summit this week. Fidler urged organizations to look at emerging technologies to stay ahead of the curve and find growth opportunities.

“There are a lot of unknowns in this space,” Fidler said about commercial real estate.  “Organizations should really look at their own structures, and should start to look at where expertise is and how to get it to where it is most useful when it is most useful. The organizations that are the most successful are the ones that are experimenting.” He noted emerging websites like Elance and Upwork to find new employees to do temporary jobs.

When identifying emerging technologies, Fidler said to look for companies that “activate, deactivate and reconfigure resources to better get them to where they are needed.” He identified several recently successful start-ups like AirBnb, Uber and Seamless as companies that are using variations of this model. He also urged companies to look internally to identify a model that will enhance workflow and productivity, because once the model is created, any new data can be entered.

Fidler took the concept a step further to say that it is possible to create a programmable workflow once an algorithm is in place. “This functionally means that when we hit play we can change the topic but keep the same algorithm,” he said. “This means that software itself will be looking for people who can contribute. Anything that is connected to a platform can be connected in this way.” Think about it in terms of data collection. If an algorithm works for one market, it will work for another market. Once the algorithm is developed, which Fidler says is the most time consuming part, data in any market could be collected quickly, thereby increasing efficiency. When the moderator, Bryan Jacobs, international director at JLL, asked if this means that companies could plug in analytics, and Fidler responded that the firm can do both.

The conference focused on innovation in the CRE industry. An earlier panel took a close look at drones to explore how they are changing construction and development.