Cushman & Wakefield's CIO believes in embracing AI to manage buildings, serve landlords, and help tenants

The chief digital and information officer at the real-estate giant said AI would change people's jobs, allowing them to be faster and more efficient.

• Sal Companieh is the chief digital and information officer of the real-estate giant Cushman & Wakefield.
• She's excited to watch her team embrace AI and transform communication and leadership.
• Companieh's insights are part of Business Insider's year-end leadership series "Looking Ahead 2024."

Sal Companieh is one of the many executives in corporate America embracing AI and its potential.

She's the chief digital and information officer of Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial-real-estate company with over 50,000 brokers and other employees around the world.

Cushman helps landlords fill their spaces, from office buildings to retail stores to warehouses, and aids companies in finding space to lease. Cushman, Companieh said, ensures both real-estate investors and tenants can use an "aggregation of the best market data," including foot traffic, drive time, and weather, to find the best space for their needs.

Artificial intelligence is at the center of that, Companieh told Business Insider.

Many Cushman employees work directly at client sites. If they're managing a big office building, for example, they'll work out of that building rather than a Cushman office. The building landlord or a tenant company may fire questions at the Cushman manager — how to onboard an employee, for example. Cushman uses AI chatbots to supplement its other offerings for client support to solve their problems faster.

AI, Companieh said, can help Cushman employees "maximize their time to best serve the client." It's exciting to introduce transformative technology in a field where change is so often gradual, she added.

"The thing that excites me most is human behavior change and getting colleagues that would have never thought about doing things differently to not only understand it but also be empowered by it," Companieh said.

Companieh said clients, including landlords and tenant companies, were rightfully asking for transparency on Cushman's AI use. She said they asked, "Where is it? Where is it incorporated? Where will it be incorporated? How do we ensure their data safety? How do we ensure sound integration of datasets?"

Despite the challenges, she added, the transition to using AI more has been rewarding.

"Watching that shift driven by a diverse, multidisciplined, and multigeography organization that is really, really employee- and client-centric is an absolute joy," she said.

Companieh's insights are part of BI's year-end leadership package "Looking Ahead 2024," which digs into vision, strategy, and challenges across corporate America.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are you looking forward to the most for 2024?

A lot of this actually changes people's day jobs on a regular basis. Being able to bring forward insights that would have taken either longer or were not possible prior to us doing this for our clients, and having them make the best commercial-real-estate decisions that they can make.

On the human side, watching my leaders model communication and genuine leadership to their teams.

What is your biggest concern or worry for 2024?

The misuse of AI technology is obviously at the forefront of a lot of our thoughts.

What is one thing you feel like you got right in 2023?

Honestly, I think it's communication.

It kind of touches on AI, but we've been very deliberate around communication to our teams, communication to our stakeholders, communication to our clients.

In a world where everything around us — both from a technology perspective and just humanity — is changing at all times, open, honest, authentic communication is the path forward. I do think I got that right.

What's one thing you might have gotten wrong in 2023?

I would say it's the assumption of how fast we can go.

My desire for impact and my desire for change — and the brilliance that is our team, and I do not say that lightly, collectively as an organization — gives me the energy to go fast.

Sometimes I forget that we need to go at a different pace to make an impact. A good lesson learned for 2023.