Brick-and-mortar real estate may seem like the only tangible thing left in an increasingly virtual world, but it too is being taken over by artificial intelligence. Some of the biggest names in the business, such as Compass, Zillow and LoanSnap, are now employing AI to help find buyers the perfect mortgage and the perfect home. And for real estate agents, it may already be a game-changer. Most real estate data is public, from land records to title documents, purchase price and even mortgage liens. The trouble was it was an onerous process to go to local offices and obtain all the information.

"AI can play a significant role in simplifying and automating processes where traditionally humans have been involved," said Rizwan Akhtar, chief technology officer of business technology at Realogy Holdings Corp., which owns brokerage brands including Coldwell Banker, Corcoran and Sotheby's International Realty. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. Artificial-intelligence efforts in the real-estate sector are benefiting from advances in cloud computing and data analytics, as well as improvements to algorithms, according to technology leaders at Realogy, Compass Inc. and Zillow Group Inc. Realogy uses more than 25 AI models, Mr. Akhtar said, including models that can help agents predict their chances of converting a prospective client into a paying client and others that can predict the optimal percentage split between a broker and an agent on a property. The company is in the early stages of testing an AI app that aims to predict when certain milestones will be reached in the home-buying process, he said. At real-estate brokerage Compass, an AI-based tool that predicts whether people in an agent's contact database are likely to sell their homes within a year resulted in more "listing wins" for its agents, said Joseph Sirosh, the company's chief technology officer.

Inman Connect sessions are on video replay. Tune in for winning strategies, and discover what's next in real estate. Session videos, livestream access and event discounts for Connect are all exclusive to Inman Select subscribers. "Compass, to me, is an idea," Joseph Sirosh, the chief technology officer at Compass, said at Inman Connect in New York on Thursday. "Agents grow their business and we invest as much as possible in agents growing their business with technology."

The world's largest tech businesses, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, sometimes pay millions of dollars a year to A.I. experts, effectively cornering the market for this hard-to-find talent. The shortage isn't going away anytime soon, just because mastering these skills takes years of work. The industry is not willing to wait. Companies are developing all sorts of tools that will make it easier for any operation to build its own A.I. software, including things like image and speech recognition services and online chatbots. "We are following the same path that computer science has followed with every new type of technology," said Joseph Sirosh, a vice president at Microsoft, which recently unveiled a tool to help coders build deep neural networks, a type of computer algorithm that is driving much of the recent progress in the A.I. field.

Over 6,000 people are attending a conference focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) that opened in Amsterdam this morning. World Summit AI brings together corporates, startups, investors, scientists, academics, NGOs along with government bodies like the UN, EU and the World Economic Forum. Participants will be learning about some of the latest innovations in AI – the creation of human-like technology - that will transform business and the ethical issues that come with it. The event coincides with Artificial Intelligence in Europe, a report by Microsoft that reveals over half of the companies surveyed expect AI to have an impact on "business areas that are entirely unknown today". Yet only 4% of companies actively use AI suggesting European businesses, at least, have an enormous mountain to climb.

Over 6,000 people are attending a conference focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) that opened in Amsterdam this morning. World Summit AI brings together corporates, startups, investors, scientists, academics, NGOs along with government bodies like the UN, EU and the World Economic Forum. Participants will be learning about some of the latest innovations in AI – the creation of human-like technology - that will transform business and the ethical issues that come with it. The event coincides with Artificial Intelligence in Europe, a report by Microsoft that reveals over half of the companies surveyed expect AI to have an impact on "business areas that are entirely unknown today". Yet only 4% of companies actively use AI suggesting European businesses, at least, have an enormous mountain to climb.

Microsoft is using custom hardware to realize a 50-100x speed up in how quickly it can run AI algorithms that power its Bing search engine -- and will make the tech available to all from next year. The acceleration is being powered by the BrainWave platform, a network of customizable chips known as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), tailored to efficiently handle deep neural networks. "The power of the BrainWave platform are FPGAs, field-programmable gate arrays, which are really executing these AI algorithms in hardware," said Joseph Sirosh, corporate VP for artificial intelligence & research at Microsoft. "What this means is approximately 50-100x the speed up. Also, there's significant cost savings, because you are executing these neural networks in the most efficient way possible in hardware."

They are a dream of researchers but perhaps a nightmare for highly skilled computer programmers: artificially intelligent machines that can build other artificially intelligent machines. With recent speeches in both Silicon Valley and China, Jeff Dean, one of Google's leading engineers, spotlighted a Google project called AutoML. ML is short for machine learning, referring to computer algorithms that can learn to perform particular tasks on their own by analyzing data. AutoML, in turn, is a machine-learning algorithm that learns to build other machine-learning algorithms. With it, Google may soon find a way to create AI technology that can partly take the humans out of building the AI systems that many believe are the future of the technology industry.

The tech industry is promising everything from smartphone apps that can recognize faces to cars that can drive on their own. But by some estimates, only 10,000 people worldwide have the education, experience and talent needed to build the complex and sometimes mysterious mathematical algorithms that will drive this new breed of artificial intelligence. The world's largest tech businesses, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, sometimes pay millions of dollars a year to A.I. experts, effectively cornering the market for this hard-to-find talent. The shortage isn't going away anytime soon, just because mastering these skills takes years of work. The industry is not willing to wait.

The tech industry is promising everything from smartphone apps that can recognize faces to cars that can drive on their own. But by some estimates, only 10,000 people worldwide have the education, experience and talent needed to build the complex and sometimes mysterious mathematical algorithms that will drive this new breed of artificial intelligence. The world's largest tech businesses, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, sometimes pay millions of dollars a year to A.I. experts, effectively cornering the market for this hard-to-find talent. The shortage isn't going away anytime soon, just because mastering these skills takes years of work. The industry is not willing to wait.