Episode 51: AI as Augmentation: Wisdom, EQ, and the Future of Work at RXR

**Scott Rechler** (0:00)
People are gonna value human connection, human interaction, human experiences. Why do you, when you look today, when you think about the entertainment, concerts, sporting events, they're crushing it today, right? Because people value those interactions, those personal interactions.

**Charlie Harary** (0:15)
This is Crossing the Chasm, your front row seat to how leaders think in real time. My name is Charlie Harary, RXR's Chief People and Organizational Strategy Officer, and I'm joined with RXR's CEO and leader, Scott Rechler. Join us as we break down what's happening in the world, and we pull out the leadership lessons behind the headlines. Scott, thanks for taking the time.

**Scott Rechler** (0:33)
It's great to be here.

**Charlie Harary** (0:34)
So we're living in an incredible world, an AI world, and I know that many times when you think about AI, and studies are showing that there's AI anxiety now, and people don't know what it means for them, are they being replaced? And there's a whole ambiguity, I think, of the human's role with AI, what's going to be the future of employment, where does AI as a person provide value to a company?
How do you see it? How do you see AI evolving in its relationship to people?

**Scott Rechler** (1:04)
It's interesting, and it's something that we're seeing more and more of, right? AI is an augmentation for people, right? It's giving them a superpower that they can use, but without the people, without the insights, the intelligence, the values, the critical thinking, AI doesn't add value. And we've seen this over and over again with our own people, the people that are thoughtful about how I'm going to use it are not just doing their job better, they're doing more than they've ever done before because they now have this tool that they didn't have before in that, to help them go do that, right? And I think the more that they can then create use cases, it was they play with AI and say, okay, if I really want to do something that I couldn't actually do myself, but now I have this tool AI, this AI agent that could help me do it, what would that be? And how would that augment my capability, right? So I think as organizations like RXR start thinking about and implementing AI, I think you're going to see our team become more empowered, more powerful, more creative, and have much more capacity to do things than they ever thought before. Now, what you've seen historically, and I'm already seeing with our own team, it doesn't mean that they get something done more quickly and they call it a day.
It means that their scope of potential that they see of things they can do widens, and so they do more to do better, right? So as an example, if you think about how we would manage and service our loans, you do an underwriting of a loan, when you make the loan, you can't necessarily re-underwrite it every day.
But if you do a good underwriting and we set up an AI agent, which we have, it re-underwrites it every day. It goes back into that market and says, what's happening? What's changed? What's happening with the rents? What's happening with crime? What's happening with unemployment? Everything that we would want, 50, 60 different things, every day it's re-underwriting every loan in our portfolio and giving our asset managers and portfolio managers a dashboard of where there might be changes in risk. We could never do that independently. So it ups our game to do more because of that.

**Charlie Harary** (3:15)
So in a way, what I'm hearing is that a person who's empowered and a person who wants to learn and grow, the AI doesn't replace, it actually enables, it allows that ambition, it allows that creativity to have a form, freeing you up for more creativity and more ambition.

**Scott Rechler** (3:35)
And again, you and I, obviously, we've been our AI working group, we spent a lot of time having these conversations, right? And there's the different degrees, right? There's the AI for the individual, the AI agent, the investment that you make into it, which then educates you, lifts you, makes you more effective, like we just talked about. But then there's the whole workflow piece of the equation, right? Which is how do we develop and integrate the workflows and automate workflows to empower you even more into utilizing AI and enhancing the business? And then there's the ongoing data collection, which is racially, if you think about it, that's our IP, that's our intellectual property. That comes, that each of us has this data. So when we keep doing it and training our AI agents at RXR and the data that we're collecting is going to make us as an organization and as individuals in this organization smarter than our competitors because we got the insights that are there, right? And we are more quickly going to recognize trends and opportunities that others might not be able to recognize.