Nordic businesses are embracing AI, but a key paradox exists: ambition outpaces strategic governance. From our perspective in corporate real estate, this gap represents one of the most significant, yet overlooked, strategic risks to a company's largest physical and financial assets: its real estate portfolio.
A recent report from EY confirms what many of us feel: the AI revolution is fully underway in the Nordic region. An impressive 75% of Nordic executives are now actively integrating AI into their business initiatives. But look closer at the data, and a critical paradox emerges—a significant gap between this technological ambition and the strategic governance required to manage it.
The report reveals that over half of Nordic companies face AI governance challenges, and only 26% of CEOs are directly involved in shaping their firm's technology strategy, a stark contrast to the global average of 49%.
For business leaders, it's tempting to view this "governance gap" as a purely technical or organizational issue. This is a mistake. From our perspective in corporate real estate, this gap represents one of the most significant, yet overlooked, strategic risks to a company's largest physical and financial assets: its real estate portfolio.
The connection is not about using a few new AI tools to find office space. It is far more fundamental.
Corporate strategy is increasingly being shaped by AI-driven insights into markets, customers, and operations. Corporate Real Estate (CRE) strategy, in turn, is—or should be—the physical manifestation of that corporate strategy. Its role is to align the company's portfolio of long-term, high-cost assets with its primary business objectives.
When the core business runs on a new, intelligent, and predictive operating system, but its real estate decisions are still being made with old, static data, a deep and dangerous misalignment occurs. The portfolio ceases to be an enabler of strategy and risks becoming an anchor.
This isn't an abstract threat. This strategic disconnect creates tangible failures with multi-million-euro consequences.
The Risk of Capital Misallocation: Imagine a company whose AI models predict future growth will come from agile, smaller teams in secondary Nordic cities. Simultaneously, its disconnected CRE team, using historical headcount data, commits to a 10-year lease on a large, expensive headquarters in a primary CBD. This is a classic case of capital being locked into a long-term asset that directly contradicts the company's data-driven future.
The Risk of Reduced Agility: Consider a business where AI identifies a fleeting six-month window to capture market share, requiring a new operational hub in a specific region. If the CRE team relies on traditional methods for site selection and analysis, the 18-month process they undertake means the opportunity is long gone. The company's real estate portfolio has failed its first test of agility.
The Risk of Flawed M&A: A merger is pursued based on sophisticated AI analysis of product and market synergies. Yet the due diligence on the target company's real estate portfolio—a massive, illiquid, and complex liability—is superficial. The acquiring company may find it has inherited a portfolio of overpriced and underutilized leases that will erode the value of the deal for years to come.
Closing the AI governance gap is essential to mitigating these risks. It requires bringing corporate, technology, and real estate strategies into a single, coherent conversation. For Nordic leaders, the first step is to ask the right questions:
The AI revolution isn't just a test of a company's technological prowess. It is a test of its strategic alignment. Ensuring your real estate portfolio is not just participating in this transformation, but actively enabling it, will be a deciding factor for success in the years to come.