A monthly community of practice for commercial real estate professionals navigating AI adoption — grounded in real workflows, real concerns, and real results.
A step-by-step walkthrough: pick a model, give it persistent context and instructions, feed it the right data safely, and let it take action when you're ready.
AI × CRE is a monthly community of practice for commercial real estate professionals navigating AI adoption. We meet to share what's working, learn from each other's experience, and ask the harder questions about where this technology is taking our industry and our profession.
We are not here to sell tools or declare winners. We're here to build a practitioner-led knowledge base that's specific to CRE.
It started almost by accident. An unplanned meeting grew out of a CREWBiz post for women who wanted to learn — quickly — how to actually use AI in their work. That first conversation took on a life of its own. We came together through CREW Network, the commercial real estate industry's premier organization advancing women through connection to opportunities, information, and each other.
Today we're a small group of women building the plane while flying it: assembling practical resources, prompts, and playbooks for using AI in the commercial real estate market, and sharing what we learn as we go.
Michelle Hamilton’s newsletter for the group: practical AI for work, family, and everything in between. Issue 04 covers Anthropic’s October policy update, OpenAI’s Dots, checking Copilot’s cited answers, and a Stating, Sequencing & Specifying prompt you can use this week. Earlier issues are linked from the top of the page.
Built a custom GPT, a Claude project, a desktop pet, or a Muse? Tell us about it. We feature member-built assistants in the newsletter.
59 battle-tested prompts for lease abstraction, market memos, listing copy, outreach, and AI adoption — including Ashley Pyle’s Copilot pack from Session 5 and the six-step prospect build sequence from Session 6.
Log the sources you vetted, write your six filters down once, then score every company Fit × Reach and let the table sort itself. From Session 6. CSV export and print.
Standing instructions so your assistant cites its sources, writes “not found” instead of guessing, and never quietly drops a row. Copy, paste, done.
Two minutes on how you use AI, what you want to learn, and what's in the way — it shapes the agenda.
Notes, key takeaways, and follow-ups from each monthly session — searchable and dated.
Curated reading, tooling notes, and platform references gathered by the group across sessions.
A giant list of automations a small team actually runs — each paired with a plain-English blueprint for wiring it up.
A curated shelf of books, journals, and article collections the group points to for getting sharper on AI.
Map your highest-payoff tasks, score them, and pick your top three to hand to Copilot — with an Idea Bank of CRE workflows by role. From Session 5.
Notes, slides, and takeaways from each monthly session. Third Friday of every month · 10–11am EST · Microsoft Teams.
Who's in the room, what we're each wrestling with, and where this is heading.
The kickoff. We mapped who's adopting AI in their CRE workflows, which tools show up most, and what concerns members bring to the table — from data security to client comms to the hype-vs-reality gap.
The conceptual grounding — what these models actually do, and don't.
Karan walked the group through how large language models work, what they're good at, and where the failure modes show up in CRE workflows specifically. Heavy on examples, light on hype.
Leadership patterns — who's actually moving, and what they're doing differently.
A look at the firms and individuals quietly building a real edge with AI — what their adoption playbooks look like, where they're focusing first, and the cultural shifts that separate experimentation from operational change.
Where your time actually goes, and how to get it back with automation + AI.
Kaitlyn Study (South Street & Co.) on cutting the small, repetitive work that eats your day — building a digital assistant before you hire, plus real automation examples you can copy.
Practical AI for the way CRE actually works.
Ashley Pyle (GadellNet) on getting real hours back from Microsoft 365 Copilot — Basic vs Premium, the "racetrack not race car" mindset, Frame · Focus · Finish in Copilot, and a live lease workflow across Word, Excel, and Teams. Leave-behind: the prompt pack, demo kits, and the AI Opportunity Worksheet.
Building a prospect list you'll actually work.
Ivy Marguerite ran it live on a member directory: check the platform's terms before you touch it, filter inside the platform rather than in the prompt, research every company across four layers with a source on each one, then score Fit and Reach and work the list top down. Recap, recording, all six prompts, the build sheet, and the agent setup guide are all posted.
Stop re-explaining yourself to your AI every morning.
Michelle Hamilton introduced hers, live, by name. George runs on Claude Cowork, reads her calendar, email, Drive, Slack and meeting transcripts, and hands her six lines every morning: what is on the calendar, what cannot slip, what will slip if she does not touch it, who has waited longest, the one decision only she can make, and what got handled overnight. He drafts. He never sends. The recording is posted, along with the seven-step build, the two portable Markdown files, the four Ds of governance, seven copy-ready prompts, and the full sixteen-question FAQ Michelle wrote afterwards.
Security, safety, and terminology for CRE decision-makers.
Most AI conversations start with tools. This one starts with the questions that should come first: what the words actually mean, who can see your data, and how much to trust what comes back.
Anthony Peters, IT Systems Manager at BranchPattern, walks through the working vocabulary of AI in plain language: tokens, models, context windows, grounding, hallucinations, agents, permissions, and prompt injection. Then he separates two questions that often get blurred together. Security asks who can access your data and where it can go. Safety asks whether an output is reliable enough for what you’re about to do with it. Both matter, for different reasons.
The session also looks at the three paths firms tend to take with AI adoption (technology-first, liability-first, and people-first) and what changes when you stop using AI as a tool and start delegating work to it. The work moves faster. The accountability doesn’t move at all.
You’ll leave with:
A working reference for the AI platforms most likely to show up in CRE workflows — with the questions to ask before you commit. This market moves quickly; verify current terms at vendor sites.
If your prompt contains confidential client data, deal terms, financial projections, or personal information — you need enterprise-grade data protection. Consumer-tier tools aren't appropriate for this content.
Many firms have IT policies that restrict or prohibit certain tools. Find out before using. If there's no policy, that's a conversation to have with IT — not permission to proceed.
Match the tool to the job. Research with citations → Perplexity. Long document analysis → Claude. Excel automation → Copilot. Social content → ChatGPT. Don't default to one tool for everything.
Drafting, research, ideation, summaries. Plus/Team add image generation, web search, custom GPTs, and data analysis.
Free tier trains on your inputs by default — turn off in settings. Team adds privacy controls. Enterprise required for full data isolation.
Long documents, contract review, research synthesis, nuanced writing. Cowork (beta) extends to desktop file workflows.
Free has usage limits. Pro ($20/mo) adds larger context and priority access. Teams/Enterprise don't train on your inputs.
Reading what’s already on your screen — a filtered directory, a search result set, a listing page — and turning it into a table. The Session 6 workflow runs on this.
Check each site’s terms first. Some platforms bar AI agents outright, and some employers block extensions. Filter in the platform, not in the prompt, and never share a passcode with a tool.
Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, PowerPoint — context-aware AI inside the tools you already use every day.
Quality varies significantly by app. Requires M365 Business or Enterprise license. Not a substitute for standalone chat tools.
Docs, Sheets, Gmail, real-time web search, Workspace-native context. Strong on data-heavy tasks in Sheets.
Advanced tier needed for full Workspace integration. Less useful if your firm isn't already on Google Workspace.
Research with live citations, market data, news aggregation, competitive scans. Strong "where did this fact come from" trail.
Not a writing tool — optimized for retrieval, not drafting. Use it for the facts, take them somewhere else for the prose.
Maximum data security, firm-specific workflows and institutional knowledge. The endgame for firms with mature AI strategy.
Requires significant technical investment and ongoing maintenance. Not realistic for most smaller CRE firms today.