How a market leader in real estate makes AI a natural part of the work

Operating out of Venlo, Burgstate is a real estate investor, project developer and property manager. It is the market leader in commercial real estate in Limburg, the largest provider of office space in the province, with Business Centers spread from north to south and a portfolio that also includes shopping centres such as Roercenter in Roermond and the Orlandopassage in Kerkrade. A team of around fifty specialists, operating across the Netherlands.

In the market, Burgstate deliberately positions itself as energetic, personal and digital. That is the promise to their clients. And delivering on that promise means that as an organisation you actually have to be digital yourself, not just in your communication.

Frank Berden, director of Burgstate, had known Joost for years from the commercial real estate world. When the question around AI became concrete, the challenge was not "something fun with AI" but "making AI genuinely work in an organisation of fifty people, across multiple departments, without it staying an isolated gadget".

That calls for something other than a tool you install. It calls for a partner who works alongside you every month, builds solutions that land in the work of sales, marketing, finance and the back office, and helps the team actually start using them. Not a pilot that stalls after three months, but AI as a natural part of the daily work.

The partnership has been running since late 2025 and is built around a fixed monthly rhythm. At the start of the month we decide together what needs to be in place over the coming four weeks, we build and test in short iterations, and at the end we review and decide whether something gets scaled up or refined. One central board where everything runs, one main contact at Burgstate, and for each use case a dedicated stakeholder from the department that will be working with it.

What we explicitly take on board from day one: adoption is not an afterthought. AI only delivers value when people use it, trust it and make it part of their daily work. That is why every month we spend time on instructions, guidance and feedback from practice, both remotely and regularly on-site at Burgstate.

Within the partnership, several AI initiatives run in parallel, each in its own place in the business:

• An email copilot for management and key roles that triages, categorises and drafts replies to incoming mail. The user stays in control, but without the sorting work.

• Automated meeting recaps for management meetings and performance reviews, turning transcripts into decisions, action lists and summaries. In use and being rolled out to more roles and meeting types.

• A floor-plan-to-visual tool for sales, turning technical floor plans into attractive sales material for letting and selling.

• Automated data visualisation and reporting from their own real estate software, so quarterly reports no longer have to be built by hand.

Each of these solutions runs in its own web-app environment, connects to the tools and data Burgstate already uses, and is built in close collaboration with the team that will work with it.

The strength is not in a single tool. The strength is that a deliberately phased programme is running, across multiple departments, from one continuous partnership. What is built in one month is refined the next based on usage. What works in the email copilot becomes the pattern for the next module. That is how you create something that can grow with the business, instead of isolated tools that stall after a quarter.

The partnership continues. We keep building on what is there, scaling up where it works, and adding where Burgstate sees new opportunities. The goal: that within a year AI is a natural part of how work gets done across several departments.