The first meaningful wave of AI in real estate will not be a fully autonomous developer replacing people. It will be a sharper operating layer that helps people see the deal faster, compare assumptions faster, and communicate risk more clearly.
Laird Miller sees underwriting as one of the highest-leverage places for this shift. A real estate deal is not just a spreadsheet. It is a collection of assumptions about rent, debt, construction, timing, vacancy, insurance, taxes, incentives, exit cap rates, and the behavior of people. AI is valuable when it helps organize that complexity without pretending the complexity disappeared.
The operators who win will not be the people who paste a rent roll into a model and blindly accept an output. They will be the people who know the real estate deeply enough to challenge the model, test the assumptions, and then use AI to move through the work with more speed and less friction.
That is the direction behind Laird Miller's work with RentalCalcAI, development workflow automation, and AI systems for local businesses: practical tools that make the business move faster while keeping judgment close to the decision.