Day 1 at Altus Connect: The next chapter of CRE intelligence, built around you

Opening keynote from Mike Gordon, CEO at Altus

Mike Gordon opened Altus Connect with a phrase that would echo across the rest of the day: the next chapter is built around you.

Right now, more than two decades of investment in technology, data, and domain expertise are converging into a single platform, in service of decisions that Altus customers are making every day. As commercial real estate (CRE) continues to move through one of its most complex environments in decades, the first full day of Altus Connect shone a spotlight on the capabilities that didn’t exist 18 months ago, and on the discipline behind how they're being built.

Mike Gordon, CEO at Altus, delivering the ARGUS Connect 2026 opening keynote

We're not just focused on building great technology; we're focused on building the right things and building them well. We're making sure they're easy to use and easy to adopt, and you are realizing value from them. Faster.

Mike Gordon

CEO

Gordon framed the broader industry context plainly, noting that volatile rates, shifting capital, structural change across asset classes, and increased scrutiny on valuations have fundamentally reshaped how performance and risk are understood. At the same time, AI is changing how decisions get made and what new categories of risk look like.

Altus's response is focus: a deliberate concentration of investment in ARGUS Intelligence as the essential intelligence platform for CRE performance, with AI, playing a supporting role, woven into the workflows teams already rely on rather than bolted on after the fact.

That AI strategy rests on two distinct uses:

1. Efficiency: Eliminating the manual work that slows teams down so people can focus on what only humans can do.

2. Intelligence: Surfacing the signals that inform the decisions that actually matter, from benchmarking against the market to scenario stress-testing across a portfolio.

Underneath both of these use cases lies the same conviction: AI is only as good as the data beneath it, and Altus has spent more than 20 years building a foundation very few in the industry can match.

Insights from renowned futurist, Heather McGowan

Heather McGowan followed with an external keynote on unlocking performance in the age of AI, making the case that real advantage comes from learning faster and operationalizing insight, and that thoughtful innovation strengthens trust rather than erodes it. For an industry historically slower to adopt new technology, an important sentiment emerged: human leadership and modern tech, working together, produce far stronger outcomes than either alone.

Heather McGowan, Futurist, sharing her insights on AI at Altus Connect 2026

ARGUS solution strategy with David Ross, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Altus

David Ross took the stage next to translate strategy into product. The ARGUS Intelligence platform, he explained, is the answer to a CRE lifecycle notoriously fragmented by silos: brokers, acquisition managers, valuation analysts, portfolio managers, each working from their own version of the truth.

By driving every Altus solution onto a single platform organized around the asset rather than the file, models, assumptions, scenarios, and benchmarks all live in one place. This asset-centric architecture is made possible by Altus Group’s Knowledge Graph technology, which organizes data from multiple sources under a common Altus ID, while the ARGUS calculation engine grounds every insight.

David Ross, CPTO at Altus, sharing product strategy for ARGUS at Altus Connect 2026

ARGUS started as a place to store and run models. But your properties and assets are the center of your decisions, so we made the platform asset-centric. Your rent roll, your income and expense data, multiple models for the same asset; all of it automatically organized so you can find and compare insights across your portfolio. Put it all together and your data stops being a record. It becomes a competitive advantage.

David Ross

Chief Technology Officer

The day's biggest reveal came midway through Ross's keynote with the introduction of ARGUS Assist, an agentic AI layer built directly into ARGUS Intelligence. It sits across the entire platform, knowing the assets, the data, the models, the workflows, and puts that intelligence in the hands of whoever needs it, the moment they need it. The first agent in the family is designed for valuation workflow tasks, purpose-built for the accuracy, and defensibility that the valuation process demands. The difference between ARGUS Assist and a generic AI tool is an answer you can defend in an investment committee, grounded in thirty years of domain expertise and one of the most consistent and detailed CRE datasets in the industry.

You could go to a generic AI tool and ask questions about your portfolio. But could you take that output into an investment committee? ARGUS Assist is different. It gives you an answer you can stand behind.

David Ross

Chief Technology Officer

ARGUS solution roadmap with Shubhra Srivastava, VP of Product Management at Altus

Shubhra Srivastava closed out the keynote series with a roadmap session that doubled as a look-behind-the-curtain on how Altus drives disciplined innovation. Through programs like the Product Innovation Council and a network of design partners, customers are helping to shape what gets built.

This is reflected in the product roadmap: Asset Manager, Portfolio Manager, and Benchmark Manager are available today; Investment Manager, Development Manager, Acquisition Manager, and Debt Manager targeted for later in 2026 and 2027; ARGUS Workbook by Forbury and Fairways Debt joining the platform; Tenant Analytics targeted for later this year.

Shubhra Srivastava, VP of Product Management at Altus, discusses the product roadmap for ARGUS at Altus Connect 2026

We are not building a feature factory. We are building for the full CRE lifecycle, end-to-end. Every capability on this roadmap maps to a real user persona and the CRE lifecycle they are active in, and it is a platform built to grow with you.

Shubhra Srivastava

Vice President, Product Management

Customer stories of innovation from UBS and Affinius Capital

Amy White, Managing Director, Head of US Real Estate Operations at UBS, joined Peter De Witte, GM of ARGUS Software and Data at Altus, for a fireside chat on standardizing data and governance across a global real estate portfolio. Her insights highlighted what becomes possible when a longstanding software relationship evolves into a true partnership across a multi-vendor ecosystem of technology providers.

Amy White, Managing Director, Head of US Real Estate Operations at UBS, and Peter De Witte, GM of ARGUS Software and Data at Altus discuss multi-vendor ecosystems at Altus Connect 2026

Neha Trivedi, Executive Director and Head of Valuations at Affinius Capital, sat with Rick Kalvoda, President of Valuation Advisory at Altus, to discuss the firm's early exploration of AI in portfolio management and what it has meant to evaluate ARGUS Assist.

Getting hands-on with ARGUS Intelligence

The morning main stage events closed with a live demonstration of ARGUS Assist from Matt LaHood, Head of Platform, Data and Analytics at Altus, and Christina Gratrix, Senior Director of Product Management at Altus, with an invitation to a private preview of the agentic AI up close and in action.

Matt LaHood, Head of Platform at Altus, and Christina Gratrix, Senior Director of Product Management at Altus, present a live demonstration of ARGUS Assist at Altus Connect 2026

We're not training an agent to calculate the value of a property because we have a foundational tool that's been doing that for decades. If you ask for the property value, the agent calls the ARGUS calculation engine directly. That's why our AI is trustworthy; it's built on foundational tools that many of you have been using for decades.

Matt LaHood

Head of Platform, Data and Analytics

For those who wanted to go deeper, the Altus Connect breakout sessions carried the day's themes into practical detail. In Conversation with Altus … ARGUS Intelligence — Turning Insight into Action traced the arc from file-based modeling to a governed intelligence platform. The Benchmark Manager Deep-Dive unpacked the data behind market comparisons and what attribution analysis surfaces about under- and over-performance. And Streamlining ARGUS data with Integration Services made the case (through real client engagements) that manual reconciliation is a solvable problem, and that integration is best understood as a journey, not a one-time project.

If Day 1 had a single takeaway, it was this: the inflection point Altus has been building toward isn't somewhere on the horizon. It's here, and the work to meet it is already well underway.