Conversations That Count - MRI Ascend 2026 Recap

Notes from Booth 12. Ask Agora, net operating income, and what property finance teams told us at MRI Ascend EMEA 2026. 

By Amy Hall, Head of Partnerships, Proactis 

As a Visionary Sponsor and MRI Software Platinum Solution Partner, we spent the day at Booth 12, ready for conversations about how we help property management organisations take control of spend and optimise net operating income.

But what stood out most were the conversations that reinforced exactly why we’re here.

The Head of Procurement at a national property management firm explaining how a single over-budget invoice can derail a quarterly NOI discussion with a client. The Finance Director whose team still spends too much time chasing missing purchase orders. The Local Government Property Manager who asked, very politely, whether anyone in the sector has truly achieved 100 per cent visibility and control over property spend.

These are not edge cases. They’re the everyday realities shaping the sector - and exactly the challenges we’re here to solve.

Conversations like these are what make events like MRI Ascend so valuable.

The future is a conversation 

MRI's keynote moment belonged to Ask Agora - the new natural-language layer that lets users interact with the MRI platform the way they would ask Siri or Alexa a question. The demo showed an arrears workflow being driven through plain English. No clicking through nested screens, no remembering which report sat under which menu. Just a question, an answer, and a next step.  

“The future of enterprise software is not a dashboard - it's a conversation.

- From the MRI Ascend EMEA 2026 stage 

For anyone who has watched a property finance team navigate a complex monthly close, that idea lands hard. The single biggest blocker to faster decisions in property management isn't the absence of a dashboard. It's the friction of getting to the right answer.

Ask Agora is MRI saying that friction shouldn't exist. We agree. 

Why this matters for spend control 

Conversational agentic software only works if the information underneath it is accurate, complete and current. If spend records are inconsistent across properties, if purchase orders are missing, if the supplier list is full of duplicates, no amount of agent-driven workflow is going to give a CFO the answer she trusts. 

That's the gap we spend most of our time closing. 

Proactis works alongside MRI Software to make property-management spend visible and controllable from the point of purchase. Every PO is captured at source. Every invoice is matched against a commitment. Every supplier sits in a managed list. Accurate records underneath are what give a conversational layer above something useful to say. 

That is why we describe what we do, with MRI, as net operating income optimisation. Every percentage point of NOI a property management business holds onto is one less percentage point that has to be argued for at the next client review. 

What our customers like CBRE and British Land have told us 

I’m going to take this opportunity to highlight just a couple of our customers who are integrated with MRI as examples of what good can look like.

CBRE Ltd. has been working with Proactis across 5,000+ properties and approximately £290 million of annual procurement spend. The team there processes more than 150,000 invoices a year through Proactis, with up to half now received, reviewed and paid electronically. The Proactis platform integrates with 15 financial systems across CBRE's portfolio - a level of integration that only matters once the foundation is in order. Their Head of Procurement put it well: 

“Proactis gives us the perfect platform to ensure that we are at the forefront of delivering both value from procurement and control of expenditure management.”
 

- Head of Procurement, Property and Asset Management, CBRE Ltd. 

British Land - FTSE 100, £13.7 billion of assets, 22.8 million square feet - extended their Proactis Source-to-Contract footprint into Purchase-to-Pay and Invoice Capture, processing more than 10,000 purchase orders and 25,000 invoices in just over a year. Their Head of Business Transformation, Jonty McNuff, said it plainly: 

“Each invoice is visible and the whole process is consistent across the business.” 

- Jonty McNuff, Head of Business Transformation, British Land 

That word - consistent - is the one most property finance leaders we spoke to over the day are quietly searching for. 

We also had brilliant conversations with the teams from Savills and several housing associations, all of whom are looking at the same underlying question: how do we get to one trustworthy view of property-management spend? 

Why partnership matters now 

This was the first MRI Ascend EMEA where Agentic AI moved from the slideware into a real, demonstrable product. The next wave of value in PropTech is going to come from the layer above - natural-language interfaces, agent-driven workflows, decisions made in seconds rather than days. 

The vendors who do well in that wave will be the ones whose underlying records are honest. That is the prize Proactis and MRI Software are building towards together: 100 percent of property management spend under control, ready to talk to whatever the next interface looks like.

Thank you, and what's next… 

A huge thank you to the MRI Software team for an event that was thought-provoking, well-run, and - pleasingly - full of the kind of practical questions that make our industry better. 

If you're managing property at scale and you're thinking about how spend control fits into the conversation MRI started this week, we'd be happy to keep that conversation going.