
AI Will Connect Mercedes-Benz Places Residents to the World
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
Sixty-seven stories above sea level, Mercedes-Benz Places sits as one of the many high rises on the Miami skyline bearing an automaker's name. Aston Martin Residences, Porsche Design Tower and Bentley Residences are all nearby, as are the Armani/Casa and Fendi Chateau.
To stand out, Mercedes-Benz Places is relying heavily on its brand affiliation. Design and technology features throughout the space are meant to welcome homeowners, shoppers, diners and visitors into a fully immersive Mercedes-Benz ecosystem.
The exterior of the condominium structure features horizontal brightwork reminiscent of the center console vents in the new-generation Mercedes-Benz CLA-Class sedan and the rounded edges of the building play on the car's armrest design.
The evolving juxtaposition of the two-tower structure gives the eye something unique to look at in a sea of light-colored towers as it moves toward the sky.
While driving an artificial intelligence-enhanced Mercedes-Benz, such as the new CLA, Places residents will be able to seamlessly move throughout their day. Transitioning from morning to night with work or play in between, with AI assistance.
"Mercedes-Benz Places in Miami is designed as a highly integrated living experience," Michael Stern, CEO of JDS Development Group, told Newsweek. "As truly a mixed-use project, Mercedes-Benz Places includes residences, a hotel, office, wellness and food and beverage outlets. Forward-thinking technology, mobility and sustainability features, and community programming support this future-oriented, integrated lifestyle, including the large-scale, reimagined park at the ground floor, to the many spaces for gathering, entertaining and socializing."
Among the features of the 2.5 million-square-foot build are over 1,000 parking spaces, over 800 condominium residences, a 175-key hotel, 130,000 total square feet of amenity and hospitality space and 200,000 square feet of office space.
There is also a public park that surrounds the Brickell neighborhood space. It will be filled with a basketball court, a dog run, green space, a kid-friendly section and a restaurant that will be built into the historic building that once housed Miami's first high school.
Each condo buyer can customize their space from a selected materials and color palette developed in partnership with the Mercedes-Benz team, led by Mercedes-Benz's Chief Design Officer Gorden Wagener.
Prospective buyers can see the options at the site's experience center. In its Finish Room, the sales team shares floor plans and views with clients, helping them understand what their unit could look like.
Like when ordering a car, customers are presented with a curated menu of options they can choose from. Unlike what is available from Mercedes' Manufaktur arm, high levels of materials and design customization aren't able to be accommodated.
Instead, as with a car, the highest level of customization and personalization comes from AI. "AI and connected technology have been part of the design process (a collaboration with Mercedes-Benz, SHoP Architects, and Woods Bagot), and will be experienced in many ways throughout the property, including through an in-home 'dashboard' in your private kitchen," Stern said.
One potential AI-linked opportunity is a valet summon capability. Imagine a blend of technology that knows your schedule, traffic, navigation and climate control preferences that would be able to ask the condo complex's valet to pull up your car so you can be sure to leave on time, in comfort. Or, utilizing self-driving features, your Mercedes car could drive itself out of the deck and into the porte-cochère so it is ready and waiting for you when you arrive on the ground floor.
"Seamless communication will be available at every turn. Not just a 'SmartHome', this is a SmartBuilding, and SmartLifestyle, where your car can talk to your home," Stern said.
Additional high-tech amenities at Mercedes-Benz Places include an F1 simulator, recording studio and custom app.
The first residences in the building are expected to be inhabited in 2027.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Newsweek
7 minutes ago
- Newsweek
ChatAndBuild Founder Christel Buchanan Wants to Make You an App Developer
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. What started out as an advertising slogan for Apple more than 15 years ago has morphed into somewhat of a modern day colloquialism: There should be an app for that. Who hasn't—ticked off by an inconvenient annoyance or inspired by a stroke of midnight genius—thought, "If only I knew how to code?" Meet Christel Buchanan. Buchanan, the founder and CEO of ChatAndBuild, is on a mission to create a world where anyone, regardless of their ability to code, can turn their app dreams into a reality. "Why can't a grandmom in Thailand chat and build? Why can't my dad, who speaks Mandarin, chat and build?" Buchanan asked during a private interview following her panel discussion at Newsweek's Women's Global Impact forum. "Why is that only someone with a Stanford [computer science] degree in the Bay Area gets to build something and then walk away as a multibillionaire?" The Singaporean tech founder told Newsweek that while her dad isn't a multibillionaire yet, he's already built two games with her AI-driven platform. After seeing the mahjong game and Pac-Man game he built, Buchanan realized, "This could be big." Christel Buchanan, the founder and CEO of ChatAndBuild, joined Newsweek at the Women's Global Impact forum in New York earlier this month. Christel Buchanan, the founder and CEO of ChatAndBuild, joined Newsweek at the Women's Global Impact forum in New York earlier this month. Newsweek Illustration/Canva Using a conversational interface, ChatAndBuild empowers users to "chat" their software ideas into real products. Prompts like, "create an AI-powered horoscope quiz" or "build me a to-do app," are answered with products that are ready for use. The rapid ascent of AI has been likened to everything from the rise of the internet to the industrial revolution, but, to Buchanan, the potential of her platform feels closer to Instagram, a tech tool that offers everyone a chance to create. "If you think about social media, it kind of empowered anyone to take a photo and share it," she said. "This is going to be the next wave." She foresees that app-building and coding will change the same way that photography did with the introduction of smartphones. "Right now, there's maybe 5 million coders," Buchanan said. "How do we make it so that 1 billion people are able to code and talk to a computer?" As of today, about 150,000 users around the world are using ChatAndBuild to create their own tech products, she said. To put those figures into perspective: Buchanan began working on the platform only earlier this year, and it wasn't until May that the product was ready for the public. With ChatAndBuild, users "don't have to worry about code dependencies, code packages, which programming language [to] use," she explained during last week's Tech Savvy: Leveraging AI to Exceed Expectations panel. "Chat and build, and everything is done for you in one platform," she said. Buchanan's goal to democratize coding stems from her own path. Just a year into university, she abandoned a coveted government-sponsored scholarship in search for something more. It led her to a job at Twitter, where she eventually became the regional head of content for Asia, Middle East and Africa, and later to software company Brandwatch and blockchain platform Zilliqa. "I've always loved technology," she said with a massive smile. "Because, for me, technology was the great equalizer. It lifted me." "With AI, we're really at the most fundamental change. ... Everything [will] be disrupted in the next 10, 20 or 30 years," she continued. The AI revolution feels fairly recent for most, but there are already new concerns being raised. Buchanan—who staunchly believes that the future of tech is better understood through hackathons than thought-leadership conferences—said she's already beginning to see questions pop up about how generative AI models are storing data, with some worried that any intellectual property entered into a chatbot might no longer belong to the user. "This is something that we need to take note about, which is why I'm developing this idea that you can train and trade your AI agent," she said. "You should have ownership of your data." "I think it's going to become a very big topic in the next one, two years," she said. "It'll be a different kind of doomscrolling." It's why Buchanan has turned her attention to non-fungible agents (NFAs), a decentralized digital entity that would establish unique digital ownership. "Right now, there is no graphical user interface for AI," she explained. "It's a very bare bones kind of thing. We don't know what the operating system is going to look like, which is why it's going to be very interesting to see what happens."


Newsweek
2 hours ago
- Newsweek
Rental Market Starts to See Effects of Trump's Immigration Crackdown
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The sharp about-turn in immigration levels since January looks set to have an impact on the U.S. housing market — particularly when it comes to rentals — though its wider effects could take longer to be felt. New analysis from economic and housing experts shows that the surge in demand for housing seen over the past four years is easing slightly, as fewer immigrants arrive in the U.S., and President Donald Trump's mass deportation plan is put into action. "The big thing that had happened the past few years is we saw a huge burst in immigration on a net basis into the United States, much of that through the southern border," Lance Lambert, founder of the housing-market research site Resi Club, told Newsweek. "So, what that did to the housing market is it created more demand, rental demand in particular, at the bottom of the market." Lambert said the markets that will see the biggest impact of lower migration numbers will be those metropolitan areas which saw high numbers of legal and illegal new arrivals in recent years, such as New York City, Miami and Houston. These cities have seen demand for housing surge, with data regularly showing soaring rental costs and a lack of available units. In Manhattan, rents steadily climbed after a pandemic-era low to a median asking price of $4,745 in July, with a total rental inventory of 18,936 units, compared to 21,317 the year before, per StreetEasy. Not all of this would have been driven by immigration, but it was likely a contributing factor in the city's ever-present housing shortage. Miami saw similar surges in costs, despite an ever-expanding metropolitan area, as Florida's immigrant population grew. Migrants Blamed for Housing Squeeze During the 2024 presidential election campaign, Vice President JD Vance was among those on the right who put the blame for America's housing squeeze squarely on immigrants. In a speech at the Republican National Convention last July, the then-VP nominee spoke about U.S. homebuilders that went out of business during the financial crisis of 2008, putting a dent in new-home construction that has continued. "Then the Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens," Vance said. "So citizens had to compete with people who shouldn't even be here for precious housing." This messaging was one of the factors driving support for mass deportations and other stricter immigration measures. Since President Trump and Vice President Vance took office, there has been a noticeable shift in immigration patterns. Stan Veuger, a senior fellow at the center-right American Enterprise Institute (AEI), told Newsweek that net migration was likely to dramatically fall in 2025, potentially by as much as 650,000. "That's mostly driven by a reduction in flows both at the southern border, but also various legal pathways that have been cut off or reduced, including the Refugee Resettlement Program and humanitarian programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Ukrainians, and Afghans," Veuger said. "So that, in turn, will have an impact on various macro-outcomes." The Impact of Trump 2.0 Policies Veuger and his colleagues predict that GDP growth will be reduced by 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points this year, partly because of the reduction in migrants leading to a loss of in employees in sectors like construction. In the months leading up to and following the 2024 election, others also made similar predictions, warning that a loss of immigrants, both legal and illegal, would have a drastic effect on the U.S. economy. When it comes to housing, those impacts may not be felt just yet, Lambert told Newsweek, with the market not necessarily reflecting the drop in net migration or the effects of tariffs on building materials. "At the moment, builders are not seeing any meaningful increases in material cost nor labor cost," said Lambert, of Resi Club. "If we potentially see a long sustaining pullback in immigration through the border, could that over time create some tightening impact to the labor market and the residential construction sector? Yeah, potentially. He added: "But at the end of the day, right now, the bigger macro features of the housing cycle are playing a much bigger role to builders." Construction workers build homes at a new housing development on August 08, 2025 in Henderson, Nevada. Construction workers build homes at a new housing development on August 08, 2025 in Henderson, pointed to an overall slowdown in the housing market since the pandemic, including affordability issues, a rising number of available units sitting for longer and a drop in demand as the real issues facing housing rather than immigration policies. "Keep in mind that immigration essentially had a pull-forward where there was more immigration the past few years than would have otherwise occurred," Lambert said. "So even with a pullback or a net decline in immigration this year, we still have more people who immigrated the past few years than the trend expected. "So it would take several years of very little immigration through the southern border or even net declines to fully smooth out that big burst that we saw in 2023-2024." Veuger said that AEI is predicting a dramatic slowdown in migration numbers over the next two years, which could impact the economy more widely, but those levels could return to normal soon after depending on federal policy and who wins the White House in 2028 — meaning only time will tell how big an impact the administration's policies will have on long-term housing and construction. "Part of what drives the very low net migration number now is that there are millions and millions of people in the country who arrived relatively recently," Veuger said. "If you are a recent arrival, you're much more likely to leave, either voluntarily or through extradited removal. "Two, three years from now, after we will have had a number of years with many fewer arrivals, we will have fewer recent arrivals who are so likely to leave."


Newsweek
3 hours ago
- Newsweek
New Trains Set For High-Speed Route Linking Washington D.C. And Boston
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Amtrak will begin rolling out NextGen Acela trains on August 28, launching five trainsets that will operate on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C. The new trains offer up to 160 mph top speeds, more seats per departure and upgraded onboard amenities, according to Amtrak. Newsweek contacted Amtrak for more information via email. Why it Matters Amtrak is the largest high-speed rail provider in the United States, carrying over 30 million passengers annually. It is supported by state and federal subsidies, much of which is focused on maintaining the Northeast Corridor, which is the busiest part of its network. Amtrak has long-term plans to double the number of passengers it carries in the next three decades. If these construction works go to plan, the route could transport 66 million people a year by 2040. What To Know The NextGen Acela will operate along the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C, stopping at major stations including Providence, New York City, Stamford, New Haven's Union Station, Philadelphia and Baltimore. A map of the new route that Amtrak's NexGen Acela trains will run on. A map of the new route that Amtrak's NexGen Acela trains will run on. Amtrak Next-gen Acela offers roughly 27 percent more seating per departure compared with the prior Acela sets, along with ergonomic seating, larger windows, individual USB ports, power outlets and complimentary 5G-enabled Wi‑Fi, according to Amtrak. The new NextGen fleet was assembled at Alstom's Hornell, New York, facility using components from suppliers across multiple states. Amtrak has not released final pricing for the NextGen Acela seats or definitive, companywide changes to scheduled trip times on the corridor at the time of writing. What People Are Saying Jason Abrams, Amtrak senior public relations manager, told NBC Connecticut: "We're very excited about the new Acela trains, they are the biggest thing we're doing as a company in the past 25 years. "It's more frequencies, more seats, more opportunities to ride, we'll have more service on weekdays and weekends and there's also more trains on the fleet so more opportunities to travel." Amtrak President Roger Harris, in a news release quoted by CTNewsJunkie on Aug. 12, 2025: "NextGen Acela is more than a new train—it's an evolution of travel. In just a few weeks, history will be made with the debut of NextGen Acela as we launch a new standard for American train travel." What Happens Next Amtrak plans to continue phased deliveries through 2027 to reach 28 NextGen Acela train sets and to operate both legacy Acela and NextGen trains during the transition.