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Every time you face a big, messy task — reading through a stack of emails, reviewing contracts before a decision, or turning raw notes into a clean report — someone still has to make sense of it all before anything useful happens. Two companies that OpenAI recently profiled show how AI can handle that first pass, with a person staying in charge of the final call.
A property company speeds up its listings
Heimstaden is a European company that manages thousands of residential apartments. In June 2025, its leadership decided to move faster with AI. After looking at several platforms, it chose OpenAI's tools, including ChatGPT.
The goal was twofold: help employees work more efficiently and rethink the core processes behind the business. Eventually, Heimstaden wants to move toward buildings that almost run themselves — with AI helping to anticipate needs, coordinate work and support decisions across the entire property lifecycle.
Here is what that looks like in practice. When a unit becomes vacant, the steps to get it back on the market traditionally include setting a rental price, arranging photography, writing advertisements and responding to market demand. Each step takes coordination and specialist input. Now AI supports all of them:
- Pricing: recommendations based on market data
- Advertising: image styling and apartment descriptions written by AI
- Review: automated checks against quality standards
- Feedback: AI-generated market insights that help teams adjust prices more quickly
In the Netherlands, the cost of producing a virtually staged property image fell from roughly €50 to less than €0.10 — a reduction of more than 99 percent. Heimstaden estimates the annual savings potential at €130,000 in that market alone. The company also used Codex (OpenAI's coding tool that helps people write and check software) to analyze 20,112 property assets, and half of all employees adopted the tools within two to three months.
Heimstaden's Co-CEO, Helge Krogsbøl, put it plainly: "The purpose of our buildings hasn't changed. We provide homes for people. But the way we operate them continues to change as we challenge conventions and adopt new technology."
A law firm speeds through the paperwork
Ropes & Gray, a North American law firm, is developing its own AI tool in partnership with OpenAI. The target is transactional diligence — the process a buyer goes through when checking a seller's contracts and records before a deal closes. It is a slow job: a team may need to read thousands of pages under a tight deadline.
The tool Ropes & Gray built makes a first pass through those documents, groups related files by theme and drafts summaries and a report in the firm's own format. Lawyers can then check the groupings to confirm nothing was missed.
The firm compared early outputs with reports that human lawyers had written for completed deals, then adjusted the approach where the drafts fell short. Josh Lichtenstein, a partner at the firm, said AI is "really one of the key ways — if not the only way — to make sure you can maintain the same quality and consistency of advice while moving at a faster pace."
Howard Glazer, the firm's Head of Practice AI, put it this way: "Our clients don't pay us to review contracts. They pay us to make judgments based on what is in the contracts." The tool is designed to handle that first, time-intensive pass so lawyers can spend more of their time on judgment.
Wrap-up
Both companies follow the same pattern: AI handles the time-consuming first pass, and people stay in charge of review and final decisions. Heimstaden cut costs dramatically; Ropes & Gray says its lawyers spend more time on the work that actually matters to clients. Both also share where the tools fell short, which makes their experience useful if you are planning to try something similar.
Your next step: choose one repetitive task you face this week, notice how long it takes you, and try an AI first draft on it.