There’s an old saying that knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

It’s funny because it captures something we all understand intuitively: having the right information and knowing what to do with it are two very different things, whether you’re a chef, an executive or an investor.

That distinction is particularly relevant today as artificial intelligence becomes part of nearly every conversation about business and technology. AI can access enormous amounts of information, analyze data, identify patterns and produce answers in seconds. It is great at giving us more knowledge, faster.

But knowledge has never been the most valuable thing a manager brings to the table. Wisdom is.

Wisdom comes from experience – making decisions, seeing what happens, adjusting and making the next decision a little better. In a cyclical business like real estate, that’s valuable.

The question I find most interesting about AI isn’t whether it can replace parts of the accounting and finance functions. It obviously can and increasingly will. The more interesting question is: what can accounting and finance teams do with the time we get back?

Iteration, Not Repetition

There's an important difference between repetition and iteration. Repetition means doing the same thing over and over. Iteration means doing it again but adapting and improving based on what you learned the previous time.

Both involve experience. Only one – iterating and improving – has a compounding effect.

If I prepare the same report 100 times using the same process, I’ve accumulated 100 repetitions. I may get a little faster, but the value of the 100th report isn’t dramatically different from the first.

Iteration is different. I make a decision. I see the outcome. I learn something. I incorporate that into my next decision – and adapt again when the variables change unexpectedly. Each iteration varies and builds on the last.

That’s what makes experience valuable. It isn’t valuable simply because something happened to us. It becomes valuable when we incorporate what happened previously into what we do next.

That’s wisdom. And it’s exactly what more time gets us. The time AI frees up isn’t just time saved – it’s expanded capacity for the kind of decision-making activities that actually compound.

Where Time is Actually Spent

Accounting and Finance teams historically spend a significant amount of their time producing information rather than interpreting it. According to EY's 2026 “DNA of the CFO” survey, CFOs report that 47% of their capacity still goes to operational tasks – compliance, reporting, internal controls and core finance processes. The same survey found that only 27% of respondents see finance as a genuine strategic partner in value creation; most organizations still view the function in a more traditional light with these priorities:

• Close the books. Reconcile accounts. Build reports.
• Update forecasts. Prepare investor materials.
• Respond to audit requests. Explain why one number doesn’t tie to another in a spreadsheet someone built six months ago.

AI can compress that 47% of time spent on operational tasks dramatically, freeing up time for more strategic projects. Systems can pull data together automatically. First drafts of variance explanations can be generated in seconds. Loan documents can be reviewed for key terms without someone manually searching hundreds of pages. Forecasts can update as assumptions change.

People don’t disappear from these processes – financial information still needs controls, review and judgment. But the human bandwidth required to produce them declines.

Which raises the real question: where should that bandwidth go?

Moving Upstream

Much of traditional accounting and finance happens in response to something after it occurs. Sign the lease – record it. Refinance the property – update the debt schedule. The property’s financial performance was below budget – explain the variance.

If technology reduces the effort required downstream, finance gets more room to participate upstream – before decisions are made. This is the idea Dan Heath explores in his book Upstream. He lays out the concept and premise of the book with a well-known parable: two people keep pulling drowning children out of a river, one after another, until one of them finally stops and wades upstream instead – to find whoever is throwing the children in, and stop it at the source.

The pattern is the same whether the subject is drowning children or a fund’s next investment decision: waiting for the problem to surface is the expensive way to solve it.

That shift – from reporting outcomes to influencing them – is where AI can create the greatest value. However, most finance organizations haven’t reached that point. One CFO survey found that while 90% of finance leaders have automated some part of their workflow, only 1% describe AI as fully integrated into their work, and more than a third are saving less than two hours a week from it. The bottleneck isn’t the technology. It’s whether finance leaders intentionally redirect the time it frees up to more valuable areas of focus. There’s also one more place that time can go, and it may be the most overlooked of all: relationships.

Relationships

Reclaimed bandwidth isn’t only useful for analysis. Some of the most valuable time a manager or principal gets back should go toward relationships – both building new ones and deepening those that already exist – well before there’s a specific deal, financing need or fundraise attached to the conversation.

This is where the business case is most direct for us. Some of the best real estate opportunities rarely reach the open market. Recent industry surveys put the share of deals sourced off-market as high as 40%, and the pattern holds for a simple reason: sellers, brokers and lenders bring their best opportunities to the buyers they already know, trust and believe can execute. A principal who has time to cultivate those relationships isn’t just being collegial – they're widening the firm’s access to acquisitions that never get marketed at all, where there’s less competition and far more room to negotiate price, terms and timeline.

Relationships don’t compound on a single transaction any more than judgment does. They compound the way iteration does – through repeated, deliberate contact over time, long before a deal or a loan maturity makes the relationship urgent.

AI creates bandwidth. Where we choose to spend it – creating a new relationship or deepening an existing one – often determines whether we see the next deal before it’s marketed or hear about it after someone else already closed.

The Human Advantage

This brings us back to the tomato. AI can tell us a tomato is botanically a fruit – and probably produce 100 fruit salad recipes before you finish reading this sentence. But deciding whether it belongs in a fruit salad requires something different – judgment. The same is true for executives and companies.

AI can flag that insurance costs across a portfolio have risen sharply – and they have! Commercial property insurance premiums rose more than 15% annually between 2019 and 2024, spiking nearly 30% in 2023 alone. Experience is what tells an executive whether that’s a temporary budget variance or a structural shift requiring new underwriting assumptions or a comprehensive change in strategy, like a broker/carrier rebidding process or a change in deductibles or other coverage elements.

AI can flag a looming debt maturity – and there’s no shortage of those coming: roughly $875 billion in commercial and multifamily mortgage debt, about 17% of the market outstanding, matures in 2026 alone. Experience is what helps us decide whether to refinance now, wait, sell, contribute equity, or start a conversation with the lender early.

AI can show that an asset is underperforming its original underwriting. Wisdom is what determines whether the right response is more capital, a changed business plan, or the discipline to stop putting good money after bad.

These aren’t questions of information. They’re questions of judgment – the kind built by adapting once reality diverges from the plan – which real estate, a cyclical industry, does regularly. Just over the last several years we’ve seen a pandemic, an inflation shock, a historic rate cycle, and a challenging insurance market that virtually no underwriting model saw coming. AI can get that information to decision-makers faster. Experience and judgment determine what they do with it.

The Future

There’s understandable concern about what AI means for accounting and finance jobs. The more useful question is what it allows those professionals to become.

When spreadsheets replaced handwritten ledgers, finance didn’t disappear. When cloud software automated reporting, CFOs didn't disappear. The work shifted more from producing numbers to explaining what they meant. AI will likely follow the same pattern. The finance professional who spends most of the day moving information from one place to another should expect their role to change. The one who understands the business, recognizes patterns, asks good questions and helps others make better decisions may become more valuable than ever.

More Time for Fruit Salad

Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, famously once said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” In the real estate industry – like most businesses – the real world sometimes makes it necessary to modify the initial plan and AI won’t change that. However, AI will give us more of an early warning , and what triggered the divergence. What AI can do exceptionally well is reduce the time finance spends gathering and producing information – so we have more time to understand what the information truly means and make better decisions about what to do next.

The greatest promise of AI isn’t that it will do our jobs for us. It’s that it may give us more time for the parts of our jobs that require experience, judgment and wisdom.

After all, a chef who knows the tomato is a fruit may be able to use that knowledge in a trivia game or a game show. Knowing how best to use the tomato is where the true culinary art form is.

Jeff Wurtz is Chief Financial Officer of Pathfinder Partners. Prior to joining Pathfinder in 2012, Jeff worked as a CPA focused on real estate and technology clients. He can be reached at jwurtz@pathfinderfunds.com.