Don’t Stifle AI Innovation: Protect Capital Region Renters and Small Businesses
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing lives in New York’s Capital Region, empowering small businesses, driving innovation, advancing lifesaving medicines, and even helping keep housing rents affordable. These new AI-driven technologies are creating a transparent and accurate view of local rental markets allowing landlords to price apartments competitively, ensuring rents don’t stay artificially high. This early warning signal ensures that rent prices don’t risk outpacing the market and create unnecessary vacancies. Unfortunately, Senate Bill 7882, now on Governor Hochul’s desk, threatens to overregulate these tools, stifling innovation and harming consumers and small businesses in the process.
Proposed by Assemblyman Holyman, S.7882 has been incorrectly described as a tool to protect consumers from high rents-but in fact-it does the opposite. The bill would prohibit landlords from using the very tools that tell them when rental prices are beyond what the market will bear. By effectively banning the technologies that align local rental pricing with rental demand, this legislation sets New York on a path to a real estate market totally blind to market realities and could usher in an era new plagued with stubborn new price floors and higher rents. Outlawing innovative technologies that provide greater market transparency is a dangerous precedent. No other state has enacted such a sweeping ban—Colorado’s Governor Jared Polis vetoed similar legislation for these very reasons.
Small landlords rely on third-party AI software to set fair, market-driven rents. Banning these tools would force higher prices and mismanaged properties, hurting renters and businesses alike. The smart approach would be to narrow the scope of S.7882 and only prohibit the use of nonpublic competitor data and allowing the use of public or historic data (over a year old) so that landlords can react quickly in markets with declining rents.
Governor Hochul has championed AI innovation, from the Empire AI consortium to the $275 million AI computing center at the University at Buffalo. To keep New York leading, she should propose amendments to S.7882 and urge lawmakers to craft a more balanced approach that protects consumers without choking innovation. Let’s keep AI working for affordable housing and thriving small businesses in the Capital Region.
Tush Nikkolaj is President and CEO of LogicalNet in Schenectady, NY.
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