JLL transforms real estate with Azure AI Services, delivering a year’s worth of insights in a week

AI is revolutionizing the way businesses operate, accelerating outcomes, and streamlining internal processes. Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), a leader in commercial-real-estate (CRE) services, is at the forefront of this technological transformation, using cutting-edge tools to enhance operations and decision making.

JLL recognized the challenge of disparate data in the CRE industry and aimed to help its clients collect, incorporate, and use data more effectively for informed business decisions. The company harnessed the power of Microsoft Azure and Azure AI Services to develop solutions that provide clients with accessible, practical insights.

Empowering global clients with 250 years of CRE expertise

Boasting more than two centuries of industry experience, JLL supports occupiers and investors with a comprehensive suite of services, including portfolio and workplace management, leasing, buying, selling, and debt and equity management. Working with Azure Databricks, JLL aims to provide cleaner data to help real estate clients track trends and unique business challenges that might affect their workplace experience, facility management, and sustainability goals.

Recognizing a significant challenge in the CRE industry—collecting and analyzing diverse data—JLL sought to develop technology that would help clients across various industries gather standardized data efficiently. “CRE data is different from what many other companies deal with,” says Yao Morin, Chief Technology Officer at JLL. “In our world, we have a wide-data problem, not a big-data problem. It’s usually dirty data as much of it is generated manually, but you really have to understand the nature of the data to use it.”

JLL collaborated with Microsoft partner Databricks and Microsoft to design a secure, compliant solution that addresses this challenge.

Creating a solution to accelerate data aggregation and insight discovery with Azure

A long-term Microsoft customer, JLL benefited from Microsoft’s early investment in AI. JLL has partnered with Databricks since 2019 in storing and gleaning insights from vast amounts of data. “Databricks is proud to collaborate with the JLL team and Microsoft to drive transformative outcomes in real estate,” says Chris Camino, Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Sales, at Databricks. “Together, JLL, Databricks, and Microsoft are empowering real estate professionals with AI-driven insights that optimize portfolios and enhance sustainability for clients worldwide.”

This partnership facilitated the decision to move forward with Azure. “In the AI revolution, Microsoft and Databricks have been the fastest to figure out how to unlock business value out of technology,” says Srihari Kumar, Chief Product Officer, Insights and Data, at JLL. “Azure has been a leader on the cloud front and provides the full stack, from the infrastructure to the platform to the AI, streamlining implementation and delivery.”

JLL aimed to aggregate data from multiple sources, providing a comprehensive real-time view to help clients make informed decisions. The company’s analytics solution, JLL Azara, built on Azure Databricks and JLL’s AI platform JLL Falcon, delivers vital insights into workplace performance management. JLL Azara turns JLL’s extensive CRE experience into a comprehensive CRE data model combined with the latest AI and business intelligence tools and Azure data storage capabilities. Using this solution, clients and their JLL partners can inquire about nearly any aspect of their portfolio to instantly uncover personalized insights, measure workplace performance, and gain the intelligence needed to develop and implement business strategies. Insights that once took months of data engineering and analytics development can now be done in minutes or seconds.

In 2024, JLL introduced new AI capabilities to JLL Azara to significantly optimize the cost, speed, and scale of delivering insights—thus offering a year’s worth of insights in one week. These capabilities include a conversational analysis experience to help clients gain insights through natural language queries. “It can be daunting for some business users to log in to a sea of dashboards and try to find actionable insights,” says Kumar. “We help users unlock the value of their data by asking questions specific to their business to make better data-driven decisions.”

JLL’s corporate occupier clients are among the first to benefit from this enhanced data access and exploration. Each month, clients have asked an average of approximately 300 previously difficult questions and generated impactful insights. Collaborating with the JLL team, clients are measuring the number of new questions asked and answered, data-driven hypotheses validated or refuted, predictions delivered, anomalies detected, and data fields enriched—all from straightforward natural language inquiries.

Cutting costs by millions and making 100% of data accessible for CRE clients

Since deploying JLL Azara powered by JLL Falcon, JLL has helped clients discover the root causes for challenges faster, meet business goals, and save research time. “Now, you can get insights instantly and at a much lower cost,” says Sharad Rastogi, CEO of Work Dynamics Technology at JLL. “It used to be that 70% of the data we had was not accessible, but now all of the data is accessible.”

Companies can use this readily available information to create a better workplace experience. JLL Azara has helped companies track facility management trends and challenges so they can proactively address them to reduce costs and improve administration practices. With personalized intelligence, JLL clients can see exactly where to focus their real estate efforts to meet efficiency challenges and pursue sustainability goals. In some cases, clients are revealing opportunities to save millions of dollars on portfolios and employee costs by empowering their teams with broad access and unencumbered exploration of data.

“Our philosophy is to create a wow experience that people didn’t imagine was possible before,” says Rastogi. “Democratizing access to advanced insights through a simple user experience does just that for business users—they are amazed at the speed and quality of analytics that JLL Azara provides them.”

Empowering CRE clients to work faster and more effectively in a data-driven future

JLL is now seeking to aggregate data in real time so that clients can make decisions and take action immediately. “We are at the beginning,” says Kumar. “We are looking to have more intelligent AI agents working alongside CRE agents, looking around the corners and alerting them on things to watch for.”

JLL will continue to democratize data using advanced tools like agentic AI. “We are on a mission to transform CRE with technology, and AI and generative AI are the most powerful tools we have seen to help in the transformation,” says Rastogi. “It’s all about how to operate more effectively in a dynamic world and offer a better experience for our clients and their employees so they can meet their biggest goals.”

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