Rich Sarkis, CEO of portfolio company Reonomy, joined other machine learning experts on stage last week at CRETech. Rich revealed how machine learning has been used by the company to stitch together data and scale their platform.
For some companies, AI is a necessary tool to reach scale. Reonomy, an SAS application akin to Zillow for commercial real estate, adopted AI technology late in its business. “Originally, we had zero machine learning. We were able to do that successfully in New York. We couldn’t scale the platform without machine learning. Those algorithms could stitch data together. For us, it is a means to an end,” said Sarkis. There's a lot of confusion around AI and machine learning tools, and how they work or can work to increase efficiency. For all of the panelists, most of the work—about 80%—is focused on structuring data and the program and only 20% was actual machine learning. At its core, 70% to 80% is blocking and tackling around the structuring of the data needed to do cool stuff of the predictive analytics.