What’s Prologis’ approach to hiring tech superstars?
Because our IT staff had been focused on looking inward, our technological transformation required a lot of new talent. We’re based in San Francisco, and it’s tough for us to compete with the likes of Google and Meta for technology talent. So even though this was way before the pandemic, we decided to be flexible and go to wherever the talent was—we didn’t expect them to move to San Francisco. Now, of course, everyone hires remotely. They were forced by the pandemic, but we were ahead of that and able to build a really good team with some of the best engineers in the industry.
Tech changes quickly. How do you keep up?
Because technology is moving so fast, experimentation and agility are essential. And that was initially a bit of a foreign concept for Prologis, given we are in real estate and there are no do-overs in real estate. (You don’t get to pour the foundation and then decide to start over.) But in software development, that’s what people do; no product is ever completely finished. So, we embraced agility and started rolling out minimum viable products, a term that was not heard of five years ago at Prologis. Our people were not used to that kind of iterative work.
We realized our increased agility would require some change management, and in the past the Prologis IT team handled that, but it was not an ideal system. It’s like a restaurant where the chef is also running the dishes out to the tables. All the work in the kitchen stops. Plus, it’s a skill set mismatch because engineers are doing change management, which is not their strength. So now at Prologis, we let the chefs be chefs, and our dedicated Global Ops and Operational Excellence teams deal with training, adoption, KPI measurements and so on. Both of those teams have been a huge part of our data and digital transformation.
How do you design seamless workflows?
A key part of our tech journey is designing workflow. How do you design a day in the life of a remote execution manager in a way where they’re not pogo-sticking between apps, but there’s a natural rhythm to how they use the different apps to get the job done? We’ve made impressive strides. In turn, the new businesses we’re starting up have a chance to leapfrog on some of these transformations. For example, a dedicated team for our energy mobility and sustainability businesses is using our learnings on transforming technology in our core business. They’re ensuring the focus on data quality, business process automation and systems integration happens from day one.
Where does AI come in?
AI is definitely going to be a game changer for us and have some underlying impacts on technology infrastructure overall. We now have PLDGPT, our own version of ChatGPT, implemented companywide. It enables us to integrate our data with the large language model, but Prologis is not in the business of building those large models. There are plenty of industry experts to build them for us, which allows us to be flexible and portable. Specifically, it promotes an application programming interface (API)-driven architecture where you plug and play the modules that surround your business, and any single part can be taken out and replaced.
When ChatGPT came along, it was clear there were no security protections for enterprise data. So, we worked with Microsoft to get access to the OpenAI large language model in a way that protects Prologis IP. And thus, we built PLDGPT, which we rolled it out in October, and we’ve already had something like 32,000 conversations.
Beyond that lies generative AI, and we have exciting experiments underway. We see it as being both an efficiency driver, which is the most common use case for generative AI, and a potentially helpful capital allocation tool. We’re doing experiments on both fronts, and we’ll come up with applications over the next few months. We’re also building reusable frameworks so related used cases can be combined. An example of this would be the concept of PLDDocumentLLM, which is capable of assisting with document analysis and creation of all types of documents at PLD, whether it’s supplemental reports, Investment Committee memos or our contracts.
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