Two days at Europe's largest real estate tech event, and one theme kept surfacing: the conversation around AI is maturing fast.

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On 9 and 10 September, I attended PropTech Connect in London, Europe's largest real estate tech event, bringing together over 6,000 executives, 400+ speakers and 2,500+ companies at the InterContinental London, The O2.

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Two days in, a few things stood out.

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Growth is everywhere, but so is a search for direction

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The exhibition floor was full of growth-stage companies, real estate innovators pitching digitalization projects, energy-focused startups, smart building platforms. The energy in the room was real. But across the sessions I attended, on the CEO outlook, the characteristics of winning firms in the AI era, global market and regulatory shifts, and operational real estate, what struck me most was how quickly the industry is changing, and how honestly people were talking about it. AI came up in nearly every conversation, but so did something else: a consistent reminder that it's still people and their talent who stay at the front of the value chain. The firms expected to win long-term are the ones that treat AI as a lever for their people, not a replacement for them. Clients still need to feel the human element in the businesses they work with.

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The questions are maturing

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What I noticed most, talking to people, is that the conversation has shifted. A year or two ago, the question everywhere was "what can AI do for us?" This year, it felt different, more grounded. The question I heard again and again was closer to: before we add another AI tool, what's broken underneath that we need to fix first? Fragmented data, systems that don't talk to each other, tools bolted on without a real strategy behind them. The appetite isn't for one more point solution, it's for making the technology and data companies already have actually work together.

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Where this connects to Dirox

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That's exactly the gap a studio like Dirox is built to close. We're not selling a single AI feature, we help companies build the custom software and digital foundations that make AI (and everything else) actually usable, whatever their sector. Real estate isn't our core market today, but the problem I heard described in every session, disconnected systems, data that isn't ready, strategy that outpaces execution, is a problem we solve every day, in every industry we work with. That's a strong signal, and a door worth watching.

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What I'm bringing back

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If there's one thing I'd take from these two days, it's that the market is growing up. Less excitement about what AI could theoretically do, more seriousness about the groundwork it actually requires, and about the people who still have to make it work. That's a shift in Dirox's favour: it's exactly the kind of work we do best. I came back with a handful of new contacts and a clearer sense that "digital transformation partner" is a conversation worth having well beyond the sectors we already serve.

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