Schroders boss: AI has ‘revolutionised’ our business
The co-head of global listed real assets at £750bn asset manager Schroders says artificial intelligence has “revolutionised” his equities division in a matter of months.
Tom Walker was speaking on a panel discussion held by the European Public Real Estate Association and law firm CMS, on which the chief executives of listed real estate firms outlined their expectations for the year ahead.
Panellists were asked by moderator Svitlana Gubriy, Abrdn’s head of indirect real assets, whether AI will have “a significant impact on the real estate industry”.
The co-head of global listed real assets at £750bn asset manager Schroders says artificial intelligence has “revolutionised” his equities division in a matter of months.
Tom Walker was speaking on a panel discussion held by the European Public Real Estate Association and law firm CMS, on which the chief executives of listed real estate firms outlined their expectations for the year ahead.
Panellists were asked by moderator Svitlana Gubriy, Abrdn’s head of indirect real assets, whether AI will have “a significant impact on the real estate industry”.
“It’s revolutionised the whole equities department in the last six months or so,” said Walker. “Schroders has been working with it for about a year and a half. You’d say, ‘Analyse this report’ and it would have a few inaccuracies. But in the last six months it’s been quite game changing.”
Walker acknowledged that “depressingly”, the benefits could mean changes for firms with “big research teams”.
“You can’t see the need for so many people going forward because the efficiency it brings, the summarising of reports,” he added. “We’ve got data scientists looking at whether it can predict where rents are going to go and working on these models now.”
In June, Schroders private markets business launched its Generative AI Investment Analyst platform, which it said would “speed up the analysis of large volumes of data. Nils Rode, chief investment officer at Schroders Capital, said at the time that the offering would “elevate our investment analysis to a new level, enabling our team to make faster and even more informed investment decisions and to focus on higher-value activities”.
Other EPRA panellists agreed that AI has already showed its worth in their own businesses, including student accommodation developer Unite Group’s chief executive, Joe Lister.
“We see it our core operational business: how it’s informing pricing on a daily basis, how we’re [using] it to gather information,” Lister said. “It’s about those data points that help you drive what your demand drivers are, collecting and identifying what those sources of data are, and using AI to interpret that and then drive your pricing decisions.”
Lister continued: “What’s great is it’s getting embedded into the core systems which we’re using rather than us having to come up with something ourselves and invest hugely to do that. It’s very early days but I can start to see this absolute benefit in using data to drive pricing and to inform where, how, what we are doing from an operational perspective.”
Photo © Gerd Altmann/Pixabay
