COHEN ON REAL ESTATE

It’s intern season, and my intern Emma Grene started this week.

The first day was spent getting access to software. The second day was updating listings. Today she’s cleaning up spreadsheets and contact lists.

She’s doing exactly what interns have done for decades.

Then last night, I read Benedict Evans latest presentation, AI Eats the World, and it made me wonder:

What if I had a million interns?

At first, it sounds ridiculous. Then you realize that’s exactly what AI is becoming.

A million intelligent assistants who can research properties, monitor portfolios, update databases, draft marketing, analyze leases, summarize meetings, identify potential sellers, and never get tired.

What would I ask them to do?

That’s the question every business should be asking.

Commercial real estate has always scaled by hiring more people. More analysts. More coordinators. More researchers. More assistants.

AI changes that equation.

Every investor, broker, lender, developer, and owner is about to gain access to an almost unlimited workforce. The cost of intelligence is falling toward zero.

The human still makes the decisions. The machine performs the work.

As Benedict states:

Every major technology eventually becomes infrastructure. Electricity. The internet. Cloud computing. AI is following the same path.

Nobody competes because they have electricity. Soon, nobody will compete because they have AI. They’ll compete because of what they’ve built on top of it.

That simple shift has profound implications.

1. Proprietary data becomes the moat.

The best AI models will become widely available. The differentiator becomes the data.

Every commercial real estate platform is becoming an AI company. The firms that own proprietary transaction data, buyer behavior, search intent, offering memorandums, due diligence documents, leasing activity, and historical sales information will build smarter systems because they learn from information nobody else has.

The model becomes infrastructure. The data creates intelligence.

2. Scale changes completely.

Large firms have traditionally enjoyed an advantage because they could hire more people.

AI enables small firms to operate like much larger organizations. One experienced broker, supported by intelligent systems, may soon accomplish what once required an entire team.

3. Relationships become more valuable.

Research becomes instantaneous. Underwriting becomes faster. Marketing becomes automated.

Trust becomes more valuable.

Owners still choose advisors they believe in. Investors still back people with judgment.

AI produces analysis. People provide conviction.

4. Brokerage becomes an operating system.

The firms that win won’t simply adopt AI. They’ll redesign how they work.

Prospecting flows into research. Research flows into underwriting. Underwriting flows into marketing. Marketing flows into buyer engagement. Transactions flow into portfolio management.

The business becomes one connected system instead of dozens of disconnected tasks.

---

This brings me back to my intern.

She’s spending this week doing the kind of work interns have always done. I don’t think that’s what internships will look like much longer.

The purpose of an internship was never updating spreadsheets. It was always developing the next generation of commercial real estate professionals. Busywork simply helped justify the cost.

AI changes that equation.

If software handles the administrative work, interns can spend their time sitting in client meetings, touring properties, underwriting deals, negotiating contracts, asking questions, and developing the judgment that actually creates value.

That’s a better internship. It’s a better business. And it’s a better future for commercial real estate.

In a few years, we probably won’t call this AI. We’ll just call it business.

And every business will have a million interns.

The firms that thrive will be the ones that know how to put them to work.