A real estate advisory and design firm

A West Coast real estate advisory and design firm: a team of project managers, designers, and technical staff, and a long list of active projects. When we arrived, people were already using AI, but everyone was doing it alone. The engagement was about fixing that for the whole firm.

The challenge: Personal subscriptions, no shared context, no line on safety

Every employee was using personal AI subscriptions, with no shared context. Whatever one person figured out stayed with them, nothing connected to the firm's files and systems, and there was no line between what was safe to put into a tool and what wasn't. The partners wanted the tools built into how the firm operates, inside the security posture a firm handling client work needs.

The first decision was the platform itself. We helped the firm choose one AI platform to standardize on, worked through the rollout order with their IT partner, and connected it to the systems the team already uses, so that from the first week there was one sanctioned place to work.

The responsibility comes back to me.

A project manager, in the pre-work survey

The solution: A team workshop, one-on-ones, a ranked automation roadmap

The centre of the engagement was a half day in person with the whole team, each person in their own workspace: role instructions, connectors, projects, mapping a workflow and turning it into a visual, then scheduled tasks and skills. Written AI guidelines set the boundaries for all of it.

Then one-on-ones with each employee to map their work, feeding a ranked automation roadmap: which automations to build, in what order, and which to leave alone, each weighed on the time it returns against the effort to build it. A written playbook for the partners closes the loop, so the firm keeps making those calls itself.

The outcomes: Faster research, an in-house website, files catalogued

A research task that took a project manager four hours per project file now takes about forty-five minutes. The firm designed, built, and launched its newest project website in-house with AI rather than hiring a web team, and it now does research internally that it used to pay an outside consultant for.

One project manager catalogued an archive of about four thousand files that would have taken weeks by hand. A partner uses AI heavily for research. And the next automations are already chosen, by the people who will use them, on the ranked roadmap.