Breaking Property News 5/11/26
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The Greatest Return on AI May Not Be the Work It Eliminates, but the Human Potential It Releases
Time to look at artificial intelligence as a growth engine that upgrades humans working life
Thought Leadership
By Author Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
For decades, businesses have measured the success of technology by what it removes. Fewer processes. Fewer administrative hours. Fewer people required to complete the same task. Efficiency became synonymous with elimination.
Artificial intelligence has accelerated that thinking. Almost every conversation about its commercial impact eventually arrives at the same question: how many jobs will it replace? I think we may be asking the wrong question.
The greatest return on AI may not be the cost of the work it eliminates, but the value of the human potential it releases.
And two examples, one from global retail and another from facilities management, demonstrate why this distinction matters.
IKEA: When Automation Creates an Opportunity Rather Than a Redundancy
Consider IKEA the Swedish furniture retailer introduced Billie, an AI-powered customer service assistant capable of handling a substantial proportion of routine customer enquiries. According to IKEA’s reporting in 2023, Billie was handling approximately 47% of customer enquiries, while the company had reskilled some 8,500 customer-service employees for more commercially valuable activities, including remote interior design advice and sales.
The conventional response might have been to calculate the payroll savings and congratulate management on its efficiency. But IKEA pursued a different opportunity. It recognised that employees who were no longer occupied answering repetitive questions could help customers make purchasing decisions, design rooms and navigate more complicated requirements.
Its remote sales channel had already generated approximately €1.3 billion in sales during the 2022 financial year, demonstrating the commercial significance of personalised customer engagement. That figure should not be mistaken for additional revenue attributable solely to AI. Nevertheless, the strategic lesson is compelling.
Technology had reduced the need for repetitive work. Management saw an opportunity to redirect human expertise towards activities that could generate greater commercial value.
The important decision wasn’t simply deploying Billie. It was deciding what people could do next.
The Facilities Management Industry Has a Similar Opportunity
This week, while judging the World Realty Congress Awards, I watched a presentation from IFM Facilities Management that brought this principle into sharp focus.
The company demonstrated an AI-driven facilities management system capable of diagnosing faults, generating work orders and dispatching contractors through a largely closed-loop process. The proposition was impressive enough. But what interested me most was its approach to workforce deployment.
Take something as unglamorous as cleaning washrooms. Traditionally, facilities management businesses organise cleaning through scheduled rotas. Staff attend particular locations at predetermined intervals, regardless of whether those facilities actually require attention. It is an established process, but not necessarily an intelligent one.
IFM demonstrated how technology could identify actual usage patterns and determine when cleaning was genuinely required. According to the company’s presentation, this approach reduced staffing requirements for the particular activity by a high percentage, while improving service outcomes. But here was the important detail.
The company said the people whose time was released were not made redundant. They were reassigned to other, more valuable activities within the organisation. Those are company-reported results, rather than independently verified performance figures. Even so, the operating principle deserves attention. Instead of asking how many cleaners could be removed from the payroll, the business was asking how intelligently its workforce could be deployed. The distinction is fundamental.
The Difference Between Cutting Costs and Creating Value
There are two ways to look at almost every major technological advance. The first is defensive, how can we perform the same work with fewer resources? The second is expansive, what can we now accomplish with the resources we already possess? The first produces efficiency, the second creates the possibility of growth.
Both matter, of course. Businesses cannot ignore costs, and not every employee can automatically be redeployed into a more productive role. But organisations that focus exclusively on elimination risk overlooking the more interesting commercial opportunity. When technology removes a repetitive activity, it doesn’t necessarily remove the value of the person who performed it. It removes one particular use of that person’s time. That distinction should be central to every serious conversation about AI and employment.
Human Experience Is Not an Obsolete Asset
I have spent nearly four decades working across property, real estate and technology, and one observation has remained remarkably consistent. Businesses frequently underestimate the commercial value of experience because it doesn’t sit neatly on a balance sheet.
A customer service employee may have spent years understanding why customers hesitate before making a purchase. A facilities management operative may know which problems repeatedly occur in a building and why. An experienced property professional may recognise a commercial risk that no dashboard has yet identified.
These capabilities are not necessarily captured in a job description. They are accumulated through experience, observation, relationships and judgement. And when technology removes the repetitive elements of someone’s role, those capabilities do not simply disappear. They may become more valuable because the employee finally has the time to use them.
There is an important warning here, however. Redeployment requires investment in training, thoughtful management and genuine opportunities for people to move into different roles. It cannot be achieved by simply announcing that displaced workers should become more productive.
Human potential is not automatically released by technology. It is released by the decisions organisations make after introducing technology.
A New Way to Measure Return on Investment
Perhaps we need to rethink how we calculate the return on AI investment. Traditionally, the business case begins with savings. If a process costs £1 million annually and technology can deliver it for £700,000, the apparent benefit is £300,000. That calculation is straightforward. But what if the technology also releases thousands of hours of experienced human capacity? And what if that capacity can be directed towards customer relationships, new services, better decision-making, preventative maintenance or increased sales?
The potential return becomes considerably more interesting. It is no longer simply a question of reducing the cost of the existing business. It becomes a question of what additional business can be created. Of course, that additional value must be measured rather than assumed. Revenue growth, service improvements, employee retention, customer satisfaction and the costs of retraining all belong in the calculation.
But excluding those possibilities from the outset would be a serious strategic mistake.
The Question Every CEO Should Be Asking
As AI becomes embedded in property management, construction, agency, investment, facilities management and the wider real estate industry, leaders will face choices about how its benefits are distributed. Some organisations will pursue lower headcounts. Others will use automation to expand their capabilities without increasing headcount proportionately.
And some will discover that the people already working within their businesses possess valuable knowledge and experience that can be deployed in entirely new ways. There is no guarantee that every technological change will protect every job. History tells us otherwise. But neither should redundancy be treated as the inevitable or preferred outcome of successful automation.
The IKEA and IFM examples point towards a more ambitious possibility. Technology can make organisations more efficient.
Human judgement determines whether that efficiency becomes merely a saving or the foundation of something more valuable.
Perhaps the defining question for the next generation of business leaders should not be: How many people can AI replace? But rather: What could our people achieve if we finally freed them from the work that prevents them from reaching their potential?
That is a much more interesting question. And potentially a much more profitable one.
Andrew Stanton is CEO of Proptech-PR, an international property technology consultancy, and Editor of PropTech-X. He has worked across the proptech and real estate sectors for a decade, advising founders, investors and established businesses with a combined mkt cap of £2.87Bn – on commercial strategy, market positioning and growth.
If you need guidance, deep insight, strategy and a trusted adviser book a meeting today https://calendly.com/andrew-stanton
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