The Rise of the AI Harness

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Hey friend,

Welcome to the 52nd weekly edition of Pillow Talk! This is where I share my unfiltered thoughts on life, business, and property management.

This week, we’re discussing what an AI harness is and why it matters.

The Rise of the AI Harness

I’ll keep this edition brief. AI has developed so fast in recent months that covering the news would be a full time job. Most of those developments are miniscule or political. We don’t need to get into those.

In today’s edition, I’m going to talk about the one development that affects property managers most: AI Harnesses. I think this is something really important for property managers to understand and keep their eye on, because it will soon open up a whole new world of possibilities.

What is an AI Harness?

You may have heard of “agentic AI” or “AI agents.” These terms refer to a type of artificial intelligence that can work toward a goal on its own instead of just answering one question at a time. When you give it a task, it figures out the steps needed, chooses which tools to use, such as a web browser or an app, and changes its plan if something doesn’t work.

For example, instead of only writing an email when you ask, an agentic AI might look up information about the person, pull details from your files, write the message, and set a reminder to follow up, asking you only when it needs your input.

Agentic AI is simply the combination of two things:

1. A Large Language Model (LLM). This is the brain of the agent. It reasons and makes decisions.
2. And a harness. The software infrastructure that sits around a model. It connects the model to other business systems, email, your knowledge base, files, databases, guardrails, and execution environments needed to carry out tasks.

LLMs have been around for a while, but the term harness rose to prominencee earlier this year. Which is why most people don’t know what it is yet.

Why it Matters to Property Managers

Without a harness, a model is just a chatbot. It can’t run code, call APIs, access files, remember previous work, or complete multi-step tasks on its own. With a harness, a model becomes an agent.

The practical effect for property managers is that the routine, multi-step chores that eat away your day become things you supervise. Because of harnesses, AI agents will soon do things like lease renewals, delinquency follow-ups, move-out coordination, monthly owner reporting, and vendor scheduling. That frees up time for the parts of the job that require judgment and relationships.

Harnesses are also important because they increase the value of your data. Most of the time, data sits dormant in your point solutions, maintenance platform, or PMS. And conversations sit in your email threads, VOIP, and chat apps. Retrieving that data used to be so time consuming because you had to bounce between multiple systems and sift through multiple threads. But harnesses can access it all and use it to make decisions and complete tasks. And because it has access to all the context of your business, it can make better decisions and complete tasks more reliably.

I think a lot of the tools you use today (if they’re keeping up) will soon have agentic features or become fully agentic. Which is why understanding what they are and how they work is so important.

I can speak from experience from things we’re doing internally, it will be utterly transformational.

Good night 😴

Lior Abramovich
Co-founder, CEO