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Why robots will humanise business communication… and other lessons in tech

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TECHTALK: PiLabs and Spire Ventures founder Faisal Butt on how Pam is the future of property management.

faisal-buttImagine a world in which you groggily roll out of bed on a Sunday morning craving the strongest coffee money can buy. Eager to nurse the weekend hangover, you scurry out of your apartment, pyjama-clad with baseball cap and dark shades on, to make a surgical strike at the local barista.  But there’s a stumbling block – the lift is broken, and you’re stranded on the 23d floor.  You whip out your smart phone, and send a quick text message. Pam replies “Oh no, poor you, is the lift broken? Not a great way to start your Sunday.  Let me see how I can help…”  A few playful texts later, the problem is diagnosed, logged, reported, and on its way to being fixed.  Pam is not your girlfriend…or your mother…nor your building concierge. She is an artificial intelligence chat bot that serves as your building’s property manager.

Back to the Future

With the advent of consumer-based artificial intelligence applications, like Apple’s Siri (who my kids like to joke is the fifth member of the family) and Amazon’s Alexa, robots are touching more and more of our personal lives.  From seemingly simple tasks like checking the weather to ordering our groceries, AI has rapidly developed in sophistication in the past 36 months.  It won’t be long until Siri or Alexa will be able to contact British Gas to schedule a boiler check or have a cleaner arranged for Saturday morning.

In 2017, we will see AI spill over from consumer services into business services.  Technology is increasingly disrupting the way businesses interact with customers across all sectors.  Perhaps two of the most pervasive of these technologies are messaging and artificial intelligence.

Slack, a messaging platform designed to help teams communicate more effectively internally, has seen 3.5x growth last year. Additionally, a recent study by Deloitte indicated 64% of IT professionals say they will implement some form of cognitive services or artificial intelligence in the next two years – a leading indicator pointing to what the near future holds for us.  As IT geeks code away at developing AI, we can expect to see all forms of artificial intelligence (chat bots, robo-advisers for mortgages and insurance, driverless cars, virtual PAs, and property management assistants like Pam) entering our everyday lives.

This isn’t a far off vision of the distant future – the onset of AI is just around the corner, and business leaders not paying attention to this imminent wave may get left behind.

Property Management 2.0

The property management industry is better positioned than most to take advantage of these developments in communication and AI.  In doing so, the industry stands to not only dramatically improve customer engagement, but also increase efficiency across all functions.  Anyone who has had to log an issue with their property manager knows that the process is mundane, boring, and downright frustrating.

What I find truly exciting is that weaving AI into property management is an opportunity to turn a harrowing experience into one that is enjoyable and delightful for the end customer.  The imaginary Pam mentioned above not only logs a complaint, but also allows you to track it and interact until it is resolved.  She shows empathy and emotion throughout the process, understanding that dealing with things breaking down in your flat or common areas just isn’t fun for you. By giving you visibility, and letting you engage throughout, she makes you feel empowered, turning a negative experience into a positive one.  As ironic as it may sound, a robot humanises what today feels like an impersonal and mechanical customer experience.

Property management is a notoriously operations-intensive business, highly reliant upon the to and fro of email and phone calls. This way of doing business works, which is almost certainly why it has remained so entrenched. It does, however, have serious limitations which results in missed opportunities. The current, manual way of working is fragmented, clunky, and administratively costly. For example, when a customer raises a new maintenance issue, it typically results in substantial traffic back and forth across the whole stakeholder chain, with property managers jumping between different communication channels and having to manually look up information to resolve issues.  This is a frustrating experience for everyone involved – issues take longer to reach resolution, and the audit trail is far from transparent.  This presents a fundamental challenge: what can’t be measured, can’t be managed.

The rise of messaging for business, when combined with AI, promises to solve these problems and in doing so stands to completely reinvent property management.  The growth of messaging platforms such as the aforementioned Slack, is rapidly changing the way businesses communicate. Messaging has many benefits – it is collaborative, so that building residents and property managers can engage in real-time, segment discussions by topic, and receive project updates and notifications.  But real-time messaging presents its own challenges, raising customer expectations to levels that can’t be met today. The advent of messaging puts the impossible burden of instant communication on already time-strapped property managers who seem to be constantly chasing their tails.  This clearly isn’t feasible at scale.

Rise of the Machines

This is where AI assistants and chatbots come in.  AskPorter, a Pi Labs backed company, offers a visionary model for the future of property management. AskPorter is an artificial intelligence driven property management platform that enables AI to work symbiotically alongside property managers. Not only does the platform use machine learning to instantly extract data from property related documents, but it also makes this information instantly accessible to building residents and other stakeholders.  At its core is Porter, an AI assistant that automatically guides customers through making enquiries and reporting issues, only reverting to a human manager or approved service provider when necessary.

This kind of hybrid approach to property management offers huge advantages over current practices.  It brings all interactions onto one platform, enabling effective real time collaboration and giving access to a whole host of trackable metrics, such as average time taken to resolve an issue.  And perhaps most promising, the more data the platform captures, the smarter the AI gets, blurring the lines between man and machine.

Friend or foe?

The idea of Pam or Porter may seem eerie to some and delightful to others.  The rise of artificial intelligence in the offering of essential property services, such as management, is likely to spark debate and controversy, just as the rapid rise of Purple Bricks and emoov did in the online estate agency space.  But smart, progressive property managers with a real passion for delivering a superior service to the residents of a building will embrace AI, not shy away from it.  Pam is neither the industry’s friend, nor its enemy. One thing I am certain about, however, is that she will push the entire industry to raise its old-world standards.  This is not likely to be an easy transformation, but it is one that the industry desperately needs.  Perhaps we will cautiously label Pam a ‘frenemy’ for now.

Faisal Butt

Main image: © imageBROKER/REX/Shutterstock

This article was first published on 3 April 2017

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