Human Behavior, Marketing Analytics and AI: Takeaways from this Year's OpTech

I’m still recovering from an incredibly busy OpTech last week. Shout outs to Doug Bibby, Kim Duty, Rick Haughey and the entire NMHC team for what I think was the best content ever at OpTech. My only regret was the number of meetings I had that conflicted with sessions I wanted to attend; but as they say, that’s a luxury problem!

I may be a bit biased (ok, I’m totally biased), but I think the best session was Friday morning on the topic of robotics and artificial intelligence. I was honored to moderate a “fireside chat” with Neil Sahota from IBM/Watson and Andrei Faji from Wayblazer. It was truly one of the best sessions I’ve been involved in during my career. Aside from the fact that I had two incredibly accomplished professionals who made it so easy for me to moderate, what made it great was how these outsiders to our industry quickly explained exactly how AI and robotics apply to our industry…and how they apply TODAY, not some distant time in the future. I believe AI will be the next big game changer in our industry. If you’d like to discuss more about how, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

Here are a few other takeaways from the conference:

• The quality of the content continues to improve. I left each of the sessions I attended with specific ideas about how operators should behave and tools they should use.
  
  
• Peter Diamandis, the keynote, gave one of the most practical keynotes I’ve attended (ok, again I’m biased as he’s a fellow MIT grad). But seriously, he gave a very accessible presentation describing how continued exponential growth in computing and networking will continue to change the nature of human behavior and business. Again, there are practical implications for our business. C-suite executives ignore these lessons at their own peril.
  
  
• Marketing and marketing analytics continues to move forward. It’s music to my ears when people talk about getting better insight into the prospect (and customer) journey and try to put real numbers behind that. No one has fully cracked that nut, but there’s much more of a consensus around the need to do so.
  
  
• In a related observation, there’s a continuing growth in spending and effort on business intelligence (BI); but are we doing it right? I still worry that BI efforts are either too report-driven (as opposed to data modeling driven) and/or they are IT-led rather than business-led. Even with those concerns, I am buoyed by the amount of attention the subject is getting.
  
  
• Speaking of data and effort, I heard more about business cases instead of just qualitative arguments. I am a HUGE fan of requiring a quantitative business case for every project or initiative. Even if it’s hard to quantify, C-suite executives should push project champions to make some assumption about where the value is going to come from. Is it higher occupancy? Higher rent growth? Reduced expenses? Maybe lower employee turnover? The point is to tie each initiative to business results even when there’s some leap of faith in accepting the assumptions.
  
  
• As with any technology event, I also saw hype on capabilities that I’m not sure will pan out. As an example, I saw multiple virtual reality (VR) vendors. They have some exciting technology, but the path to ROI is still a bit unclear to me…at least in our industry. So, it will be interesting to see which technologies survive Gartner’s Hype Cycle and those that don’t.

Just one final word of caution. I love innovation, and I spend a lot of time thinking about new technologies and how to gain adoption. However, at the end of the day, I find our industry needs more execution more than innovation. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to continually innovate. Just don’t get so excited about the latest new thing that you take your eye off the execution ball. In multifamily housing, great execution of slightly old technology and process will beat out mediocre execution on the latest technology every day of the week (and the proverbial “twice on Sunday”).

Looking forward to seeing you somewhere in the future… but a little relieved the conference season for 2017 is over!