Since the new edition of the 20for20 Annual Survey was published, there have been many conversations about this year’s findings. Unsurprisingly, most focus on AI, and they cover perspectives from operations and tech leaders, to technology company leaders, investors and developers. As usual, those conversations add perspective to the findings that are worth considering on this important topic.
By way of recap, two data points from this year’s research suggest that the adoption pattern for AI changed substantially in 2025. The first comes from the opening research question about the biggest highlights of the previous year. In 2025, the answer was overwhelmingly AI adoption. More interestingly, the six out of 20 respondents who chose this answer were all technology leaders (not operational leaders).
That signals a change in attitude toward the technology. In voiceover, these CIOs/CTOs described 2025 as the year AI moved beyond limited testing and deployment to become a legitimate, strategic part of the technology stack. They pointed to having tested long enough or having seen enough peer success, that it now seemed like the right time to embrace the technology more fully.
Additionally, they felt they had a firm enough understanding of where the benefits lie. Not just in the tasks that can be executed, but in how AI changes the nature of work, both at properties and in the corporate setting. These companies expressed a level of confidence in their adoption plans that was quite different from previous editions of this research.
A Widening Scope in Operations
The change is not just in the attitudes of technology leaders; there was a clear increase in the scope of activities that operators are asking the technology to do. In response to the question of whether any technologies played a bigger part than expected in 2025, the most common answer related to specific AI projects that emerged last year.
Drilling into these answers, the dominant theme was an expansion in the number of conversations AI is having with residents. For most of its history in multifamily operations, AI has been a leasing assistant. The change that accelerated in 2025 is that AI is now deployed across multiple types of resident conversations.
That changes a great deal about what AI is likely to become in multifamily operations. Unlike leasing, which ends when the prospect comes to a decision, resident conversations, like delinquency, for example, happen on a regular cadence and involve residents rather than prospects. This means operations have greater visibility into both the conversations and their outcomes, and can see how AI is learning about residents as it conducts these interactions each month.
Those learnings have a value. AI automation provides the opportunity to marry information about resident sentiment with the service elements that influence it. That can reveal cause-and-effect relationships that would previously have been invisible. It can also recommend or (in some cases) execute service-related improvements as AI becomes more agentic.
Changing Attitudes to Technology
As attitudes to AI change and experience grows, there is evidence from this year’s interviews that it is changing the way people think about technology more broadly. Part of the conversation focused on the ongoing problem of tech bloat and what companies are doing to address it. Over the past few years, too many apps have been added to the stack, and most respondents want to reduce, or at least not increase, the number of technologies in use.
This year’s survey reports shifting views on technology decisions, including an increasing skepticism toward narrowly focused solutions. As AI makes it ever easier to add functionality, boundaries between products will continue to erode. It is becoming harder to defend point solutions that risk increasing competition from some of the more versatile AI-driven platforms.
Existing technology is also attracting fresh scrutiny, with some operators expressing concern with their vendors’ attempts to add AI to their existing platforms. The question is whether or not “AI-enabled” tech is going far enough to be able to compete with AI-first platforms over the long term (whatever the long term means in the era of AI!)
These considerations are both exciting and unsettling. They are also among the most important developments in multifamily technology and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I am preparing a couple of panels on this very topic for industry events later in the year, including AIM and Blueprint. For a more detailed understanding of these findings and how they connect to broader changes in multifamily operations and technology, don’t forget to download your complimentary copy of this year’s Annual Survey.
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