Talk: AI in the research process
AI is changing how research gets done — but for anyone looking in from the outside, it is hard to tell what is doing the work. The analogy that keeps coming to mind is weight loss drugs. People get results. But whether it was the jab or the gym is rarely obvious, and the distinction matters.
At yesterday’s ECREDA conference in London, I tried to triangulate exactly this. Using real estate research as a testing ground, I explored how LLMs perform on research idea generation — varying domain knowledge and constraints, then scoring ideas for novelty and predicted citation impact. AI can expand the frontier of what gets considered. But the gym still matters.
