Lendlease, Mirvac, Charter Hall unite on AI stance, telling industry to embrace not ban

A panel of property developers and experts has compared banning the use of ChatGPT among other generative AI as ‘leaving the garage door open’.

Several of Australia’s biggest property companies are in agreeance that employees should not be banned from using AI products at work.

Technology chiefs from some of the largest property companies in Australia have said that banning employees from using generative AI was “completely the wrong move” and that businesses should instead educate employees on the safe use of the technology.

The remarks arrived as The Australian newspaper on Thursday revealed that Dexus had joined the likes of Samsung, Apple, JPMorgan Chase and Verizon in banning staff from using the technology.

Charter Hall’s chief information and technology officer Sheridan Ware told a crowd at a Property Council of Australia event on artificial intelligence that companies should be teaching their staff how to understand the technology.

Companies in Australia are increasingly going public with their AI products and integrations in a bid to show that they are up with the times.

However, many others are yet to embrace the technology or come out publicly about having done so, with fears large language models such as ChatGPT and Bard are being trained on data they don’t own and that there’s a risk employees could share sensitive information which could later resurface.

Ms Ware said that Charter Hall had not banned its employees from using generative AI products.

“And the reason for that is when you shut the door and stop your employees from using it on their company devices, it’s a bit like leaving the garage door open,” she said. “Even if you could stop them from using it on their personal devices, what about all your suppliers who also have access to your data?”

Ms Ware said a better approach for all employers was to embrace generative AI and learn how it could be utilised.

“You’ve got to lean into this head on, think about the risk and then go after the opportunity,” she said.

The rest of the panel, which included technology spokespeople from Mirvac, Lendlease, MinterEllison, Meld Strategies and Gray Puksand, said their companies had also not banned the technology.

Gray Puksand digital practice manager James Hanley, who showed the room an example of several ways the technology was being used by architects, said banning staff from the technology “is not going to solve anything”.

“I think closing it down to staff is just the wrong way. You’ve got to get everyone around on being comfortable with it,” he said.

“We need to work out the different ways to use (the technology). How I will use it is different to the way an architect would use it and again to how an interior designer would use it.”

Meanwhile Mirvac’s general technology manager John Sinistaj said that bad threat actors would access the technology regardless of whether others were banned.

He said that putting a preventive measures in place would not stop “the people that are using it for the wrong purposes”.

Education and appropriate guidelines on employee use of the technology would be a better approach.

Lendlease head of podium services Colin Dominish said companies should develop policies regarding the use of ChatGPT and other generative AI. “Like having a travel policy within your organisation, if you don’t have a data policy that defines your data governance, (staff won’t know what is acceptable),” he said. “The right starting point for your organisation is to get a policy, so people know how they can use it.”

Originally published as Lendlease, Mirvac, Charter Hall unite on AI stance, telling industry to embrace not ban