The real problem isn't AI. It's the data underneath.

The biggest bottleneck to AI adoption isn't the technology. It's the mess underneath it.

Even at sophisticated firms, a surprising amount of real estate intelligence still lives in Excel files, scattered PDFs, siloed databases, and institutional knowledge locked inside people's heads. When teams layer AI on top of this without first unifying the foundation, the output is only as good as the fragmented inputs.

This is what we built Quanthome to solve. Our platform unifies the Swiss real estate market into one structured, live foundation: over 2 million buildings and 150+ investment vehicles, covering financials, ESG, construction data, and transactions. When a client's proprietary portfolio data meets Quanthome's market intelligence, the AI has the full picture. Not fragments. The whole story.

Asking a brilliant junior analyst to work without a proper database, armed only with Post-it notes and scattered files, is absurd. Yet that's functionally what happens when firms deploy AI without an underlying data platform.

10 to 20% gains, then it stalls

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found in 2025 that generative AI users save an average of 5.4% of their working hours. Across all workers, the aggregate gain drops to 1.4%. The Penn Wharton Budget Model compiled multiple studies showing gains between 10% and 55%, but the impact on total factor productivity in 2025 was 0.01 percentage points. Essentially zero.

Meanwhile, a rigorous METR trial (July 2025) found that experienced developers using AI tools were actually 19% slower, while believing they were 20% faster. A 39-point gap between perception and reality. MIT Technology Review reported an independent replication with similar results.

The pattern is consistent. AI accelerates isolated tasks, but without process redesign, the gains evaporate. Time saved on one step gets absorbed by prompting, reviewing, correcting, and re-formatting on others. Parkinson's Law kicks in: the work expands to fill the day. The EY US AI Pulse Survey (December 2025) confirmed this: 96% of companies see AI productivity gains, but 47% simply reinvest them into more AI capabilities. Only 17% do anything structural with the savings.

When companies adopt AI without rethinking their processes, the benefits are marginal. A 10 to 20% improvement on scattered tasks. That's not transformation. That's a faster hamster wheel.

The real lever: redesign the process

The research is clear on what actually works: process redesign.

Anthropic's "Building Effective Agents" lays out the framework: decompose tasks into steps, route work to the right models, parallelize where possible, escalate to autonomous agents only when complexity demands it. Their internal research shows that 27% of AI-assisted work at Anthropic would never have been done at all without it. Engineers became "full-stack," doing entirely new categories of work.

Google's Workspace study found the same. Companies at "high AI transformation" reported 57% more innovation and 65% more creativity. Not from automating email, but from reducing mundane tasks by 39% and redirecting that bandwidth toward strategic work.

The question for leading real estate firms isn't "will AI replace your analysts?" It won't. It's "are you redesigning workflows so AI handles the data-heavy research while your people focus on strategy, negotiation, and relationships?" The firms already investing in proprietary platforms (JLL with Falcon, CBRE with Ellis) clearly understand this. The opportunity is enormous for those who pair strong AI tools with a properly structured data foundation.

From workers to architects: how Quanthome fits in

Consider the tasks Wall Street flagged as "automatable": lease abstraction, market research, comparative analysis, portfolio reporting, valuation. These are data-intensive, repetitive, and structured. They are also exactly where a platform like Quanthome AI delivers massive acceleration.

An asset manager on our platform can ask in plain language: "Which areas in Lausanne have the highest concentration of condominiums owned by real estate funds?" Quanthome AI queries structured datasets across every building in Switzerland, cross-references with investment vehicle data, runs the calculations, and delivers the answer with full transparency. Challenge the result, and it self-corrects. Two days of manual work, done in 30 seconds.

This only works because the data is unified from the start. Quanthome merges each client's proprietary data with the full market database: financials, ESG, construction, transactions, investment vehicles. It's this total, cross-functional view that separates institutional-grade analysis from chatbot guesswork.

When you have that foundation, the professional's role elevates. The analyst stops collecting data and starts architecting decisions. She formulates the right questions, challenges the AI's reasoning, spots the strategic implications, and makes the call. The human becomes the architect, not the bricklayer.

But this requires breaking the silos. An asset manager with ESG data in one system, financial performance in another, and market intelligence in a third will never unlock the full power of AI. Quanthome connects these dimensions into one platform, turning a "three-day Excel report" into a "30-second portfolio diagnostic."

The question that matters

The "AI Panic" of February 2026 will pass. The leading firms have real, durable advantages: relationships, negotiation expertise, market intuition, deal-making at scale. No AI is going to replicate a handshake at MIPIM or the trust built over a 20-year client relationship.

But the wake-up call is real. The question is no longer "How do I use AI in my 8-hour day?" That accepts the premise that the processes are fixed and AI is just a faster pen.

The real question is: "What should my day look like if my processes, my data, and my tools were designed for the AI era?"

Unify your sources. Connect proprietary data to market intelligence. Break the silos. Redesign the workflows so AI handles the analytical heavy lifting and your people own the decisions that create value.

That's what we're building at Quanthome. And after this week, we're more convinced than ever that it's the path forward for the entire industry.