MHN Executive Council: Where to Draw the Line With AI (Part 2)
More suggestions about where to have a human touch.
As important and as useful as AI applications have become, they shouldn’t be used for every task, especially for those in the multifamily industry. This month the Executive Council shares what they don’t use AI for. (Read part 1.)
Human Experience
I think of AI the same way I think about any great tool—it should give you more time to be human, not less. If it’s helping me spend less time on administrative work and more time with our teams, our clients and our residents, it’s doing exactly what it should. We believe technology should enhance the human experience, not replace it. If AI starts making decisions for you instead of helping you make better ones, that’s where I’d draw the line. —Kari Warren, COO of Property Management, Kairoi Residential
Fitting the Situation
Use AI for efficiency. Keep judgment, connection and accountability human.
AI is incredibly useful for accelerating research, organizing ideas, identifying patterns, challenging my thinking, and eliminating work that does not require uniquely human judgment. If AI gives me the answer, I still have to ask: Does this fit the situation? Does it fit the people involved? What might it be missing? And am I willing to own the decision?
For me, the best use of AI is not to think less. It is to create more capacity to think about what matters most. —Maria Pietroforte, President, Maria Pietroforte Consulting
Management Challenge
In the new age of AI, we have our greatest management challenge yet. AI can be a magic bullet for expedited research, data analysis and documentation. However, if left to its own devices, it can be too literal, lack common sense and an abhorrent writer. We need to learn more powerful prompts, which make us all managers of a new assistant. It is the new Management 101, but for a bot. The faster we learn how to master the management, the better our work will be. I doubt AI will ever replace real expertise or human judgment, so we never accept it as final without a thorough human edit. —Suzanne Rosnowski, Founder & CEO, Relevance International
Automate Aggressively
This may be a bold perspective, but I’m less concerned about designers relying too heavily on AI than I am about designers not using it enough and spending valuable creative time doing work a machine can increasingly help us do.
The demands on design disciplines today are intense. We’re expected to document, visualize, coordinate and administer increasingly complex projects at a pace that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago. AI gives us an opportunity to shift that equation. I always say we want to keep our designers designing. If AI can give them back hours previously spent on production, documentation, or administrative tasks, I want us to rely on it heavily.
But there is a very clear line: AI should create capacity for design, not become the designer. AI is remarkably good at consuming precedents, recombining it and producing something that looks convincing. But design isn’t simply the aggregation of things that already exist. Particularly in multifamily, we’re creating spaces where people live their lives, meet their neighbors, build community, and make memories. Those environments require empathy, judgment, curiosity and an understanding of people and place that cannot be reduced to an algorithm, or worse, a pretty picture that’s not feasible.
So, my threshold is simple—automate aggressively around the act of design but protect the act of design itself. The more AI can take off our plates, the more time we should have to think, question, create, and ultimately produce better places for people. —Josh Kassing, Managing Principal, Mary Cook Associates
Interested in joining the MHN Executive Council and sharing your insights? Email Jessica Fiur.
