The digital transformation in the real estate industry is far from complete and lags behind other industries in many areas. We’re already much further along in our daily lives, and it’s hard to imagine modern life without artificial intelligence (AI): software recognises our face before unlocking our smartphone, voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa help us organise our daily lives, and navigation systems find us the fastest route to the nearest shopping centre. But AI can do more than just make our everyday lives easier and is now considered a key technology with the potential to profoundly change entire industries and spheres of life.

There’s no such thing as one kind of artificial intelligence though. Rather, AI comprises a variety of smart technologies that consciously perceive their environment and are thus able to learn from it, understand facts, plan, make decisions and ultimately correct themselves. This means that there’s hardly any limit to their potential applications.

And this is precisely what opens up many opportunities for the real estate industry. From running a property more efficiently through building automation and integrating smart office solutions to simplify the organisation of work in office buildings to collecting and evaluating huge amounts of data – the potential of neural networks creates a wealth of new opportunities and synergy effects for our industry.

Merantix, a pioneer in the field of AI, moved into our ENTER property as an anchor tenant on 1 May. This gives us the opportunity to gain deeper insights into this topic. Going forward, the founders Rasmus Rothe and Adrian Locher plan to operate an ‘AI Campus’ in the office space of ENTER and thus create an ecosystem for artificial intelligence based on collaboration and synergies. The project is already considered one of the most ambitious undertakings of the young European AI scene. We’re thus all the more pleased that Townscape and Merantix will be collaborating in this area in the future and start a joint project to determine what opportunities artificial intelligence can offer the real estate industry and project developers in particular.

We’re excited to see what insights and thought-provoking ideas this partnership has in store for us, and we look forward to sharing the results of their workshops here very soon!