New Survey Tracks Real Estate’s AI Adoption Progress

Keyway and The Appraisal have launched a new industry survey tracking how commercial real estate firms are moving artificial intelligence out of pilot mode and into full enterprise deployment, according to Keyway. The confidential, five-to-10-minute survey targets professionals across acquisitions, lending, asset management, finance, legal, property management, and executive leadership. It builds directly on the firms’ earlier research into where AI adoption in commercial real estate tends to stall before it reaches production, at a moment when boards and investment committees are pushing for clearer proof of AI’s return on investment.

The Pilot Problem

The follow-up study extends Keyway’s “State of AI Adoption in Real Estate” report, which surveyed more than 150 U.S. real estate professionals earlier this year. That research found 45% of firms were actively running AI pilots, but just 9% had reached enterprise-wide deployment, and only 8% said their data infrastructure was fully ready to support AI at scale. Trust in AI outputs, data readiness, and system integration emerged as the three biggest barriers keeping pilots from becoming standard practice across the industry.

The Details

The new round digs deeper into where those programs actually live inside a firm: which business functions have adopted AI, what organizational models support it — centralized innovation teams versus function-by-function ownership — and which scaling strategies are working versus stalling out. Participation is open now, takes five to 10 minutes to complete, and every respondent receives the final report once results are compiled. Keyway hasn’t disclosed a close date or a target sample size for this round, and individual responses remain confidential.

Zooming Out

The findings so far track with other recent reporting on the sector: CRE Daily’s own coverage of how AI adoption reshapes strategy for firms across the U.S. and Canada found a similar pattern — plenty of experimentation, far less follow-through into live systems. More than half of respondents in Keyway’s earlier survey said they expect to meaningfully increase AI investment over the next two years, which suggests the pilot-to-scale gap could widen before it narrows industry-wide.

Why It Matters

For CRE firms, the space between piloting AI and actually deploying it is turning into a competitive line rather than a technology curiosity. Brokers, lenders, and asset managers who solve for data readiness and system integration now stand to move faster on underwriting, valuation, and leasing decisions than peers still testing tools in isolated pilots with no path to production.

That shift is already showing up in daily workflows. A separate look at what professionals are doing with AI tools in day-to-day CRE work found adoption spreading well beyond back-office experimentation and into deal-facing tasks like underwriting and lease abstraction — exactly the kind of workflow-level detail this new survey is trying to quantify.

What’s Next

Keyway and The Appraisal plan to publish full results once the new survey closes, with findings expected to break down deployment by business function, organizational model, and scaling strategy. Given that more than half of respondents in the prior round expect higher AI budgets through 2028, the next report should show whether that spending is finally converting pilots into finished, enterprise-wide systems — or whether the same trust and data-readiness gaps are still holding firms back.

Take the Survey HERE