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TRACE SOLUTIONS AND THE RISE OF AI BY MARTIN HUGHES, DIRECTOR OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, TRACE SOLUTIONS


Sometimes it seems like Artificial Intelligence is the only thing anyone ever talks about. Like a shiny new toy, software developers have rushed to include something – anything! – that can be labelled ‘AI’. And who hasn’t enjoyed exploring the possibilities presented by Claude, Chat GPT, and the rest?


So why is Trace Solutions – the UK’s longest-serving and best known supplier of property management software – being so careful and con- sidered in the way it approaches AI?


It all comes down to reputation. There is a reason we’ve been known and respected for over fifty years, and it is because we pride ourselves on producing the most rock solid and reliable software in the market. And when your software is used by many of the world’s largest property management companies – well, then the incorporation of ANY new tech- nology must be handled with extreme care. Never more so than when that technology is AI.


The pros - and cons - of AI


Have you ever noticed how an AI search will occasionally supply you with a completely wrong answer? Not just slightly wrong, but an answer that is, quite frankly, entirely made up? These are the famous AI ‘hallucinations’, and they’re surprisingly common.


AI is astonishingly powerful, and will be transformational on society. Even in its simplest incarnations it can already automate the tedious, unearth insights buried in data, and help your team make faster, better decisions. We intend to leverage all those exciting possibilities.


But AI does also makes mistakes – confident, plausible mistakes, and they don’t come with a red flag or an audit trail. Unlike a spreadsheet error, traceable to a single cell, AI failures are unpredictable. You might even call them creative.


In property management, where compliance, audit and accountability are non-negotiable, that’s the sort of creativity you don’t want from your software.


Trace has been a member of Brunel’s Industry Advisory Board for some years, but uniquely in the property world we also work directly with their researchers to explore, test and inform how AI I can provide extra value for our clients.


It’s a deep and happy collaboration. Brunel brings profound scientific understanding of what AI can and can’t do; Trace brings over fifty years of institutional knowledge about what the property industry needs.


Power to the people


Our philosophy is simple. AI can and should be used to augment human expertise – “to give superpowers to ordinary people”, as our Director of Software Development has put it. But it must never replace or degrade human expertise, by pandering either to mistaken attempts at cost-cutting, or simple human laziness.


Trace’s MD Louise Dawson at PropTech Connect 2025 Director of Software Development Martin Hughes Enter Brunel University


Brunel University London is one of the world’s leading centres for AI research, uniquely focused on practical, industry-relevant applications.


Over the past decade, Brunel has produced more highly cited AI papers than any other UK university, consistently ranking in the global top 1%. They understand exactly where AI works brilliantly, where it struggles, and – crucially – where it should be kept on a tight leash.


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Our phased roadmap reflects this. We’ve started where AI automation adds the most value for the least risk to our customers – batch invoice processing, matching and classification – and are moving into budget analysis and compliance monitoring, with predictive features to follow. At every stage, we build in the checks, friction-points and confidence scoring needed to ensure human operatives don’t blithely accept a potentially damaging outcome.


The AI arms race in property software is real. But the vendors worth watching aren’t the ones who shout loudest. They’re the ones who can tell you, clearly and honestly, what their AI actually does — and what it doesn’t.


At Trace, we think that’s a conversation worth having. COMMERCIAL PROPERTY MONTHLY 2026


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