First Draft Live Ep 17: Inside CRE’s New Operating System (with Christian Ulbrich)

After years of cautious experimentation, CRE’s biggest players are finally scaling artificial intelligence.

JLL has been at the forefront of it, launching an in-house AI platform called Falcon that is cutting deal timelines from weeks to hours and automating the drudgery that once bogged down teams. The result is higher revenue per head, higher success rates when pitching and faster closings.

On this week’s show, CEO Christian Ulbrich gave a peek under the hood of how JLL is getting the most out of AI and how he sees it reshaping the industry.

It’s difficult to get an edge from AI, he said. Tools that drive productivity become table stakes within six months. The real differentiation only comes from new-to-market strategy, agentic AI that reinvents parts of CRE deal-making.

Still, the industry must act.

“Don’t wait too long,” he said. “The train has left the station and it is going at Japanese speed levels of train — very very fast.”