Inside the Room: SurfaceAI’s Blueprint Dinner With Multifamily Leaders
Five grounded themes shaping operations, data, and technology adoption.
At this year’s Blueprint in Las Vegas, SurfaceAI hosted a private dinner with executives from institutional owners, large family offices, and innovative operators across multifamily. The goal was straightforward: compare notes on what is working, pressure-test assumptions, and trade practical approaches for running better portfolios in a volatile environment. The conversation stayed focused on execution rather than predictions. Attendees compared methods for cleaning and structuring data, debated how to prioritize AI use cases against competing operational needs, and described the governance models that keep pilots on track.
What follows are five topics that consistently surfaced during the evening, framed to inform decision-makers who are balancing capital discipline, organizational change, and a fast-moving technology landscape.
1. Data Readiness Before Tooling
Participants aligned on a sequence that begins with data hygiene, continues with process clarity, and only then moves to technology selection. The rationale is operational, not theoretical. Without consistent naming conventions, a clear system of record decisions, and well-documented processes, even a best-in-class platform will create more reconciliation work and introduce reporting drift.
Leaders described practical steps such as establishing a semantic data layer to normalize terminology across ERPs and CRMs, logging lineage for critical fields, and setting lightweight stewardship rules that property, asset management, and accounting teams can actually follow. Several noted that a central integration layer reduces the cost of change, since vendors can be swapped with minimal downstream disruption. The consensus was that clean data is less about perfection and more about repeatability. Companies that invest here shorten implementation timelines, reduce pilot failure rates, and create the conditions for reliable analytics across the portfolio.
2. AI’s Role in Everyday Operations
The discussion treated artificial intelligence as an operations tool, not a headline. Executives shared where AI is already providing measurable value: document extraction for draws and compliance packets, revenue assurance through lease variance checks and collections workflows, and workflow automation for resident communications and renewals.
The emphasis was on scoped use cases with clear baselines and defined handoffs back to humans. Leaders recommended starting with processes that are frequent, structured, and tightly coupled to financial outcomes, then layering in more complex tasks as confidence grows. Equally important, attendees stressed the need for auditability. Operational teams must be able to explain how an output was produced, identify exceptions, and recover gracefully when inputs are incomplete. The result is not a wholesale reinvention of the org chart but a progressive shift of routine tasks to machines, freeing teams to focus on resident experience, vendor management, and decision quality.
3. Governance, Change Management, and Training
Technology programs succeed or fail on the strength of their governance and enablement. Attendees outlined simple, durable practices: a cross-functional intake process that ranks initiatives by business impact and integration complexity, a named product owner for each deployment, and quarterly reviews that retire redundant tools rather than letting them linger.
Training was framed as a workflow design problem. Rather than classroom sessions that fade in a week, leaders favored in-app guidance and short “point of need” modules tied to the exact step where users struggle. Executive participation matters as well. When senior leaders use the same tools and dashboards as the field, adoption accelerates and resistance declines. Finally, the group encouraged teams to plan the subtraction alongside the addition. Removing obsolete reports, duplicate steps, and legacy policy checks creates the organizational space required to absorb new capabilities without overwhelming frontline staff.
4. Integration Strategies Across Fragmented Systems
Most portfolios live with multiple ERPs, CRMs, and marketing stacks for reasons of history and scale. The dinner focused on pragmatic integration patterns that can handle this reality. A hub-and-spoke approach, where a central integration platform standardizes authentication, event streams, and error handling, allows teams to add or replace applications without recoding the estate. API contracts and data contracts were highlighted as low-drama ways to keep vendor scopes clear and reduce brittle point-to-point connections.
Leaders also discussed a tiered approach to real-time data. Not every process merits low latency, and forcing everything into real time increases cost and fragility. By matching latency to business need, companies preserve performance for use cases that truly require it while simplifying the rest. Over time, this architecture supports portfolio-wide analytics, pilot portability between regions, and cleaner security boundaries for audits and compliance.
5. Partnering With Technology Vendors for Measurable ROI
The group compared procurement models that balance speed with rigor. The common pattern starts with a narrowly scoped pilot on representative properties, a clear success metric tied to NOI or labor hours saved, and a documented runbook for rollout if the target is met. Vendor selection, weighted integration fit, and security posture, alongside feature depth.
Participants emphasized that the most effective partners meet operators where they are: they plug into existing workflows, supply usable APIs and webhook events, and provide transparent reporting that finance and compliance teams can validate. Several executives noted the value of advisory relationships that shape product roadmaps to real operational needs, while maintaining objective exit criteria if outcomes fall short. The goal is predictable, compounding gains rather than one-off wins. When partnerships are structured this way, technology adoption stays aligned with portfolio performance and organizational capacity.
What’s next?
The dinner reinforced a practical playbook for multifamily operators in a changing market. Start with data and process, pilot AI where feedback loops are short and financial impact is direct, design governance that removes as well as adds, architect integrations for change, and formalize vendor partnerships around measurable results. SurfaceAI was honored to convene the conversation and will continue to support leaders who are building durable operating advantages with clear, verifiable outcomes.
