AI has plenty of useful applications for business. Fraud detection, forecasting, enterprise resource planning, logistics - all of these were considered AI at o

AI has plenty of useful applications for business. Fraud detection, forecasting, enterprise resource planning, logistics - all of these were considered AI at one point. The specific problem the author cites - digitizing data in PDFs - shouldn't even require AI. It can be solved better by just inputting data in digital form to begin with (like with a web form), and passing it around in a standardized machine-readable data format. But the commercial real estate industry is pretty backwards, and can continue to be pretty backwards because its core competency is ownership of the real estate, and digitization labor is round-off error compared to the profits generated by it. It'll take a major recession (and this current coronapocalypse may qualify) to create selection pressures to weed out inefficient firms, and until that happens there's no incentive for them to upgrade their processes.