Spring is in the air, and in multifamily, that means it’s almost time for AIM, one of the very best weeks in the industry’s calendar. Each year, leaders, innovators and innovative leaders get together in ever-increasing numbers to share the latest ideas and network between walks on the beach.
This year, I’m particularly excited about the session that I get to lead, as it brings together multiple threads in the ever-richer tapestry of AI in multifamily. To understand what we’re going to be talking about, indulge me for a moment while I explain the origin story of this session, as it reveals something interesting about AI adoption.
Two Ideas About AI
I sat down last fall with Steve Lefkovits, the producer of this excellent event, having pitched to him two different ideas about AI that I think are highly relevant in 2026 in multifamily. Each originated from a different piece of research conducted late last year.
The first proposed session was about sentiment analysis and how ubiquitous AI-enabled chat in multifamily operations enables us to understand what residents think far better than we ever have before. This idea was tested in a white paper published in collaboration with RETTC and ResiDesk at OPTECH last year. The study focused on residents' sentiment toward their Wi-Fi, and used AI to “interview” residents at scale and analyze the results.
The findings demonstrated how AI’s ability to ask open-ended questions yields vastly superior results than the closed structure of the sentiment surveys that are more familiar to multifamily operators. An AI agent that guides a conversation one question at a time gets much more insightful answers than a predefined list of questions. And when the respondent chooses the words they text in response to a question, they tell us far more than a score on a survey.
A growing number of AI-enabled conversations that work in a similar way to our Wi-Fi research are telling operators how residents feel. This, it seemed, would be a good subject to explore further, given the audience that AIM invariably attracts.
The second topic was automation, but not the obvious kind. We tend to think of AI as a means of automating mundane tasks, but as the scope of AI automation increases, it is redefining what we think of as mundane.
A recent 20for20 paper researched in collaboration with EliseAI, “Automation, The Real Story of AI in Multifamily,” went deep on this topic. As AI gets smarter and more agentic, it is increasingly able to identify new opportunities and even make decisions that help improve operations.
As a broader swath of tasks, from leasing calls to collections to renewals, comes under the purview of what is often the same AI-based platform, the base of chat data grows. It is already identifying cause-and-effect relationships (think service history and renewals conversations) that were never possible before.
That ability to uncover insights and act on them (as the paper explained) is the AI capability that looks likely to change multifamily operations the most profoundly.
Turning Sentiment Into Steps
Having made my pitch, Steve did what he often does and came up with a framing that clarified the point of these ideas. He asked, “Why not present these ideas together, since the source of the benefit is really the same?” He was right. The essence of both ideas is that the words that residents use to answer and ask questions reveal the insight that AI enables us to harness.
The words enable us to understand resident sentiment more deeply than we currently can. A better understanding of sentiment will mean a deeper understanding of how it impacts outcomes. The analysis of these cause-and-effect relationships will be increasingly automatic, enabling new levels of responsiveness and better alignment to commercial outcomes.
That is what we’ll be talking about in our session: “Turning Sentiment Into Steps,” on Tuesday afternoon at AIM. Drawing on direct experience from my fellow panelists, Devin Lusk of American Landmark and Maria Banks of AMLI Residential, we will share examples of AI-driven sentiment analysis and progress toward AI-enabled automation.
Together, we will draw some conclusions and then speculate on what this set of capabilities is likely to bring to property management. In my view, this is the most important conversation in multifamily technology at the moment. Much of my work this year focuses heavily on AI, but with particular attention to new capabilities AI makes possible that were not possible before.
That is what we hope to tease out in 45 minutes by the beach in SoCal in a few weeks’ time. If you have yet to register, please do so. See you at AIM!
Photo by Jose Manuel Gonzalez Lupiañez Photography on Pexels