The State of the Union address is delivered by the President in early February. Are you planning to watch it? The public address normally offers updates on the economy, national security and other key points regarding the President’s legislative agenda and priorities for the coming year. With the upcoming address, it brings curiosity to not just the state of our country, but also the state of where the multifamily industry stands—specifically in regard to artificial intelligence.

Read on for three highlights on where Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands today and where it’s going for apartment leasing.

Self-Learning Apartment Communities

Apartments are not just smart—they are becoming self-learning. The quantity of smart home enabled devices has never been higher. Current statistics show that the smart house market will approach $40 billion by 2020. Many renters look to these devices to help make their day-to-day tasks more convenient. Owners and managers of apartment buildings also use these devices to save on their properties’ operational costs. Today, one of the most common devices that garner these benefits is the smart thermostat. Thermostats use sensors and renter’s GPS location from their mobile devices to learn a heating and cooling schedule. The thermostat will then set itself to the most economical temperature based on learning the renter’s schedule over time.

Say Goodbye to Simple Chatbots

Chatbots were introduced as a one-size-fits-all solution for customer service. However, most apartment owners and managers know this simply isn’t true. The notion of having a single, one-sided website chat with a bot will begin to disappear as we know it. The state of chatbots today offer a more omni-channel approach that include chat, voice and text. Research shows that customers still overwhelmingly prefer to speak to another human for important inquiries. This need is paving the way for the necessity of having human-like voice bots. Plus, in the moment that the bot can’t handle the request, it simply means those customers can be transferred to a human agent with creating any additional friction points. ACE, the virtual leasing assistant from LeaseHawk, offers this experience for renters today.

Another benefit that voice bots will bring in the future is the ability to understand sentiment. Unlike text, our voices say a lot about how we are feeling—tone, voice and volume all create a deep picture of a person’s needs. Voice bots can use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to gather this information to give you data about how people are feeling when they call your property. Are they mostly happy, excited leasing calls? Or, are they angry resident requests? Soon, communities may be able to harness this data and better understand the performance of their employees and processes.

Predictive Maintenance Requests

Imagine never having to call maintenance out in the middle of the night again. Artificial intelligence can read environmental cues to suggest preventive maintenance and predict equipment failures. This means you won’t have to keep excess parts on hand in order to fix problems quickly or inconvenience tenants while waiting for parts to be delivered. The Edge, located in Amsterdam, is considered one of the greenest buildings in the world. They have deployed over 30,000 sensors that collect data about the building’s operations and how occupants interact with it. Using the data, their AI is able to direct commuters to open parking spaces, close areas of the buildings based on energy consumption and much more.

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that by 2030, AI will deliver $13 trillion in additional economic output worldwide. To put this in perspective, the value of U.S. commercial real estate is estimated at $15 trillion. The adoption of AI is on the rise and there are so many ways it can help streamline processes for the multifamily industry.