In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) in India’s real estate sector was largely confined to the customer-facing side of the business. Virtual property tours, chatbots answering buyer queries, personalised recommendations and smarter digital marketing were among the first applications developers experimented with.That was the easy part.
Now, a much bigger shift is happening behind construction barricades, inside project offices and across boardrooms where developers are increasingly relying on AI to decide what to build, when to build it, how much it will cost and whether a project is likely to run into trouble long before delays begin to show up on site.The conversations around AI inside real estate companies have changed remarkably over the past year.The opportunity is massive. India’s real estate sector is currently valued at $650 billion, projected to become a $5.8-trillion industry by 2047, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF). But to get there, developers will have to build more, build faster and build smarter. Increasingly, they believe AI can help do all three. A joint EY-Parthenon and CREDAI report estimates GenAI alone could add $14-17 billion to the sector’s Gross Value Added over the next seven years by improving productivity, shortening project timelines and boosting sales.”About 18 months ago, developers were asking us, ‘What can AI do?’ Today, the question is, ‘How quickly can we roll this out on our next project?’,” Iesh Dixit, co-founder and CEO of construction management platform Powerplay, told ET Online.
That shift reflects a broader change across the industry.
Every project generates thousands of drawings, contracts, approvals, site photographs, procurement records, spreadsheets, WhatsApp messages and progress reports. Traditionally, making sense of all this depended heavily on experience and manual coordination.AI changes that equation.
Unlike older enterprise software that required structured databases and extensive employee training, today’s AI models can understand engineering drawings, site images, voice notes and unstructured communication that construction teams already generate every day.
“The effort required to adopt new technology has reduced dramatically. When AI starts working with the information teams already create instead of forcing them to change their workflows, adoption naturally accelerates,” Dixit said.Moving beyond chatbots
While AI-powered marketing remains important, developers say project execution has become the industry’s biggest focus.
“Earlier, AI was largely associated with marketing automation or customer engagement. Today, developers want to know which two or three business functions AI can improve immediately,” Argenio Antao, Chief Business Officer at Inkers Technologies, an AI-powered construction intelligence platform, told ET Online.
The answer increasingly lies in execution.Developers are using AI to predict schedule overruns weeks before they occur, automate project reporting, analyse site photographs to identify quality issues, forecast procurement requirements and anticipate cash-flow gaps before they become critical.
The economics are becoming difficult to ignore.
According to EY, AI can reduce deal evaluation time by nearly 50%, shorten land-closure timelines by 30-35%, and enable developers to evaluate 2.5 times more land opportunities through automated feasibility studies and AI-generated financial modelling. Decision-making cycles that once took months could shrink to weeks—or even days.
Inkers estimates AI can reduce manual reporting effort by 30-40%, while projects using AI-powered monitoring have improved execution timelines by roughly 5-10% because project teams identify risks before they snowball into expensive delays.Powerplay, meanwhile, said one of the biggest breakthroughs has come in estimation.
Tasks that previously required engineers to manually analyse architectural drawings over several days — or even weeks — can now be completed within hours and, in some cases, minutes. The company said its AI models, trained on data from more than 85,000 construction projects, are also helping automate procurement planning and cash-flow forecasting.
Developers say avoiding even a single Bill of Quantities (BoQ) error — which can run into crores of rupees — is often enough to justify investing in AI.While the industry is still in the early stages of adoption, consultants say AI’s biggest financial gains are likely to come from automation rather than replacing people. According to Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Partner, Consulting, Deloitte India, AI-led automation has delivered 10-40% effort savings in software development-related processes and 50-70% savings across several non-software business functions in other industries. The exact benefits for real estate, he said, would depend on the specific use case and how the technology is deployed.
“It is difficult to quantify exactly how much developers can save because every deployment is different. The savings ultimately depend on the AI use case and the deployment scenario,” Gopalakrishnan told ET Online.
“The misconception is that AI replaces engineers. In reality, it removes repetitive work so engineers can spend more time making decisions that require judgment,” Dixit said.
