What Do Vantage Real Estate Council Leaders Really Think About AI And Digital Skills?

The gap between AI ambition and reality in real estate and facilities management is wider than most vendors would have you believe – and closing it will require more than technology investment. The latest Vantage Real Estate & Built Environment Council roundtable made this clear, surfacing both the barriers organizations are facing and the approaches that are making a difference.

At the end of April, senior leaders from across the corporate real estate, healthcare and public sector industries gathered to share what is happening on the ground across three topics: long-range portfolio strategy, AI and workforce optimization, and the growing digital skills shortage. When it came to AI and digital capability, the picture that emerged was candid and consistent.

Is AI adoption in real estate as advanced as the market suggests?

Across the group, AI use for real estate and FM initiatives remains at the pilot and proof-of-concept stage, with very few organizations reaching scaled, production-level deployment. A handful are testing predictive maintenance models, AI-assisted space planning tools and service desk triage applications. But for most, the honest answer is that the foundations are not yet in place to support broader rollout.

The recurring blocker is data, specifically:

• Fragmented asset records with no single master.
• Disconnected planned and reactive maintenance systems.
• Incomplete or inconsistent data across sites and geographies.

The consensus from the group is unambiguous: data consolidation is not a parallel workstream to AI adoption, it is a prerequisite.

How much do real estate leaders actually trust AI?

When asked how far they would allow AI to go, members drew a consistent line: yes to recommendation and analysis, no to autonomous decision-making and dispatch. Concerns around data privacy, inconsistent legislation across geographies and governance gaps all contribute to a cautious posture that is unlikely to shift quickly.

This is not resistance to change; it is a rational response to a market where vendors are overselling capability and regulatory frameworks are lagging behind technical development. The organizations making the most progress are those that have defined their trust boundaries clearly and built procurement criteria around them, rather than buying on promise.

Is the digital skills shortage a hiring problem or something deeper?

The digital skills gap in real estate and FM is not something that better job adverts will fix, because it is symptomatic of a structural issue rather than a cyclical one. FM is poorly represented in higher education, many practitioners entered the field by accident and the profession consistently struggles to attract technically minded talent from adjacent disciplines such as IT, data and engineering.

Some firms have made a deliberate shift in how they think about the capability they need – and this shift is making an impact. Rather than recruiting for deep technical specialization across every digital domain, leading teams are retaining people with the system-level thinking and vendor management skills to direct and challenge specialist providers effectively. For the scarcest capabilities – particularly IWMS/CPIP implementation specialists and smart building architects – the focus has moved to managing and commissioning external expertise well, rather than attempting to build it all in-house.

The harder problem to solve is the pipeline: without greater visibility of FM as a credible digital career, and without clearer progression paths for people entering from adjacent disciplines, the skills shortage will deepen as the current generation of practitioners retires.

The bottom line

The organizations getting this right are not waiting for perfect conditions, they are building internal fluency around AI and digital capability now, mapping pain points, understanding what different tool categories deliver and developing the rigour to evaluate vendor claims critically.

For more on how real estate and FM leaders are approaching digital strategy, read Verdantix Best Practices: Successful IWMS/CPIP Implementations, or find out how our Real Estate & Built Environment advisory team can support your organization along the digital maturity journey.