A next step for artificial intelligence in commercial real estate is the automatic generation of "thousands of viable building designs in seconds." TestFit, which provides software tools to automate lower levels of architectural design, has a new product called Generative Design.

It allows developers and architects create many optimized building designs in a brief amount of time, versus "the weeks and months just one design can take using traditional manual tools," they said in an email to GlobeSt.com. A short video of the tool in action shows the process of setting parameters — the equivalent of creating a prompt for a generative AI — and then browsing through the resulting designs and then sorting through them by parameter values.

The designs aren't finished but they do show various ways that space could be generally laid out for a certain type of building, like multifamily with an overall unit masterplan and number of units, including filters for floor area ratio, parking ratio, and yield on cost. It's a set of initial steps that create prototypes, although not finished designs.