THE FOUNDER
Accounting. Audit. Law. Real Estate. AI. One founder, five disciplines.
THE FOUNDATION
Most AI consultants come from tech. I came from spreadsheets, courtrooms, and closing tables. At Brooklyn College, I graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Public Accounting, Business Management, and Finance. While classmates chased Wall Street, I was studying how numbers reveal what people try to hide. Financial statements, variance analysis, internal controls. That training taught me to question every assumption and verify every output, a habit that turns out to be the single most important skill when deploying AI in the real world.
THE BIG 4
PwC hired me into Risk Assurance, where I spent my time evaluating IT general controls and testing SOX compliance across enterprise systems. The work was methodical and unforgiving. You learn quickly that technology is only as reliable as the controls around it. While most people in tech see what a system can do, audit teaches you to see what can go wrong. That mindset, skeptical, evidence-driven, obsessed with documentation, is exactly how I approach every AI implementation today.
THE LEGAL MIND
Cardozo Law did not make me a litigator. It made me a better thinker. As a Samuel Heyman Corporate Governance Scholar, I studied how institutions fail, how contracts create or destroy value, and how regulatory frameworks shape what technology is actually allowed to do. Law school trained me to read between the lines, structure arguments that hold up under pressure, and spot risk before it materializes. When a client asks whether their AI workflow is compliant, I do not guess. I analyze it the way I was trained to.
THE REAL ESTATE EDGE
For two and a half years during law school, I worked at Jacob Sebag & Associates, P.C., a firm handling residential and commercial real estate transactions across New York. I drafted and negotiated purchase and sale contracts, coordinated closings, managed due diligence on acquisitions, and worked directly with clients navigating financing and development. That was not a summer internship. It was years of hands-on deal work while simultaneously earning a J.D. at Cardozo School of Law. At Hirshmark Capital, I added CRE loan due diligence to the mix, underwriting commercial deals and stress-testing the assumptions that determined whether millions of dollars would change hands. I know what a rent roll looks like at 2 AM before a closing deadline. That is not something you learn from a tutorial.
THE GRIT
Before any degree or title, there was a diagnosis. Legg-Calve-Perthes disease as a child, followed by two major hip surgeries before the age of 25. Each time, months of physical therapy just to walk again. Most people never hear that part. But it is the part that matters most, because every difficult chapter that followed was measured against having already relearned to stand on my own feet. Resilience is not a buzzword on this page. It is the foundation everything else was built on.
THE OBSESSION
During law school, I started experimenting with AI tools. Nobody told me to. There was no class for it, no mentor, no roadmap. Just a pull toward something I could not ignore. I taught myself everything through trial and error. No computer science degree. No bootcamp. No curriculum. Just building, breaking, and rebuilding, nights after classes and weekends between closings. I did not come from tech, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. That is exactly the point. I learned the way most CRE professionals will have to learn: by doing, by failing, by refusing to stop. What started as curiosity became something I could not turn off. Every deal I touched, every process I watched someone do manually, I saw what AI could solve. By the end of law school, I was spending more time on AI architecture than case law, and it was not even close.
THE CONVERGENCE
Commercial real estate was drowning in data and starving for intelligence. Underwriting models lived in fragile spreadsheets. Due diligence was a manual grind. Investor reporting took days when it should have taken minutes. I saw the gap because I had worked every side of it: the accounting, the audit controls, the legal compliance, the deal execution. By graduation, the question was no longer whether I should do this. It was how fast I could build it. Launching The AI Consulting Network was not a pivot and it was not a risk. It was the only move that made sense. Every credential, every late night, every surgery, every failed prototype had been pointing here. CRE needed someone who could build AI solutions from the inside, not a tech company guessing at what real estate professionals actually need. So that is what I built.
“I do not build AI for real estate from the outside looking in. I build it from the inside, because I have done the work.”
Avi Hacker, J.D.