Ross Hodges is the Global Head of Emerging Technology at Cushman & Wakefield, one of the world's leading commercial real estate services firms. His mandate is clear: encourage innovation across the organization and drive AI adoption at the enterprise level.
Cushman & Wakefield serves two core client groups: investor clients looking to buy and sell real estate around the world, and occupier clients seeking to lease space in major cities globally. It's a business built on complex transactions, and at the center of almost every one of them is documentation.
The document problem in CRE
Commercial real estate is a document-heavy industry. Leases in particular represent one of the sector's most stubborn operational challenges. They're highly complex, rarely standardized, and can run to 100 pages or more. Historically, abstracting key information from those documents with any meaningful degree of accuracy was slow, resource-intensive, and prone to error.
Lease abstraction quickly emerged as the number one AI use case across the commercial real estate industry, the clearest opportunity to apply machine learning to unstructured data and bring real value into the enterprise.
Putting Unframe's promise to the test
When Cushman & Wakefield first engaged Unframe, the pitch was bold: deliver working solutions in days, not months. Ross and his team took that claim seriously and put it to the test.
Two weeks later, Unframe came back with a working product, and it blew them away. Not only did Unframe meet the accuracy benchmarks Cushman & Wakefield had defined, they outperformed every other vendor in the competitive tender. Crucially, this wasn't a polished demo. It was a tangible, production-ready product that the team could actually use.
From concept to something in front of the business took five to six weeks.
The impact on day-to-day operations
The before-and-after is striking. Historically, abstracting a single lease could take anywhere from six hours to three days. Today, Cushman & Wakefield can put that information in front of brokers in minutes, consistently, and across multiple languages.
That speed and reliability changes what's possible in client engagements. Brokers can surface lease insights in real time, rather than waiting days for back-office turnaround. The information is accurate, accessible, and available at the moment it's needed.
A strategic relationship, growing fast
Unframe is now a core part of Cushman & Wakefield's AI platform and strategically aligned in the firm's broader technology roadmap. The relationship has grown to more than 15 active projects, with more expected as the relationship matures.
What makes the collaboration distinctive is the ability to build bespoke, curated solutions configured to individual users, not just the organization as a whole. That individual-level customization is what drives adoption. Employees engage with tools that fit their actual workflow, and the firm still captures the underlying data and insights it needs to operate at scale.
Opening new conversations with clients
The commercial impact extends beyond internal efficiency. Cushman & Wakefield can now demonstrate, concretely and credibly, that it is an AI-forward organization. That reputation is opening new conversations with clients who want to know: what else can you do?
For Ross, that's the real opportunity: proving that Cushman & Wakefield is actively pushing the boundaries of what AI can bring to commercial real estate, and using that position to deepen client relationships and explore new possibilities together.
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