Inside Innovate 2026: How CBRE Employees Turned AI Ideas into Real Solutions in 48 Hours

More than 1,400 CBRE employees had a common goal: take an AI idea, build it out, and prove it works. That was the premise of Innovate 2026, CBRE’s global hackathon, and the results exceeded expectations.

Across 300+ teams representing 20 countries, including India, the United Kingdom, the Unites States and Poland, employees from every corner of the business had 48 hours to move from concept to working prototype. Data scientists worked alongside project managers. Real estate experts collaborated with technologists.

The solutions addressed genuine business problems: extracting insight from complex data sets, building intelligent digital assistants to cut manual work, and creating more connected experiences for clients and colleagues. Teams presented their proof-of-concept solutions to a panel of judges evaluating business impact, technical innovation, scalability, market readiness, and overall execution.

"Innovate was a chance to tackle a problem our teams live with every quarter: the manual grind of tracking how markets move," said Chris Hemming, Data Intelligence Manager at CBRE. "Building a solution for it alongside a great team was easily one of the highlights of my year."

The event also brought CBRE's broader ecosystem into the room. Turner & Townsend, a majority-owned CBRE subsidiary, contributed participants with deep domain expertise.

"Participating in CBRE's AI hackathon was a fantastic opportunity to turn bold ideas into real impact," said Dhwani Talati Padiyar, Senior Director at Turner & Townsend. "Together with an exceptionally talented team from CBRE and Turner & Townsend, we blended diverse expertise, challenged conventional thinking, and explored new ways to elevate sustainability assessments across data centers."

What Innovate 2026 made clear is that good ideas at CBRE do not require a specific title or technical background. They require curiosity, the right collaborators, and the space to experiment. The hackathon provided all three, and the ideas that came out of it will continue to shape how CBRE uses data and AI to solve complex problems for clients around the world.