The almost endless talk of artificial intelligence by CRE software vendors is frequently dominated by the mention of generative AI programs like ChatGPT from OpenAI, Google's Bard and Gemini, Microsoft's Bing Chat, and others.

Trained on vast sets of text material, companies make many promises, how these systems will create marketing materials, communicate with customers, analyze large numbers of potential deals, and more for CRE businesses. However, there are already indications that generative AI can have significant drawbacks.

A new study from researchers and experts at Harvard Business School, the Wharton School, Warwick Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Boston Consulting Group put this into even greater relief. They looked at 758 consultants — about 7% of the consultants at the company — and had them do baseline work on particular tasks. Then the researchers assigned each of the consultants to one of three groups: no AI access, GPT-4 AI access, or GPT-4 AI access with training on how to write the prompts the software uses as instructions.