10 Themes for the Next Ten Years - No 10

Number 10: We Need a Bigger Pie - Expanding Opportunities in an AI-Driven World
‘by AGI we mean a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work’ - OpenAI’ definition.

We are, probably (but by no means certainly), many years away from AGI - Artificial General Intelligence - which, as above, involves systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. But truth be told, the road to AGI is a sliding scale, and we do not need to have achieved it absolutely before we start seeing significant changes in our businesses, and across society. Already we are seeing AI dramatically increase the productivity of certain tasks, such as software development. Google have talked about some 25% of their ongoing code creation being produced by AI, and superstar Andrej Karpathy has written about ‘vibe coding’ where "It's not really coding — I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works”. Substantial boosts in efficiency are here today.

The bottom line, an absolute certainty, is that:

‘AI means we will need fewer people to achieve our current level of output.’

So we need to ‘build a bigger pie’.

And by a ‘bigger pie,’ I mean expanding the scope of economic activity, creating new industries, and redefining the very nature of work and value.

But how?

Job Creation vs. Job Displacement
While AI will undoubtedly automate many existing roles, it also creates new opportunities. The challenge lies in ensuring that job creation outpaces displacement. AI opens up entirely new job categories, from AI ethics specialists to prompt engineers and digital experience designers. Governments, businesses, and educational institutions must collaborate to facilitate workforce transitions, ensuring that displaced workers can pivot into new, AI-enabled careers. The goal is not just to replace lost jobs but to create an abundance of higher-value opportunities that did not previously exist.

New Market Opportunities
AI is unlocking markets that were previously inaccessible or economically unfeasible. For example, AI-driven language translation enables businesses to enter global markets with unprecedented ease, while AI-powered analytics help companies identify untapped customer segments. In healthcare, AI facilitates remote diagnostics and personalised medicine, expanding access to high-quality care worldwide. By leveraging AI’s capabilities, businesses can scale into new domains and reach customers who were previously beyond their grasp.

Value Redefinition
Traditional economic metrics focus on tangible production and financial transactions, but AI is forcing a rethinking of value itself. In an AI-augmented economy, intangible assets such as data, knowledge, and creativity take on heightened significance. Companies must evolve beyond traditional revenue models, exploring AI-driven value creation through hyper-personalisation, experience curation, and digital ecosystems. This shift challenges industries to move beyond efficiency gains and instead reimagine what constitutes value in a world where information is abundant and intelligence is increasingly commoditised.

Entrepreneurship and Innovation
AI significantly lowers the barriers to entrepreneurship by democratising access to knowledge, tools, and markets. Startups can now leverage AI-powered automation, reducing operational costs and allowing smaller players to compete with established enterprises. The ability to prototype, test, and scale innovations rapidly cultivates a culture of creative problem-solving and continuous disruption. Moreover, AI-driven platforms facilitate innovation ecosystems where entrepreneurs can collaborate across geographies and disciplines, further expanding the economic pie.

Skill Evolution
Rather than simply replacing human labour, AI necessitates a shift in skills. The workforce must transition from routine, repetitive tasks to roles that complement AI capabilities—such as critical thinking, creativity, and interpersonal skills. Continuous learning and adaptability become central to career longevity. Nations and companies that invest in upskilling their workforce will be better positioned to capture the full economic benefits of AI, ensuring that people can participate meaningfully in an evolving labour market.

Economic Expansion
Historically, technological advancements have driven economic expansion by creating entirely new industries. AI’s potential follows a similar trajectory, enabling sectors such as synthetic biology, quantum computing, and immersive virtual environments. Crucially, AI does not merely optimise existing processes—it enables the emergence of economic activity that previously did not exist. By focusing on overall economic expansion rather than efficiency-driven cost-cutting, businesses and policymakers can ensure that AI contributes to a broader, more inclusive prosperity.

Inclusive Growth
For AI-driven economic expansion to be sustainable, its benefits must be widely distributed. Without intentional efforts, AI risks exacerbating inequality by concentrating wealth and opportunity among a small subset of individuals and companies. Policies that promote fair access to AI tools, invest in digital infrastructure, and encourage ethical AI deployment are essential. A more inclusive approach ensures that AI-driven growth is not just about building a bigger pie but ensuring that more people get a fair slice.

Conclusion: Embracing AI as a Growth Catalyst
AI is not just a tool for efficiency—it is a catalyst for market expansion, value creation, and economic reinvention. To fully realise its potential, businesses, governments, and individuals must shift their mindset from one of job protection to one of opportunity creation. By focusing on new market opportunities, skill evolution, and inclusive growth, AI can help build a future where economic prosperity is not a zero-sum game but an ever-expanding horizon of possibilities.

The challenge ahead is not merely about managing AI’s risks—it is about ensuring that AI is harnessed to grow economies, enrich societies, and create a world where innovation leads to shared abundance rather than scarcity.

Everything we’ve discussed over this series will come to naught if we do not ‘build a bigger pie’, but combined it does provide us with the raw materials to do so. Let’s just recap the essence of what we’ve been hypothesising:

1. The synergy between human intelligence and AI is becoming increasingly seamless, leading to unprecedented levels of productivity and innovation.

2. Traditional business models and processes are being deconstructed and reconstructed, with AI playing a central role in this transformation.

3. The concept of value is being redefined, with AI democratising access to high-quality services and experiences previously reserved for the elite.

4. Human skills like creativity, empathy, and complex problem-solving are becoming more valuable, even as AI capabilities expand.

5. The physical aspects of real estate are evolving to become more flexible, adaptive, and responsive to human needs.

6. There's a shift towards outcome-based services, where providers take more responsibility for delivering specific results.

These are powerful drivers of change. That will redefine much about how we understand the world around us and how and what we prioritise. To me they represent an extraordinary opportunity to both build a better built environment and to create and then curate a more inclusive, fulfilling, purpose driven society. One where, by embracing the new tools at our disposal, we raise the bar of what denotes the norm and ushers in a much more pervasive world of excellence. Why can’t we all have more - of everything? It is within our grasp. We can make it happen. For sure, this will involve wholesale disruption and require reinvention on a scale we’ve not dealt with before. But think back to the great gardener and landscape architect Lancelot ‘Capability' Brown who got his moniker from his fondness for describing country estates as having great 'capabilities' for improvement. Well, our current societies are just the same.

The next step is for businesses to embrace AI not just for efficiency but for expansion. Policymakers must create frameworks that encourage responsible innovation. And individuals should actively invest in skills that align with this new reality. The opportunity is vast—let’s seize it.

What do you think?

I’d love to hear your feedback about this series of ten themes for the next ten years. What excites you? What do you hope to achieve? How far do you think we can go?

10 Themes for the Next Ten Years - No 9

Number 9: #SpaceasaService loves Generative AI: The Progressive Company Nexus
‘Companies at the forefront of adopting Space as a Service concepts are often the same ones embracing Generative AI in their workflows.

This creates a synergy between physical and digital transformation efforts, marking these companies as ideal clients for innovative real estate solutions and advanced AI implementations.’

An underlying characteristic of all the themes we have looked at in this series is a progressive mindset. One that is doing everything to stifle those looking to tax the future to protect the fast. As the great American poet, Robert Frost, wrote ‘The only way out is through’ and in difficult times likes now, where we are morphing from the computer age to the AI age, this is apposite. You have to embrace the future in order to shape it.

And this mindset is shared by those in real estate embracing #SpaceasaService, and those in technology embracing Generative AI. Both of these are fundamentally creative movements that are looking to enable humans and machines to work together to produce things neither could achieve on their own.

This similarity of mindset means, I think, that progressive companies in real estate and companies embracing Generative AI are natural bedfellows and should be each others best customers.

Let’s walk through where these two exemplars of the current zeitgeist overlap:

• Predictive Space Management, where AI enables us to forecast occupancy and usage patterns.

• Personalised Environments where we create spaces that adapt to individual preferences automatically.

• AI-Driven Design where Generative tools allow us to create optimal layouts and aesthetics.

• Automated Facility Optimisation where AI manages and continually optimises energy, maintenance, and resources throughout a building.

• Cognitive Buildings that are structures that learn and evolve based on inhabitant behaviours.

• AI Concierge Services are advanced AI assistants that manage all aspects of space use.

• Wellness-Centric Design uses AI to optimise spaces for human health and wellbeing.

• Biophilic Integration utilises AI to seamlessly incorporate nature and natural elements into built environments.

And so on. #SpaceasaService aims to create the physical, social and emotional environments that enable people to be as successful as they are capable of being, and to make people, happy, healthy and productive. Generative AI (as well as non generative) provides many tools that contribute to making this possible. These are very much high tech and high touch places. Achieving the desired human outcome actually requires the successful synthesis of data, technology and advanced human skills. Hard and soft components are required. This is a quantitative and qualitative game.

There are other similarities in culture between #SaceasaService and Generative AI companies.

• Dual Innovation meaning that companies at the forefront of AI adoption are also at the forefront of business model and operating model innovation, so the standard office is unlikely to be human-centric enough for them.

• Automated + Augmented - both types of company favour balancing task automation with AI-augmented human roles.

• Flexible Spaces, Flexible Tech - there appears to be a correlation between adaptable workspaces and adaptable tech stacks. If you’re in favour of one you’ll likely be in favour of the other.

• Human-Centric Approach - prioritising employee experience in both the physical and digital realms. Talent density is essential in AI companies, so looking after your talent really matters.

• Data-Driven Decisions - using AI insights to optimise both space utilisation and business processes is a default setting in these types of companies.

• Continuous Adaptation - another default setting are cultures of ongoing learning and evolution in both space and tech use.

• Holistic Productivity - viewing workspace and AI tools as integrated productivity enhancers. One provides a flywheel for the other.

• Future-Ready Mindset - and finally management teams have to be prepared for rapid changes in both real estate and technology landscapes, and thus have to have an extremely well attuned future-ready mindset.

Taking all of this together I hope the point is clear that progressive real estate thinkers need to seek out progressive technology companies (or companies aggressively using technology) as they will be the most likely to buy into new ways of delivering value.

Everything about these ten themes will NOT be across the board. Companies pursuing them will be pre selecting who their target market needs to be. Looking at the innovation adoption bellcurve we’re after the early adopters and the early majority. That’s where the differentiation will be, as well as the premium market. After all there is a strong argument to be made that 30-40% of existing office real estate is already obsolete, or heading there fast. I don’t think we are far off the following scenario;

1. The top 15-20% of the market will be designed for large multi-national companies, that have the in-house scale and substance to create exceptional workplaces, in exceptional buildings, for their employees.

2. The next 40-45% of the market will operate #SpaceasaService - either by taking space in one of the growing breed of high quality flex operators, or by having one of these operators run their own buildings for them. CBRE buying Industrious suggests this is now a key plank of their thinking.

3. The remainder of the market either disappears (through shrinking down space requirements) or operates fully distributed. There is no future for low to medium quality commodity office space. It simply will not be needed.

This theme, number 9, is all about aligning yourself for the vanguard of this inevitability, which will likely play out over the next 5-10 years.

What do you think?
The future appears as much about human creativity as it is about algorithmic precision. Are we ready to embrace a world where our workspaces learn, adapt, and even anticipate our needs? What do you see as the most exciting opportunities—and the most daunting challenges—in melding advanced AI with the very fabric of our built environment? I’d love to hear your insights.

10 Themes for the Next Ten Years - No 8

Number 8: Evolving Real Estate: Form, Purpose, Location
‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us’

If we want to benefit the most from all the themes in this series, we need the right real estate. Winston Churchill, in this quotation, was succinctly explaining how our internal environment shapes us: how the form factor, purpose and location of a space matters. The real estate is an input to whatever output is created within that space.

We spend 90%+ of our time indoors, in buildings, in real estate. And at an individual level each of us knows where we would like to spend our time. But at the collective level we really don’t pay enough attention to what our personal instincts tell us. Over the next 10 years we need to over-index on the need for ‘Human-Centric’ real estate. What form factor should a space take to optimally support whatever its purpose is, and where should it be?

Historically real estate has been very siloed. Offices go here, retail here, entertainment here, residential here etc. Asset classes were very distinct. Every building knew its place. Today though, everything is becoming amorphous. I work at home, use the office to socialise, and hotel lobbies for meetings.

Technology now enables us to do ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’. RTO mandates fail because they fight against the tide of technology. The world of ‘everyone in the office, five days a week’ is fundamentally a pre-internet era construct. Which has just become clearer as capabilities have developed. As a society we are adjusting to this at different speeds, but adjust we will. There is no going back.

Hence the need to over-index on human-centric real estate. What matters when we have pervasive AI, and ‘the machines’ are doing a lot of our work for us?

I think, regardless of asset class, these are the ‘Six Pillars’ around which we need to develop our strategies. Whether we are investors, operators or occupiers.

Health and Wellbeing
We have known for decades that the environmental quality of the spaces we occupy impacts our cognitive function. Get the lighting, acoustics, temperature, air quality, and humidity right and people can function at their best. And if you can do this in combination with providing different types of ‘perfect’ environments to suit personal preferences you will be enabling people to be as productive as they are capable of being. But YOU WILL ALSO be contributing significantly to their health and wellbeing. Over the next 10 years we, in real estate, will become super sophisticated about optimising our spaces and places to this end. From a business point of view, in order to get maximum productivity out of your employees, you first need to help them be happy and healthy:)

Ergonomics & Comfort
The physical quality of space really matters. Being human-centric means understanding what your spaces are going to be used for, by whom, and then very carefully designing the ergonomics and comfort to suit.

Technology Integration
Apple have become a multi trillion dollar company by seamlessly integrating hardware, software and service. We need our spaces to work like this. Spending ten minutes getting the fancy technology working before any meeting starts is a sign of not being human-centric. In a human-centric building your technological needs would be pre-known, and therefore delivered friction free as required.

Community & Connectivity
This is a fundamental pillar. Because it accepts that over the next ten years community and connectivity will be THE purpose of commercial real estate. Everything else will have been offloaded to ‘the machines’. We discussed #HumanIsTheNewLuxury last week - and it underpins this. Why else, apart from doing what we cannot do elsewhere, would we bother to commute to an office? The best real estate will catalyse community and connectivity in ways we can barely imagine today. And they will have been designed specifically with this front and centre.

Flexibility & Adaptability
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has a sign above his desk that reads

’no one knows what happens next’.

And if he doesn’t know then nobody does.

What we do know is that every building has to be designed to be maximally flexible and adaptable. Across the developed world we are entering an era of obsolescence. Literally billions of square feet of real estate has outlived its product/market fit, and will have to be torn down, or repositioned or repurposed. We need to be smarter than this. We must create spaces that people can reconfigure and adapt to their changing needs.

Sustainability
And then of course the sixth pillar of human-centric real estate is sustainability. Regardless of current politics we all know that we have to decarbonise the built environment. So this is non-negotiable and foundational.

In summary then we’re need more green, tech-enabled, adaptive, multi-functional space that is deeply human-centric, where an exceptional user experience is the priority, and all the technology, data and AI we can muster is created and curated to deliver that.

While these six pillars provide a framework for individual buildings and spaces, we must also consider how broader societal shifts will play out over the next ten years.

Here’s four:

Decentralised Hubs
There is surely going to be a move away from ‘Central Business Districts’ to a much more decentralised set of ‘places of work’. We do need to congregate but not all in the same place. People talk of the power of agglomeration in Cities, but there is no bigger agglomeration of talent than on the Internet. Distributed working IS the future, and real estate needs to supply to this coming demand. CBDs will morph in Central Social Districts, CSDs.

Micro-locations
We are certain to see a rise of hyper-local community developments. That have a deep understanding of their customers wants, need and desires and a laser like focus on delivering against them. Additionally, these are likely to be mixed use. The artefact of locations dedicated to single use classes is a relic based on the technology available at the time. As we’ve discussed we are way past this, so it makes perfect sense for mixed use to be the default in many locations.

Transportation responsive design
Autonomous cars are here - ‘they’re just not evenly distributed’. Waymo, in San Francisco, operates a large fleet of fully autonomous self-driving taxis. What happens when this becomes the norm in major cities? When we don’t need any parking spaces? When underground garages and car parks serve no purpose?  Structures are going to change and the potential to reimagine urban layouts is immense. Over a decade fortunes are going to be made and lost here. Start buying where this will have consequences in 2030-35!

Fluid Space Allocation
A consequence of flexibility, adaptability, technology, and data will be our increasing ability to use space more intensively. What if, for instance, we could think of a curb as a delivery space in the morning, a pick up spot for ride sharing in the afternoon, and a restaurant in the evening? Or look at flex spaces today, that operate as places to work, meet, dine, socialise and more. So many spaces only get used a few hours a day. There are 24 hours a day - use them.

Looking Ahead
The rise of AI and other technologies is set to be highly disruptive to the real estate industry. Form factors will change as ‘the work we do’ develops into being, paradoxically, much more human-centric because being human is our only selling point. This will fundamentally change the purpose of asset classes and increasingly merge many into one. Most importantly it’s the separation of ‘Offices’ that, I think, will make no sense ten years from now. They will become increasingly multifunctional - otherwise what’s their point?

And finally we will be more distributed, and will commute less. We will though gravitate to places that are human-centric and are managed to optimise for this.

This doesn’t mean we’ll become isolated. Quite the opposite. If we build the right environments, focus on what truly matters—the customer—and embrace the future, our innate humanity will thrive. We will spend more time in meaningful, purposeful connection. In marvellous, human-centric real estate.

Real estate has always shaped society. The next decade will determine whether it empowers humanity—and that is up to us. Just as we shape our buildings, we can shape technology too.

What do you think?

I am intrigued as to whether this chimes with you? I am optimistic that, despite a level of disruption most people underestimate, we humans, and real estate people, can develop a better built environment that serves all our interests. Can we do it? In 10 years?

10 Themes for the Next Ten Years - No 7

Number 7: #HumanIsTheNewLuxury
‘LLMs are the revenge of the Humanities Graduate’

As a History and History of Art Graduate, who bizarrely also spent twenty years coding and running software companies, it is very pleasing to see the rise of Large LANGUAGE Models, which are transforming what it means to code. Instead of understanding the odd syntax of Python or Javascript the new interface to computational power is language. Indeed the great AI Researcher Andrej Karpathy has said:

‘The hottest new programming language is English’

Natural Language Computing, where we use text or voice to interact with ‘the machines’, appears to be the future. Where we describe what we want, an LLM understands and processes our wishes, and then offloads the task or tasks to an army of computing ‘tools’ who do our bidding. Unlike historically where we had to precisely know how to do something, now the most important thing is to be able to describe precisely what it is we want done. Hence the revenge of ‘Humanities Graduates’ who have been trained to have great facility with words. The stumbling and mumbling of an archetypal ‘techie’ is now a hindrance. Clarity, precision and persuasiveness are all of a sudden superskills rather than arty affectations.

This is just one way that the future is going to be a lot more human than many people believe. Despite the world becoming ever more mediated by technology, it is going to be the acquisition and development of human skills that will become, for most people, their route to a successful life.

Because #HumanIsTheNewLuxury.

We humans are very hard to please materially. We strive to acquire the next big thing, are in thrall to it for a while once acquired, and then, every single time, become tired of it a little further on. It’s why so many very rich people are miserable; they rapidly learn that being able to have everything is a curse not a blessing. Arriving is no fun. The journey is always the enduring pleasure.

And with technology this is true in spades. There is a saying that ‘AI is anything that doesn’t work - as soon as it works it’s just…. statistics’. We move on very fast. It wasn’t that long ago that maintaining a phone signal while travelling in a car was hit and miss. Now we rage when our 4k video streaming at 80 mph drops off. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI has quipped that people veer between saying ‘AI will end the world’ one day to ‘It’s SO slow’ the next.

We're fickle. We're not really interested in technology itself - we care about what it enables us to do. And somehow, it's never enough.

Shania Twain nailed it:

‘Okay, so you're a rocket scientist
That don't impress me much’

And this will just become more and more obvious as technology improves. We’re realistically within 2-10 years of AGI - Artificial General intelligence, which OpenAI have defined as ‘a highly autonomous AI system that can perform most economically important tasks better than humans.’ But will we be impressed? For a while, but shortly thereafter it too will merge into the background. Once we can let AI do all the things needing doing, we’ll be back to the perennial question; Now what?

With a big caveat. That ‘perform most economically important tasks better than humans’ means that we’ll need to be inventing a whole new set of ‘economically important tasks’. Where the AI cannot substitute for us. We’ll need to be doubling down on being human. But being human that has economic value. Incentives matter to humans and we like to create value and be valued.

So where might this take us?

Where does our capacity for nuanced emotion, our desire for authentic connection, our appreciation of imperfection, become not just differentiators but essential qualities?

I think in seven key directions:

1. Personalised Experiences: This is a classic area where AI will help us be more human. It is very good at personalising at scale digitally, but if one can combine this personalisation with human delivery there are many opportunities to provide exceptional experiences.

2. Emotional Intelligence: Now, computers can ‘simulate’ emotional intelligence very well but there is an irreplaceable role for human empathy and understanding. Many high IQ people have very low EQ, but in a world where AI provides the IQ, working on one’s EQ makes a lot of sense.

3. Creative Problem-Solving: This is one of the great superpowers for the AI age. Problem solving alone is an intellectual muscle we all need to work on but if one can add creativity to it, then magical things can happen. From current research we know that using LLMs does raise the creativity of most people but it does so both in the same way, and in a different way to how humans are creative. We have more creative ideas, but they tend to all follow a similar pattern, and these ideas are not those we’d have left to our own devices. So humans need to work with LLMs but never lose sight of the need to inject humanity into the equation. Many products and services will be AI developed but the luxury ones will have that human je ne sais quoi.

4. Authenticity: The value of genuine, non-automated human connections will become incalculable. All our luxury moments will be authentic.

5. Artisanal and Bespoke Services: Custom, human-crafted solutions are already luxury offerings, but in a world of mechanical perfection we will actively seek out imperfection. The imperfect will be unique, the perfect a commodity. It is upside down, but humans like ‘character’ and few real characters are perfect. There is a sterility to perfect that we tire of. It is enervating. It bores us. We want to feel the human in the loop. Artisanal and bespoke services will definitely be a luxury we strive for. Think vinyl versus CD - the CD is perfect but vinyl speaks to your soul.

6. Human-Centered Design: Spaces and services designed to enhance human experiences and catalyse human capabilities will be the only spaces and services people actually want. They won’t always get them, but it will be what the luxury market provides. And as with personalised experiences, these will be the fruit of human + AI working in synergy, creating something that is better than either could create alone.

7. Community Building: The importance of human-facilitated social connections cannot be overstated. Remove community from society and we have nothing. This will be the ultimate luxury in an AI mediated world.

Given we spend more than 90% of our time inside buildings, real estate is the crucial canvas for bringing these human values to life. Here's six ways they might manifest themselves:

1. Concierge Services: High-touch, personalised property management will be the ‘premium’ offering. AI will help us know a lot about you but it’ll be a human that turns that knowledge into something special. Helping enable you to be ‘happy, healthy and productive’ is the aim, and that takes data, resources…. and a deft human touch.

2. Curated Spaces: Human-curated environments that cater to specific lifestyle needs will be essential. Curation is currently an under-appreciated skill - it won’t be in the future.

3. Relationship-Based Transactions: Personal, trust-based interactions in high-end real estate deals will distinguish them from the norm of automated transactions. Often we will want automated transactions but for those that really matter we want to deal with humans. If you could buy a home with just one push of a button, would you?

4. Experiential Retail: Retail was hit by online technology a decade, or two, before offices but it is clear that successful retail spaces focus on human-centred, memorable experiences. Offices will follow.

5. Wellness-Focused Design: ‘there is no wealth without health’ so spaces that prioritise human well-being and personal interaction are a very obvious luxury offering. This will become ever more so as we have more time to invest in it.

6. Community-Centric Developments: Real estate HAS to be designed to foster human connections and community engagement. We’re going to see a renaissance of mixed-use developments. The industrial era gave us  live, work, play separation - the AI era will bring all of these back together. Commuting is almost the antonym of luxury - AI will lead to its demise.

Does this sound like a world you’d enjoy? I think I would. Will it happen? I’m 100% certain it will, for some. #HumanIsTheNewLuxury is such a wonderful thing to aspire to. Putting humans, and humanity, at the centre of a good life.

The big challenge will be in making it the norm, not just a #Luxury.

Next Steps

What constitutes #Luxury in your business? Can that become your North Star to aim at? Let me know.

10 Themes for the Next Ten Years - No 6

Number 6: Outcomes as a Service - Beyond Software to Solutions

“Outcomes as a Service represents a shift from simply providing software or tools to delivering comprehensive solutions that guarantee specific results.”

This statement encapsulates a burgeoning hypothesis that promises to fundamentally reshape the technology landscape, particularly in industries like CRE.

Why SaaS Isn’t Enough Anymore
The traditional Software as a Service (SaaS) model, while revolutionary in its own right, is increasingly seen as a stepping stone to a more outcome-focused future.

This future is defined by Outcomes as a Service (OaaS), a paradigm shift where the value proposition moves beyond access to software and towards the guaranteed achievement of specific, measurable business results.

Driven by the demand for tangible value and empowered by advancements in Artificial Intelligence, particularly the emergence of sophisticated AI Agents, OaaS is poised to become the dominant model, profoundly altering the supply side of industries like PropTech.

The limitations of the pure SaaS model are becoming increasingly apparent. While SaaS democratised access to powerful software and streamlined operations, it often left the burden of achieving desired business outcomes squarely on the shoulders of the client.

Companies purchased software subscriptions, but the responsibility for successful implementation, user adoption, and ultimately, achieving tangible improvements, remained with them.

How AI and IoT Make OaaS Possible
OaaS addresses this gap directly. Rather than just providing a tool it offers a comprehensive solution, often combining software, hardware, services, and expertise, with the explicit commitment to deliver predefined business results.

The fundamental issue with Software as a Service is that in an AI mediated world there are things beyond just software that matter. With AI we need to understand what is possible, what data is required, how to collect it, how to cleanse it and then how to apply models to it that give us the outcomes we desire. It’s complicated. The number of moving parts has multiplied and a wide range of skills are needed to orchestrate a complete solution.

Software alone won’t get us where we want, and need, to go. And actually, we don’t want the process, we want the outcome.

It’s the difference between subscribing to, say, an energy management platform, and partnering with an OaaS company who will guarantee a specific percentage reduction in energy consumption, with their fees directly tied to achieving that target.

Other examples might be:

• Tenant Satisfaction Assurance: Committing to specific tenant satisfaction scores

• Sustainability Outcomes: Delivering specific environmental performance metrics

• Space Utilisation & Optimisation: Ensuring efficient use of space based on agreed metrics

This is the essence of OaaS – a move from selling (or buying) access to software to selling (or buying) tangible, measurable outcomes.

And several factors are converging to make OaaS the logical next step beyond SaaS.

Crucially, the demand for demonstrable Return on Investment (ROI) from technology investments is intensifying. Businesses are no longer satisfied with the promise of efficiency; increasingly they are demanding quantifiable improvements to their bottom line. Not least of all because, (whisper it quietly), they don’t know how to get the best out of all the software they’ve signed up to. We all know that installing software is one thing - getting your people to use it effectively is quite another.

But it is also because other technologies have matured and we now have access to IoT devices spitting out copious data points that have to be analysed in order to accurately measure and track progress towards specific outcomes. Our ‘Smart Buildings’ are outsmarting us!

The big push though is the new reality that AI is defining. We now have algorithms that can analyse massive datasets, identify patterns, predict future outcomes, and proactively optimise systems to achieve predefined goals. But …. it’s all very complicated.

On top of which we’re now seeing the emergence of AI Agents – autonomous software entities capable of performing complex tasks with minimal human intervention – and these are opening up whole new worlds of opportunity. Which, again, we mostly don’t understand but ‘know’ will be transformative.

These agents can continuously monitor building performance, adjust settings, even interact with tenants or building systems in real-time to drive specific outcomes like optimised occupancy or enhanced tenant satisfaction.

For example, an AI agent could dynamically adjust HVAC settings based on occupancy patterns and weather forecasts to minimise energy consumption, or proactively address tenant requests to improve satisfaction scores. This level of proactive, intelligent automation makes the delivery of guaranteed outcomes increasingly feasible and scalable. If only we had a way to get it all working.

Enter the OaaS providers. The ‘middleware’ if you like, between the technology and desired destination.

The Shift for PropTech Companies
It’s not just the demand side though that will be affected by all of this. The fundamental shift from selling software to selling outcomes will necessitate a dramatic transformation on the supply side, particularly for current PropTech companies. Their existing organisational structures, pricing models, and overall business models will need significant overhauls to effectively deliver on the promise of OaaS.

Organisational Changes Needed
First, organisational structures will need to evolve beyond feature-driven development and sales. Sales teams will need to become adept at understanding client business objectives and translating them into quantifiable outcome targets.

New roles, such as "Outcome Managers" or "Value Engineers," will become crucial, responsible for defining, orchestrating, and ensuring the delivery of agreed-upon outcomes. This will require strong project management skills, a deep understanding of both the technology and the client's business, and the ability to collaborate effectively across internal teams.

Data science and analytics will move from a supporting function to a core competency, critical for measuring progress, demonstrating value, and continuously optimising solutions.

Customer success teams will transform from reactive support providers to proactive partners, focused on driving adoption and ensuring clients achieve their desired results.

New Pricing Models
Secondly, the traditional pricing models of current SaaS companies will be disrupted. The predictable recurring revenue of subscription-based pricing will likely give way to more complex, performance-based models. We will see an increase in:

• Performance-based pricing: Fees directly tied to the achievement of specific outcomes (e.g. a percentage of cost savings, a fee per successful tenant placement).

• Risk-sharing agreements: Vendors share the financial risk, potentially taking lower upfront fees with larger payments contingent on achieving predefined targets.

• Value-based pricing: Pricing reflects the perceived value delivered to the client, directly linking costs to the realised business benefits.

This shift will require PropTech companies to develop sophisticated methodologies for measuring and tracking outcomes, along with robust contractual frameworks that clearly define the responsibilities and liabilities of both parties.

Evolution of Business Models
Finally, the overall business model will need to evolve from being primarily a software provider to becoming a comprehensive solution provider.

The software itself will become an enabler, but the true value will lie in the integrated suite of services, expertise, and partnerships that guarantee the delivery of outcomes.

This implies a significant increase in investment in areas like consulting, implementation, data analysis, and ongoing support.

PropTech companies will need to forge long-term, strategic partnerships with their clients, moving beyond transactional relationships to collaborative ventures focused on achieving mutual success. This also necessitates building ecosystems of partners to cover the diverse expertise required to deliver a wide range of outcomes.

What’s Next for the CRE Industry?
The question then becomes: who will be best positioned to capitalise on the OaaS opportunity? Several scenarios are plausible:

• Evolving Existing PropTech Companies: Some companies are beginning to experiment with outcome-based elements (Salesforce with their Agentforce service - Intercom with Fin, their customer support bot), though I’ve not seen it yet in PropTech. But they possess the core technology and understanding of the CRE industry. To succeed with OaaS, they will need to invest heavily in building out their service capabilities, developing robust data analytics infrastructure, and forging strategic partnerships.

• Emergence of Specialised Startups: We are likely to see the rise of new startups specifically designed to deliver niche outcomes within the CRE space. These agile companies can focus on specific problem areas and build deep expertise in delivering those particular results, potentially becoming acquisition targets for larger players.

• CRE Professional Services Firms: Established players like JLL, CBRE, and Cushman & Wakefield possess deep industry knowledge, extensive client relationships, and a strong understanding of client needs. They are uniquely positioned to integrate technology into their existing service offerings and offer comprehensive, outcome-based solutions. They could achieve this by developing their own in-house PropTech capabilities, acquiring promising startups, or forming strategic partnerships with existing technology providers. But, as history tells us, this is easier said than done. Particularly the adjustment to new core business models. How much of an ‘Innovators Dilemma’ does this constitute?

Ultimately, the future of technology in commercial real estate is likely to be shaped by a combination of these forces.

We may see the emergence of "ecosystem orchestrators" – potentially the larger CRE service firms or some of the more forward-thinking PropTech companies – who build platforms and cultivate partnerships to offer a broad spectrum of outcome-based services.

Regardless of who leads the charge, the shift towards OaaS would seem to be inevitable.

It represents a fundamental re-evaluation of value, placing the focus squarely on tangible business results and ushering in a new era of partnership and accountability.

It is an example of ‘Human + Machine Synergy’ - where new technologies enable things that were not possible before but maximising the potential requires a deep integration of human and computational capabilities. The very best outcomes will not be achieved by automation, but by a subtle blending of the quantitative with the qualitative.

We are humans after all.

Next Steps
If you’re curious about how OaaS might transform your business or want to share your experiences, let’s start a conversation. Your insights could shape the future of this paradigm shift.