Tech, Apps and AI in the Retail Estates Workplace

 Tech Evolution in Retail Property Management: From Floppy Disks to AI  

In this episode of 'That Retail Property Guy', host Gary Marshall reviews (and laughs at) the evolution of tech and its impact on retail property management and accounts payable over the past 40 years. He recalls early computers, and software like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, and contemporary tools like Excel, Power BI, and specialized property management applications. He discusses the rise of AI, its capabilities and limitations, and emphasizes the need for critical thinking when dealing with AI-generated outputs, ensuring human oversight avoids errors and hallucinations. 

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast 

01:04 The Evolution of Tech in Business 

01:53 Early Office Tech and Software 

04:15 The Y2K Scare - a storm in a teacup? 

05:53 Advancements in Mobile Technology 

07:21 Modern Apps, and Their Predecessors 

10:00 The Role of AI in Today's Work Environment 

12:52 The Reliability and Risks of AI 

15:45 Conclusion and Final Thoughts 

Link to FINDME TTS  https://www.twofireseducation.com/findme

Link to Geolytix https://geolytix.com/blog/uk-retail-places/

Link to MRI https://www.mrisoftware.com/uk/products/prolease-overview/enterprise/

Link to Accruent https://www.accruent.com/products/lucernex-v2?utm_source=google&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=emea-oa-inbound-lx-25fy-google_search_evergreen_brand&utm_content=lucernex&utm_id=701v400000ll7nf&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22326956637&gbraid=0AAAAAD9ez3z5lFSoK9QHIhtnMGOEIbu0c&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzbXikZ66kAMVo4BQBh3pwSQ0EAAYASAAEgK3Z_D_BwE

Link to Daniel Clark on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielclarke-uk_dont-assume-everything-that-comes-out-of-activity-7385219323188948992-xUPJ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABSNuk4B0Kz-cthxrcVIY2QMcZmpqKO6wIQ

Never miss an episode! Follow and like That Retail Property Guy on your favourite podcast platform - available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon and more.

Find out more and message us on the podcast website

Go to ThatRetailPropertyGuy for more on Gary Marshall, Smarter Estates and the TRPG podcast. You can also check out the TRPG Blog for reading versions of key episodes. 

For our niche 'Accounts Recoverable in Retail Property' business services, visit SmarterEstates

And find Gary and team on LinkedIn for regular updates and community info!

Transcript

0:00

Hello, and welcome to that Retail Property guy with your host, Gary Marshall. In each podcast episode, we delve into topics relating to the particular overlap between estate management and accounts payable from the perspective of a retailer as tenant sharing stories and insights through Gary's unique lens. We hope you'll be entertained, enlightened, and maybe a little inspired. I'm prompted by a few posts I've seen online and a few discussions with people who are smarter than I am to consider the tech and apps that we use in our work lives and maybe also in our social lives. So much is commonplace and it seems generational, though not exclusively to embrace it instinctively or find it's a challenge. So in this episode, let's put on our nerd hats and walk through those advances and changes over a period of, say, 40 years. And if you haven't been working that long, just figure where you drop into this timeline. Do colleagues younger than you already see you as a dinosaur. There's no doubt about it. Tech has transformed how we do business, and I'm not talking about huge digital enterprises doing business. I'm talking about all of us day-to-day interacting in business. Of course, we're property people and accounts people, but our tech isn't limited to our specialties. We're office people, and that's the location rather than the suite of apps. But of course it is also the suite of apps. We're constantly online in touch swapping files, doing lease completions through DocuSign, instantly transferring funds, doing remote surveys by drone. And I can look back on the shifts in hardware and software that have been the stepping stones of this for the last four decades, while many younger colleagues can't remember the days before the internet and iPhones and chat GPT. First step obviously was computers. My original desktop machine had an under the desk tower unit, the size of a filing cabinet connected to a bulky cathode raid. Monitor the size of a microwave with a tiny, 12 inch luminous green screen, and no mouse. Everything was control command. And file sharing was either a floppy disk sent through the post or via a modem with a tediously slow dial up, making that awful shrieking sound until it established a connection. Being able to use that early hardware required some skills in software that many professionals just didn't have. Some still don't. There were no downloadable apps. Everything was uploaded via floppy disc and then later by CD rom. Popular apps for office use included Lotus 1 2 3, a kind of forerunner of Excel and Word perfect, a kind of forerunner of word. PowerPoint for presentations was still very much a specialist activity. Often a whole team would rely on one colleague who had mastered the art of dragging and dropping the pictures. Email by Outlook was still science fiction. You could get email via a OL, but it was barely a step up from at Telex or a fax. And I'll leave our younger listeners to investigate what those were. Zoom and teams were Star Trek light years away. And of course, LinkedIn, Facebook, and all the other social sites were still most likely unimagined. One application I do miss is Microsoft's access an easy to use database app with a customizable front end and a robust if chugging the slow engine to power it. I say Miss, it is actually still available in a limited number of Microsoft Office packages, but most business IT teams don't endorse it or support it, so it slipped from the standard apps list. Which is a pity because in my opinion, it would still present a powerful yet novice friendly step away from cumbersome spreadsheets and workbooks for those who want a database, without having to understand S-Q-L-S-Q-L. The power of coding queries could be a whole other episode, but let's say that being proficient in it represents a long reach even for many competent Excel users. This leap forward in time seems incredible. It seems absurd to look back to the late 1990s and the fear and panic that was known as Y 2K. This was the worry that many computer processors were built with clocks that only ran to 1999, couldn't toggle over to 2000. The issue was that after 99 comes zero, zero, but maybe the processor would interpret that as 1900, not 2000, and we'd all go back a century in time. Planes would fall from the skies and bank ATMs would shut down or worse, still start spewing out cash willy-nilly. Huge amounts of resource and funding went into disaster recovery centers with backup computers. And bear in mind, these were still pre laptop. So a computer took up a lot of space. Businesses invested fortunes in manual processes as backup in case the computer just rolled over and died. Tech teams were on standby across the world on New Year's Eve. In fact, new Millennium's Eve watching the clock count down, fingers crossed, breath held, and guess what? Nothing happened. We're all still here. It was a storm in a teacup. So there have been huge advances stacked on top of each other. Tech advances as desktop PCs and Macs evolved into hefty laptops, then lighter laptops, and then tablets, clunky handheld PDAs. Personal digital assistance like PalmPilot were little better than electronic file of faxes, and again, younger listeners look this stuff up, but they evolved into wearable computers, barcode readers, task specific tablets. Star Trek coming to life, and let's not forget phones. I remember in the mid 1990s being mugged at knife point for my Nokia 2110 mid call on a street in Mayfair, where now muggers Steel Rolexes. The original 2110 was a design classic with the original Nokia ringtone, which I still use today on my much cleverer Samsung. The 2110 made phone calls and sent basic text messages. Oh, and allowed us to play snake while waiting for the bus. What else would we want a phone to do? Then the innovation, which was Blackberry, specifically the 58 10, the ability to send messages and small emails, run your diary, browse the still new worldwide web, and it fitted snugly in your pocket. Just wow. No self-respecting yuppy went without one. It's amazing that this was only 20 ish years ago and how much it changed our expectations of workplace tech. Now our iPhones and Samsungs and a Myriad other brands offer us the world in the palm of our hands. We can barely exist without them. Though a flat battery at airport check-in doesn't help with an etic, so sometimes the old ways are still the best. A piece of paper never runs out of charge. So yes, you get my point. Tech has leapt ahead from science fiction of just 40 years ago to a point where we now seem to be enacting Gene Roddenberry's imagination. And that's another Star Trek reference in case you missed it. And what about those apps? Modern apps stand on the shoulders of forgotten Giants. Lotus 1, 2, 3 users switched over to Excel. Data analysts might now prefer Power bi, though the point of transition from Excel to BI still seems quite broad. Maybe Excel is suitable for individual tasks with small sets of data and the familiarity of those formulas and calculations. While Power BI is more suited to large data sets and creating dashboards and visualizations for the board in shared real time collaboration, hmm, choose the right tool for the job. Property teams, tenants, or landlord, migrated from access or homegrown databases into specialist software to help manage their portfolio data, monitoring those lease commitments, those rent reviews, the breaks, the expires, the rents due, the repairs to be scheduled, management contacts, service charge budgets. It's all much easier when managed in a relationship database. Early applications for estates back in those days of do matrix printers and floppy disc storage, were little more than electronic versions of leather bound lease ledgers. The analytical capabilities were very limited. But applications like Cube, Manhattan and Tramps represented a new world order running queries, producing reports, scheduling activities. These products led onto the current apps like MRI's, prole, former Horizon, an AC Occurrence, loosen X Trace Solutions, latest version of Tramps or co. By CoStar. Other apps are also available. Smart stuff for smarter estate managers, property finance, accountants. Oh, and let's not fiat. The footfall analysts In the good old days, new store locations were appraised by a sales manager's gut instinct. Now, MRI and Geolytics provide data on footfall, catchment area, customer demographics, drive times, and market analysis, science, not guesswork. We can rely on support packages to help our time, poor schedules or our physical difficulties like access or site or touch, or dyslexia or a DHD. I came across a great idea called Find me TTS, to help students and others with diverse needs. It offers natural speech to text and a unique search capability so that the user can find and color code and see groupings of whatever they're searching for in a webpage or a local file. It's a clever Chrome extension rather than an app or an AI tool is like a reliable friend helping you in the library rather than writing your thesis for you. Of course there is a creep of AI into so many aspects of our work tech world. We can still create graphics in Adobe, but we can look for AI help in Canva. We can type in Word, but we can dictate speech to text documents with co-pilot all look for AI help to present us with a draft document from its own deep resources, even though that might feel like copying somebody else's homework. There's a generality in the messages we see that AI can do it all. Ease your burden, allow you to focus on the big stuff, like having a virtual assistant, literally able to do everything except perhaps carry your banks. There's a common pushback too, will AI replaces? Is this the beginning of the machines rising, but maybe the biggest, most immediate pushback should be. Is AI reliably, right? Even when we get our hedge round, the enormity of what AI is, it still seems to be like talking to a book learned and slightly arrogant teenager with zero actual life experience and a low boredom threshold. Don't get me wrong, I'm not AI adverse. I'm not anti-tech. I'm not John Connor honing my subversion skills against Skynet. But some recent interactions with AI gave me pause for thought, and I wondered if you share any of these concerns. So cards on the table. Yes, I use ai. I use it in the production of these podcasts. I use it to draft social posts and to suggest to-do lists, but in all these cases, I use it as a draft, a prompt, a suggestion board. I always proofread, modify, and of course I correct the mistakes or misunderstandings because generally there are some. My business team at Smarter Estates developed an AI agent that can interpret and summarize property leases faster than estate managers can read them, clever stuff, but again, we must caveat that it could misinterpret a complex clause just like an estate manager could. So use the output as helpful support, not gospel, and let's not tar all AI with the same brush. Not all AI is the same. Choose your AI source wisely. Chat, GPT is a chat-based interface. It's owned and created by OpenAI. It's generally free for low volume users and it can handle a wide range of questions and tasks. There are, of course, lots of examples online about chatty, getting it wrong, it's parent company. OpenAI is more targeted towards businesses which require more advanced AI capabilities. Gemini gets good writeup for large scale code analysis or image analysis, and then there's Claude, which or who is allegedly much better at creating or supporting on long documents and creating human-like text that doesn't get called out by the naysayers on LinkedIn. But whichever option you choose for your task. Note that AI has been widely accused of hallucinating, literally making stuff up. So tread carefully with any AI output. Treat it with respect, not contempt, but treat it like hearsay, not gospel. A popular example of errors is the strawberry test. There are three Rs in the word strawberry, but many AI sources say the answer is two. Well, they say it's two until they are purposefully taught that the answer is three, just to get round this well-known challenge, and I think that's cheating. The confusion comes from something complex called tokenization, where the source breaks a word down into token parts like straw and bury, and it can confuse itself or miss the connectivity across the boundaries of those tokens. Do I sound learned and authoritative? Hmm. I didn't know anything about this yesterday. I just learned it from ai. I hope it's right. If you don't wanna take my word for it, that AI can make mistakes. Check out a post on LinkedIn from Daniel Clark. See the actual link in the show notes? Daniel urges us to not assume that everything that comes outta GPT is accurate. He asked it to check an SDLT stamp duty land tax calculation that he'd done. It insisted he was wrong and he had to prove he was right. Daniel comments it could have been a disaster if he'd blindly taken the numbers, given these tools can be very useful, but we cannot forget we have a brain and we still need to use it or seek proper advice. Strong examples of hallucination pop up in the press very often, whether it's an AI generated draft lease, which refers to non-existent legislation or fictitious case law in a court case, or imaginary references in research. The realization that AI sources can dream stuff up out of nowhere should terrify us. The law society urges legal advisors to double check all AI generated citations and references, like I mentioned earlier, to treat the output as a draft to be checked, not gospel to be quoted verbatim. So can AI help us? Yes, absolutely. Is it reliable? Absolutely not. We should all urge our colleagues, our researchers, our analysts, our lawyers and accountants to yes, lean on ai, but don't trust it implicitly. Don't accept everything. Don't do something rash because your AI friend told you to do it. And yes, people make mistakes too, but you can learn to trust a person based on a relationship with them, where you measure and appraise their reasoning, their output, their accuracy. But every query into an AI source is like a lucky dip, like dealing with a duty solicitor or a call center agent who has a script to follow, but maybe just maybe has no idea what they're actually talking about. Thanks for tuning in to that retail property guy. I hope you enjoyed the discussion and found the subject both entertaining and insightful. Check out more podcast episodes and if you have a suggestion for a future topic, please leave a suggestion or send us a message. If you liked what you heard, please consider leaving a review. Thanks for listening.