Ah, Doom. Pixelated monsters, improbable weaponry and corridors that would definitely benefit from a better floorplan. The 90's really did have it all.
This week, an AI called Jev is having a go at the classic game - making decisions in real time and responding to instructions as it plays. Its creators say the demo makes around ten AI calls a second, at a cost of roughly $7 an hour.
Which is quite a lot of monster management for your money.
Jev comes from TypeSafe, founded by former OpenAI researcher Diogo Almeida, and is designed to make fast decisions that software can immediately act upon. There is a useful detail here: it receives structured information about what's happening in the game, rather than watching the screen as a human would. The team explain that in their launch write-up.
For property, the interesting bit is the potential to put that speed to work inside the systems we already use. An incoming enquiry could be classified and routed to the right person immediately. A maintenance request could be assessed for urgency. The hundreds of small decisions that currently require someone to stop, read, click and forward could start happening automatically.
We'd need to test how reliably it handles those jobs, of course. A missed buyer enquiry has rather different consequences from losing a virtual firefight.
But you can see where this is heading. More of the process handled in the background; more time for the conversations that actually build a business.
And, hopefully, considerably fewer demons in your CRM ...