Buy Now, Maybe Pay Later: Dealing with Prompt-Tax While Staying at the Frontier - Andrew Thompson
AI Engineer World's Fair 2025 · 25:09
AI for commercial real estate legal work
Orbital builds AI software for commercial real estate legal work, serving law firms, in-house legal teams, developers and property portfolio managers. Its Copilot combines document understanding, spatial mapping and legal reasoning to produce lease abstracts, title reviews and covenant summaries. The broader platform connects transaction documents with property data, helps teams turn findings into negotiated language and signature-ready documents, and coordinates lawyers, owners, lenders and advisers around a deal.
Founded in 2018 by Will Pearce and Ed Boulle, Orbital brings together former real estate lawyers, engineers and data scientists, with Andrew Thompson serving as CTO. Its property-boundary extraction system combines specialized AI agents with deterministic orchestration and computational geometry: agents interpret historical survey descriptions, while geometric operations assemble boundaries and validation checks flag potential errors. When part of a description cannot be processed, the system returns partial results with explicit error reporting.
Orbital operates across the UK and US. As of August 2026, the company reported 5,000+ real estate professionals using its software and more than 250,000 transactions supported annually. Its legal workflow includes source-linked findings and audit trails, allowing teams to trace outputs to underlying documents and review activity.
AI Engineer World's Fair 2025 · 25:09
Affiliations reflect their AIE appearances, not necessarily current employment.
Thompson discussed experimentation, cross-functional prompt ownership, and progressive rollouts when changing models. Evaluations appeared as a prospective tool for managing migration risk.
Affiliations reflect each recorded session, not necessarily current employment.