JLL rolls out proprietary generative AI model to internal employees

Dive Brief:

JLL rolled out a proprietary large language model, JLL GPT, to its more than 103,000-member workforce last week. The company’s technology division, JLLT, developed the generative AI capabilities specifically for the commercial real estate industry and is looking to offer the tech to clients in the future.
The tool features a conversational interface, allowing users to ask natural language questions similar to other popular models. The decision to build versus partner or buy was motivated by the need for security as well as to have a model trained on commercial real estate data, said Yao Morin, JLLT CTO.
“For us in JLL and commercial real estate in general, we really need to be the expert,” Morin said. “There are a lot of data and information that is not available to the general public that we wanted to capture and leverage through the GPT technology and offer to our employees.”

Dive Insight:

As employees familiarize themselves with the model, JLL is monitoring usage and the number of unique visitors coming in.

In the first 48 hours following the rollout, more than 11,000 employees used the model, the company told CIO Dive.

JLL Technologies developed a proprietary LLM to generate relevant information for employees and turn data into insights by fine-tuning it with internal commercial real estate information along with other external data sources. The goal is to augment, not serve as a replacement for employees.

After initial tests yielded success, the company felt comfortable forgoing gradual deployment.

“It has been overwhelmingly very positive,” Morin said. “We decided to roll it out to the entire JLL because we feel like we have tested it and we really have a lot of confidence in what we have built.”

The company chose not to share certain details related to the development of the technology due to the “highly competitive” nature of AI in the commercial real estate landscape.

JLL operates in more than 80 countries around the world and brings in annual revenue of $20.9 billion. Before JLL GPT, the company used AI to improve building efficiency, generate 3D leasing visuals, calculate sustainability risks and power investment leads.

One in five of all JLL Capital Markets opportunities globally was enabled by its AI-powered platform in Q1 2023, according to the company.

The company expects JLL GPT to initially assist employees with transforming space utilization dashboards into conversations, augmenting client feedback and expediting workplace planning strategies. In the future, the company expects the tool to help with data mining for automated facility management, price modeling and predictions for investors and matchmaking for leasing transactions.

One use case already identified by a JLL employee was using the tool to sift through a lengthy lease agreement to determine whether employees can bring a dog to the office, reducing the length of the task from hours or days to seconds.

“We will continue to have demos and instructions that help create and explain use cases for our employees,” Morin said. “We also have been evolving our products and we are going to add new features.”

As teams update the model, they will lean on user feedback, Morin said.

“We are going to continue to evolve JLL GPT so that it gets to the right place for our employees,” Morin said. “Just like any software rollout, you have to go through that phase.”

The company also has more than 40 innovations related to generative AI in development or in beta.