By Alex Vail

Every week, ARL members receive approaches from suppliers promising revolutionary outcomes. The challenge is no longer finding AI vendors. It is distinguishing meaningful innovation from expensive noise.

Having spent over a decade working with everyone from startups to high street banks in deploying emerging technologies, the relatively young rental living sector is experiencing the kind of tech transformation which is uncannily familiar to many more established sectors.

Although the rise of the personal computer began to grab hold of the public imagination with the rapid development of information technology in the 1980s, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the subsequent IT productivity boom arrived, even though it was based on technologies developed a decade earlier. ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,’ economist Robert Solow observed in 1987.

Whenever a new technology gains momentum, suppliers move quickly to position themselves within the emerging market. Some deliver genuine innovation. Others simply repackage existing capabilities with new language.

The AI market is no exception.

The ARL’s recent AI in Build to Rent Guide contains a notable observation from industry consultation: many products currently marketed as AI solutions may offer relatively limited sector-specific functionality despite extensive claims. That does not mean operators should ignore the market. It means they should become more disciplined buyers.

This shifts the focus of the conversation from technology (which might seem daunting) to procurement (which our members are veritable experts in).

It isn’t particularly important to ask whether a vendor has AI: almost every one of them will say ‘yes’. The better questions focus on what operational problems the system solves and how success should be measured.

The Guide provides an extensive procurement framework covering issues including model transparency, bias testing, security assurance, training data provenance, audit rights, retention policies, subcontractors and human oversight. It also highlights several “material red flag” questions that operators should expect vendors to answer in writing before contracts are signed.

Perhaps the most significant shift is that procurement teams now need to examine not only the software itself but also the model behind it:

• Where was it trained?
• What data was used?
• Can customer data influence future training?
• What happens if the model changes?
• Who remains accountable when things go wrong?

These questions would have seemed unusual a few years ago, but in the current climate, they are rapidly becoming standard governance questions every one of us needs to be asking.

The strongest operators are unlikely to be those that buy the most AI. They will be those that ask the best questions before they buy it.

We’ll be talking about these issues and much more at the AI in Rental Living Summit, taking place in Manchester on 28 September. We’re excited to bring together a host of experts to help our members understand how to measure value from AI and which questions to ask. We hope to see you there!

Register now to secure your place at the AI in Rental Living Summit, Manchester, 28 September.

Alex Vail is the Operations Director at the Association for Rental Living and the author of Data Culture, available from all good bookshops.