Early use cases have reduced manual operational effort in selected workflows
Bank data and cash application workflows can now parse data and support transaction posting in significantly less time
CBRE has built and deployed AI-enabled applications for targeted business workflows
Google Cloud Agent Development Kit (ADK) has helped streamline development and deployment for selected AI use cases
CBRE is leveraging the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform with the help of McKinsey to rapidly build, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade AI agents.
CBRE is leveraging the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform with the help of McKinsey to rapidly build, deploy, and scale enterprise-grade AI agents.
Overcoming rote processing at global scale
As the world's largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, CBRE delivers a fully integrated suite of financial, property accounting, and fund administration services. Managing asset-level transactional processing and generating complex financial statements across a massive global portfolio requires immense operational precision. For years, these critical functions relied on heavy manual intervention, forcing teams to absorb high volumes of rote document processing and manual work orders.
To continue improving service delivery for commercial property owners and managers, CBRE has been modernizing its facilities management technology stack. The company launched a multi-year digital initiative focused on improving operational efficiency, scaling its internal Ellis AI platform, and developing predictive maintenance capabilities. Moving beyond simple point-automation required a flexible framework designed to support AI-enabled workflows with appropriate oversight and controls.
Traditional CRE operations involve a high level of manual interventions and rote document and information processing. We believe AI agents will alleviate these pain points, but a robust architecture is essential to enable successful deployment.
Kapil Lahoti
Head of AI and Data Science; Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Advisory Services, CBRE
Building a robust architecture with Agent Platform
To bring this AI vision into selected production workflows, CBRE partnered with Google Cloud and McKinsey & Company. Google Cloud provided the architectural inputs and generative AI tooling; McKinsey supported process definition, design research, and technical delivery practices for enterprise implementation.
Working together, the teams followed a disciplined, four-step framework. They established the core technical architecture and built a foundation for agentic workflows. Rather than automating existing friction points, they completely reimagined the underlying process workflows. From there, the teams built the technical solution for hyper-automation and executed the rollout using comprehensive change management and performance measurement.
A key technology supporting this effort is the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which helps CBRE centrally create, run, and govern agentic AI workflows. CBRE developers used the Google Cloud Agent Development Kit (ADK) to build and deploy highly reliable client-facing applications within a few months.
“Building our agentic AI platform in-house gives us more flexibility to adapt to evolving business needs and develop new capabilities for our workflows and clients. That approach helps us move with greater speed and focus,” says Basia Huss-Kaniewska, Chief Business Transformation Officer, CBRE.
The ADK provided capabilities that support CBRE’s multi-agent workflows. To maintain continuity across longer-running real estate tasks, the platform uses context and state management features. Multi-agent orchestration tools support workflow composition and large language model (LLM) reasoning, while throttling and rate limiting features help manage workloads and support service level agreement (SLA) management.
Building our agentic AI platform in-house gives us more flexibility to adapt to evolving business needs and develop new capabilities for our workflows and clients. That approach helps us move with greater speed and focus.
Basia Huss-Kaniewska
Chief Business Transformation Officer, CBRE
The architecture also includes event-driven features that can support workflow intervention and adaptation. To manage latency, the ADK supports both asynchronous and synchronous generation patterns. The system is designed to scale across Google Cloud infrastructure and includes guardrail and safety features that support CBRE’s security and governance practices.
“Google Cloud and Agent Platform are helping us build and deploy AI-enabled services with more flexibility and consistency as our agentic AI capabilities mature,” says Surya Rebbapragada, Group Vice President, Head of Data Science and Engineering, CBRE.
Reimagining workflows and
exceeding automation targets
By applying this agentic architecture to real-world business cases, CBRE is changing how selected work gets done. Following business reviews and interviews with facility managers, CBRE initially targeted 50% process automation using AI agents in facilities management (FM) workflows. The actual results have exceeded that target.
In practice, the Bank Data and Cash Application workflows use AI-enabled automation to help read submitted deposits and daily bank activity reports. The system can parse banking data and support receipt transaction posting in significantly less time for selected workflows across multiple business lines and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The approach is designed to help clients receive data quickly and reduce time spent reviewing manual reports.
To support continuous improvement, the platform includes an exception-handling process. When the system encounters a transaction it cannot process and a team member cannot determine the right path forward, an in-app workflow can engage the relevant operations team. That human-in-the-loop review can inform future scenarios and help reduce similar exceptions over time.
“At its core, this work shows how organizations can move the needle to become AI-led, using AI not as a standalone tool, but as a catalyst for rethinking how work gets done at scale,” says Aman Dhingra, Partner, McKinsey & Company.
This initiative produced practical patterns for enterprise AI deployment. CBRE and McKinsey found that reductions in manual work are more achievable when end-to-end workflows are redesigned before automation is introduced. By establishing shared automation patterns, CBRE is making selected AI solutions reusable across multiple lines of business. Moving from isolated point solutions to a unified enterprise platform supports broader orchestration, while operational metrics and SLAs improve process visibility. Human review and change management help support adoption and responsible scaling.
Building an agentic AI capability allows us to reimagine processes, design intelligent workflows, and optimize execution at enterprise scale. The real value of AI automation comes from consistency, scale, and disciplined execution—not isolated use cases.
Georgeta Ionescu
Managing Director, Global Business Process Transformation, CBRE
With Google Cloud-powered architecture in place, CBRE has accelerated speed to market for agentic capabilities. The company is well positioned to develop rapidly, gather continuous feedback, and roll out high-value, secure AI use cases.
“Building an agentic AI capability allows us to reimagine processes, build intelligent workflows, and optimize execution at enterprise scale. The real value of AI automation comes from consistency, scale, and disciplined execution, not isolated use cases,” says Georgeta Ionescu, Managing Director, Global Business Process Transformation, CBRE.
CBRE is the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm and a premier provider of critical infrastructure services.
Industry: Real Estate
Location: United States
Product: Gemini Enterprise
About Google Cloud partner – McKinsey & Company
McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm. It works with leading organizations to combine bold strategies and transformative technologies to help organizations innovate more sustainably, achieve lasting gains in performance, and build workforces that will thrive in this generation and the next.
