In 1675, Isaac Newton wrote a letter to Robert Hooke containing a line that has outlived almost everything else in it: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
He was making a point about how knowledge actually accumulates. Nobody starts from nothing. The view is better from up there because somebody else did the climbing first.
It is hard to think of a better description of what artificial intelligence is doing right now.
Every answer has a source, even when you cannot see it
When a language model answers a question about lease structures, cap rate compression or how to reconcile a gross potential rent bridge, it is not reasoning from first principles. It is drawing on an enormous body of material that already existed: articles, white papers, earnings call transcripts, conference panels, industry publications, forum threads, textbooks and the countless posts of people who took the time to explain something in public.
The model is the vantage point. It is not the view. Everything it can tell you about commercial real estate was learned from people who worked in commercial real estate and then wrote it down.
That is worth sitting with, because the speed of the answer can disguise where it came from. Ask a question, get a fluent paragraph back in two seconds, and it feels like the machine knew it. It did not. Somebody taught it, usually without ever knowing they were doing so.
The giants in our own field
Commercial real estate has never lacked for people willing to explain it in public. A few names come up again and again, on stages, on podcasts and in the research that everyone else ends up quoting:
- Dr. Peter Linneman, whose research and long-running letter have shaped how a generation of investors reads the cycle.
- Spencer Levy of CBRE, whose podcast and conference appearances have made economic commentary genuinely listenable.
- Hessam Nadji of Marcus & Millichap, a fixture whenever the market needs someone to explain what the transaction data is actually saying.
- Willy Walker of Walker & Dunlop, whose webcast has quietly become one of the better interview archives in the industry.
- Michael Bull, who has spent years turning weekly broadcasts into an accessible on-ramp for people new to the asset class.
- Bob Knakal, whose habit of publishing what he sees in the market has left a long public trail of how deals actually get done.
None of them set out to train a model. They set out to explain something to an audience. But every transcript, every panel writeup, every published note became part of the material that AI systems learned from. When a model tells you something sensible about absorption or the debt markets, there is a reasonable chance the shape of that answer traces back to people like these.
Why this matters for how you use the tools
If AI is standing on other people’s shoulders, two things follow.
The first is that a model is only as good as what was published before it. Where an industry has argued in public, written things down and shown its work, the answers are strong. Where the knowledge stayed in someone’s head, in a private model or in a deal file that never left the building, the answers get thin fast. That is exactly why AI can discuss cap rate theory confidently and yet tell you nothing useful about why occupancy slipped at your property in Mesa last quarter.
The second is that your own data is the part nobody else has. The giants gave the industry its general knowledge. Your portfolio, your commentary, your variance explanations and your property teams hold the specific knowledge, and no amount of general training substitutes for it. The most useful thing you can do with these tools is point them at the ground truth you already own.
AI gives you the accumulated view of everyone who explained the industry in public. It cannot give you the view from inside your own buildings. That one is still yours to supply.
Credit where it is due
There is a habit worth keeping as these tools become routine: remember that the answer had authors. Read the research. Listen to the panel. Follow the people who are still doing the climbing, because the next generation of models will be trained on whatever they publish next.
Newton’s line was partly a courtesy and, depending on who you ask, partly a dig at Hooke. Either way it holds up. The view is better from up here, and we did not build the shoulders.
So here is the question. Who is on your list? Which voices in commercial real estate do you actually make time for, the podcasts you finish and the research you read the week it lands? We would like to know which giants you are standing on.