EliseAI Innovation, Technology & Agility

What project are you most excited to work on in 2025? 

I’m most excited to continue building out our centralized CRM platform with AI integrations that genuinely help agents save time on repetitive, manual tasks, allowing them to focus more on operations that drive community success. EliseAI is in an exceptionally rare position where we’ve spent years developing effective and practical generative AI, and now we face the much easier task of building a CRM on top of those tools, rather than the other way around.

Many of our customers have shared how the recent AI hype has resulted in a flood of so-called “time-saving tools” that, in reality, are nothing more than basic email suggestion generators. Understandably, this has led to AI fatigue amongst our customers. That’s why it’s incredibly rewarding to demonstrate first-hand how our CRM truly saves time — by surfacing only the tasks that need attention, optimizing tour schedules and enabling bulk actions for common, repetitive workflows.

What does the roadmap for this project look like? 

Currently, I see this project being a major part of my day-to-day over the next three months, given our current goals and commitments to our partners. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this project is the high level of collaboration as it involves working with nearly every department at EliseAI, including design, operations, strategy and product while also iterating with external developer teams for integrations and gathering customer feedback on a weekly basis.

At this point, we’ve addressed every foreseeable roadblock. However, with any project of this scale, there will be surprises along the way. More than anything, I’m excited to tackle those challenges because so many people are invested in this project. I have full confidence that our team will collaborate to develop innovative solutions that continue advancing technology in the housing industry.

What in your past projects, education or work history best prepares you to tackle this project? What do you hope to learn from this work to apply in the future?

Over the past year at EliseAI, the most valuable preparation I’ve had has come from two key factors: the ability to easily engage with our customers and a strong focus on developer velocity. From my very first month on the team, I was on calls with customers at every level of the industry and meeting with clients in person across the country. This experience has given me a much deeper understanding of which problems need to be solved and why they are important. 

In my experience, there’s only so much context that can be gained from reading a lengthy list of product requirements. However, being able to ask real-time questions to the people who use the platform daily and understanding what is and isn’t important to them significantly improves our ability to build the best possible product. It also greatly reduces the number of times we have to rework a finished feature, a frustration every engineer knows all too well.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity. Images provided by Shutterstock and listed companies.