Vornado Realty Trust was drowning.
With thousands of complex lease documents, millions of invoices, and 10 million square feet of prime Manhattan office space to manage, the commercial real estate giant faced a data deluge that threatened to overwhelm even their most experienced teams. AI changed everything.
Robert Entin, Vordano’s Executive Vice President and CIO, has spent nearly two decades transforming the $20 billion real estate investment trust from legacy infrastructure to an AI-ready enterprise. In a recent conversation on Box’s AI First podcast, Entin revealed how Vornado is using AI to unlock insights buried in decades of unstructured data, and why he believes we’re on the cusp of the most significant workplace transformation in history.
A foundation of content in the cloud for future of Intelligent Content Management
Vornado’s AI transformation didn’t happen overnight. It began with a prescient decision nearly a decade ago to move all content to the cloud, a bold move for commercial real estate at the time.
The migration took three grueling years, but it positioned Vornado perfectly for the revolution that’s happening today. “Not that we knew then,” Entin commented, “but now our unstructured data is in a place where it’s easily leveraged for tomorrow’s AI technology. We’re really in good shape.”
Now our unstructured data is in a place where it’s easily leveraged for tomorrow’s AI technology.
Much faster, AI-enabled access to content in Box Hubs
The payoff came when Vornado began implementing AI across operations. The company’s loan documentation, for instance, comprises thousands of complex documents that teams constantly need to reference. It once required hours of manual research for an employee to glean a piece of knowledge from this trove. Now, an AI-powered Box Hub, powered by Box AI, can deliver answers to questions in an instant.
The impact of Box Hubs extends beyond loans. Vornado has also built Hubs for earnings call transcripts, analyst reports, and SEC filings.
Loan documentation is now in an AI-powered Box Hub that can deliver answers to questions in an instant.
The impact of Box Hubs extends beyond loans. Vornado has also built Hubs for earnings call transcripts, analyst reports, and SEC filings.
One particularly powerful example involves a Financial Planning and Analysis team member who must compile analyst feedback after each earnings call. “The analyst reports come out right after the call,” Entin explained, “and overnight, he has to put together a summary of who said what. That was being done manually!”
By pulling all the reports into a Box Hub and training AI on what output should look like, Entin was able to greatly speed up this process. He confirms, “AI doesn’t make a finished product, but it gives him the data in a form that he can easily use to save significant time.”
The power of metadata applied to unstructured data at scale
Perhaps the most ambitious application of Intelligent Content Management involves Vornado’s thousands of commercial leases. These are documents that can run hundreds of pages with incredibly complex terms.
“Our job,” Entin said, “is to take these leases, extract all the financial data, and put it into our ERP systems. Then there’s all the other unstructured data in the lease: renewal information, expansion information, termination information, signage rights, insurance requirements.”
The real pot at the end of the rainbow for real estate will be having the whole bucket of leases parsed and vectorized in a way that you can ask complex questions and get really good answers.
Currently, human abstractors manually extract about 1,000 fields of information from each lease into a relational database. But Entin sees AI revolutionizing this process: “The real pot at the end of the rainbow for real estate will be having the whole bucket of leases parsed and vectorized in a way that you can ask complex questions and get really good answers.”
The key, he believes, is combining structured metadata with AI’s ability to understand unstructured text. “If I have the extracted metadata attached to the leases, and I have the leases, then I can envision an AI engine on top of that being able to ask a complex question and get back a cogent answer.”
Practical guidance for other real estate companies
Having witnessed and led Vornado’s AI transformation, Entin offers practical guidance for organizations looking to follow Vornado’s lead.
- First, ensure that your data is AI ready: well-organized, current, and accessible
- Second, find high-value use caseswhere teams are already analytically minded and dealing with rich content
- Third, set realistic expectations: “Don’t lie to them,” Entin says. “Some things are going to work well, but many things won’t, and it’s going to take a while to settle down.”
Most importantly, he advocates for hands-on experimentation. “Talk to the agent, whether it’s a GPT general agent or a Box Agent. You need to be explicit. You almost need to bloviate — give it way more information than you think it needs.”
By combining cloud infrastructure, Intelligent Content Management, and a willingness to reimagine workflows, Vornado isn’t just preparing for the future. It’s actively building it, one AI-powered insight at a time.
As commercial real estate faces mounting pressures, from return-to-office challenges to economic uncertainty, Vornado’s AI transformation offers a blueprint for turning data chaos into competitive advantage. But by combining cloud infrastructure, Intelligent Content Management, and a willingness to reimagine workflows, Vornado isn’t just preparing for the future. It’s actively building it, one AI-powered insight at a time.
Read more about how Vornado builds on Class A content and watch the full AI-FIrst podcast episode below.
