Aareon Group has grown strongly – both organically and through acquisitions. Since summer 2025, Aareon COO Fermín Peleteiro has been responsible for optimising go-to-market and customer success processes. In this interview he explains how Aareon is building a more scalable, AI-powered operating model to support sustainable growth and long-term value creation.
Fermín, what were the most important priorities in your first year at Aareon?
Aareon has been on an impressive growth trajectory. As a result, different structures and ways of working have emerged. My focus is on connecting the strengths of the different units and creating a shared operational foundation. We standardise where it creates efficiency and remain flexible where it adds value for customers. When processes, data, systems and go-to-market approaches work together, we increase productivity and create the foundation for further growth. Accelerating that growth enables us to continue investing in innovation, our products and customer success. We serve a very large market, and we benefit from a balanced set of growth levers: new customer acquisitions, upselling and cross-selling to our customer base. Over the past few quarters, AI solutions have become a key driver of our growth acceleration. We have earned the trust of our customers through years of partnership, and we are now on a joint journey to support them in adopting AI into their core property management processes. Our customers are our strongest co-innovation partner. We listen to their needs, we share our vision on how processes and technology will evolve, and we build together the best AI solutions for property managers in Europe.
Why is Operational Excellence such a critical success factor?
Growth alone is not enough. What matters is making it repeatable, scalable and efficient. Operational Excellence provides the foundation for this: clear processes, integrated systems and shared priorities. This enables us to be agile, deploy resources more effectively and support customers better. For a software company, this has a direct impact on productivity, customer satisfaction and long-term success.
What role does AI play in increasing productivity and scalability?
AI is a lever for productivity, automation and better decision-making. It is important to use it where it creates value – for example, in the intelligent automation of manual processes, faster data analysis or support in day-to-day operations. The key is to embed AI directly into processes, systems and decision-making. That is why we have been consistently developing our software with AI support for some time now and working with a standardised Software Development Lifecycle across the entire Group.
Another area where we have been leveraging AI to improve productivity is the customer support process. We started with AI copilots supporting our team with context gathering and summarisation, knowledge retrieval, response drafting and automated wrap-up. We are currently expanding the use of autonomous AI agents deployed in our customer support portal as chatbots or directly engaging with open tickets to triage and solve them. When a request is too complex to handle autonomously, the AI agent manages the orchestration before a human gets involved. All these technologies are enabling us to deliver solid efficiency gains while having a positive impact on our response times and customer satisfaction.
How does customer success contribute to Aareon’s further development?
Customer success isn't about the ink on the initial contract – it's about long-term adoption, continuous satisfaction and tangible value. At Aareon, we know that excellent support breeds trust, loyalty and mutual growth. That's why we evolved our customer service model into a dedicated Customer Success Management (CSM) framework years ago, moving from reactive troubleshooting to proactive partnership. But how does this drive our continued development? It's simple. Customer success is one of our most valuable innovation loops. Our CSM teams don't just protect retention; they inspire our product roadmap. By translating daily client challenges and real estate market shifts into actionable data for our development teams, they ensure our software evolves in lockstep with the industry. Today, this partnership is taking on a new, critical dimension: guiding our clients through their AI journeys. Implementing AI in real estate goes far beyond just turning on a new technological solution. A successful transition requires fundamental process redesign, shifts in organisational models and cultivating new skills within our customers' teams. Our CSMs are at the forefront of this transformation, acting as strategic advisors to ensure our clients don't just adopt AI, but truly transform their businesses with it.
Aareon serves different markets and customer groups. How do you ensure that standardisation doesn't come at the expense of staying close to our customers?
Finding the right balance is essential. Standardisation is not an end in itself. It is intended to improve speed, quality and scalability. At the same time, we must stay close to our markets and remain deeply connected to our customer needs. Aareon follows exactly this approach and leaves operational decision-making authority with the respective local market units. A shared operational foundation creates the necessary freedom to achieve exactly that. When recurring processes, systems and data structures are clearly defined across the Group, local teams have more capacity to focus on what being close to customers is really about: understanding their markets, advising customers and delivering solutions tailored to their specific needs.
What is next on your agenda?
My goal is to make Aareon even more scalable. To achieve this, we need clear processes, a powerful system landscape, a stronger data foundation and integration across the Group. It is about positioning the organisation so that we can implement our strategy faster and more effectively. Specifically, we want to leverage Agentic AI capabilities as an opportunity to challenge the inertia of 'we've always done it this way'. We don't solve inefficiency by automating a messy process. Agentic AI is a catalyst for simplification, standardisation and greater agility across our organisation. Ultimately, all of this is about positioning the company in a way that enables it to deliver long-term value for our customers – helping them achieve best-in-class outcomes through intelligent, end-to-end property management.
Thank you, Fermín!