We were delighted to be invited to exhibit at DataFest 2025 in Edinburgh last week. Hosted by The Data Lab - Innovation Centre, this is Scotland’s flagship data and AI event, celebrating the country’s leadership in shaping the global data and AI landscape

It was fantastic to connect with so many innovative people and hear from leading organisations such as OpenAI and IBM. Below are some of the key takeaways from the sessions we attended:

🧭 1. While the latest AI developments are unlocking significant productivity gains in applications such as contract review and customer service, these solutions only work well within wider systems that are designed to amplify their strengths and manage their risks.

👪 2. Key challenges include ensuring consistency of output, establishing effective safety measures and dealing with changing user behaviour. Organisations must adopt governance frameworks that recognise the potential of AI to ‘hallucinate’, while staff and customers need to be protected from the risks of misinterpreting or becoming overly reliant on the outputs of AI tools.

💾 3. Data is often a blocker for building effective AI-powered solutions. AI models are not magic, so any attempts to use them with data that is poorly labelled or inaccessible (often the case in large organisations) will generally result in disappointing outcomes.

🏛️ 4. Many organisations (particularly in the financial services sector) are opting to self-host open-source models to reduce the risk of leaking sensitive data. Many avoid using large, general-purpose models (which are expensive to run and produce outputs that are hard to explain) and instead use combinations of smaller, more focused models.

⏰ 5. Enthusiasm for AI often leads to a focus on short-term results, creating a risk that any solutions developed offer limited value and lack durability.

🔎 6. Many people 'think too small’ when adopting AI, focusing on how existing processes can be automated rather than exploring the more transformative improvements that AI could unlock.

Lots to ponder as we explore how AI can help us future-proof property - we’re looking forward to next year’s DataFest already!