It takes a village: A framework for technology exploration and adoption

People and technology: lessons learned in practice

Commercial real estate has always been a people business. Relationships matter. Trust matters. Expertise matters.

In many ways, those things will never change. But increasingly, differentiation is being shaped by two levers: people and technology.

The first lever is well understood. Great advisors, strong client relationships, exceptional service, and a collaborative culture will always matter.

The second is evolving more quickly. Technology is advancing at pace, with artificial intelligence, automation, agentic workflows and new data platforms emerging rapidly. Increasingly, the challenge is less about access to technology and more about judgement: separating what is genuinely useful from what is simply noise.

While much of the discussion around technology focuses on potential, the more immediate challenge is adoption: how organisations translate curiosity into implementation. In our experience, this often follows a repeatable pattern – explore, test, validate and scale.

Explore: The kite and the string

A useful way to think about this is as a balance between exploration and control.

Teams focused on innovation can act like the kite, exploring emerging technologies and testing new ideas. But a kite without a solid anchor quickly becomes lost. Functions such as information security, resilience, data architecture and application architecture provide the string, ensuring innovation remains grounded in operational reality.

As exciting as new technology can be, every opportunity raises practical questions:

• What data is being shared?
• How secure is the vendor?
• Can the platform integrate with existing systems?
• Is the vendor mature enough to support enterprise use?
• What regulatory, legal, or reputational risks should be considered?

Innovation without governance creates risk. Governance without innovation creates stagnation. Successful organisations need both.

Test: Why pilots matter

Technology decisions rarely happen in conference rooms; they happen through testing.

Rather than making large commitments upfront, a more effective approach is to run focused pilots with small groups of engaged users. Test often. Fail fast. Learn quickly. Refine. Repeat.

This approach allows teams to validate real-world use cases, understand adoption patterns, gather feedback, and measure business impact before making larger investment decisions.  Not every pilot succeeds — that's okay! The goal isn't to prove every idea works. The goal is to learn faster than the market.

Where we see opportunity

While the technology landscape is changing rapidly, the most immediate opportunities tend to be practical.

For example:

• Improving how marketing and client materials are created and delivered
• Enabling teams to extract more value from the vast amount of information available across organisations
• Enhancing day-to-day productivity across communication, workflow management and task automation

The goal is not to replace the human element that makes our industry successful. It's to amplify it.

Validate: It really takes a village

People often see the end result of a pilot – a new tool being tested by a team – and assume innovation is driven by a single group. The reality is very different. 

A successful technology evaluation requires contributions from many teams across the organisation. For example:

• Corporate development teams research the market, identify opportunities, and structure evaluations.
• Risk and resiliency teams assess vendor stability and operational risk.
• Information security experts evaluate data handling practices and security controls.
• Architecture teams determine integration requirements and technical compatibility.
• Procurement helps structure commercial agreements.
• Legal ensures contracts appropriately protect our clients, our data, and our business.

Only when all of those perspectives come together can an organisation responsibly move from curiosity to implementation.

Decide: Build, buy or partner

One of the most common questions we face is whether a capability should be built internally or purchased from the market.

There is no universal answer. Some workflows are so unique to the organisation that building internally may create a competitive advantage. Others are better served by specialised third-party providers that can dedicate their entire business to solving a particular problem.

The key is understanding the difference. That requires visibility into what competitors are doing, what startups are building, what adjacent industries are testing, and where the broader technology landscape is heading.

Looking ahead

Artificial intelligence is creating one of the most significant technology shifts we've seen in decades.

The pace of change can feel overwhelming at times. Yet organisations that remain curious, experiment thoughtfully, and build strong cross-functional foundations will be best positioned to navigate what's ahead.

We don't claim to have all the answers. But in our experience, creating the structures, teams, and processes is necessary to ask the right questions.

In this environment, the advantage is not in finding technology, but in building a repeatable way to adopt it – quickly, safely and at scale.