WAV Group had an opportunity to meet with Skye Michiels, National Head of Agent Development at Compass, and Chrissy Oliver from Compass Strategy and Growth, to discuss the September 13 launch of Compass AI. The focus of Compass AI is to improve productivity and effectiveness of Compass agents so they can spend more time developing client relationships — resulting in higher satisfaction of agents and customers.

The Personal Marketing Assistant

Among real estate firms today, Compass agents probably employ the highest number of assistants, at great cost to the agents. Assistants are great, and fully embraced by Compass, but the firm focuses on delivering value to agents by automating tasks that can be performed more quickly and effectively using technology like CompassAI. This saves time and money. 

For the release last Wednesday, 8,000 Compass agents tuned in for the webinar to learn how they will benefit from the features and functionality of CompassAI. Today, every Compass agent has access to the platform and can leverage AI as a virtual assistant to perform many tasks that they pay assistants to do today. The features of the application are already broad in this first iteration, and there is more to come on the roadmap.

CompassAI is used extensively across the Compass technology platform by being embedded in workflows. The CompassAI team is evaluating every opportunity to make it fast and easy for the agent. The first panel on the left provides a list of places where AI is embedded today or will be leveraged in the future — Performance, Contacts, Likely to List, Messages, Tasks, Business Tracker, Marketing, Insights, and more.

CompassAI is also a specific landing page on the left hand rail of the Compass back office solution that clearly illustrates the usefulness of the tool for the important activities performed by agents on a daily basis (bottom left under Help). We reviewed a few key components that are illustrated in the screen below.

As you can see on the CompassAI landing page, the center panel calls out four key activities routinely activated by Compass agents: Listing Description, Social Media, Biography, and Marketing Ideas. Selecting any of these templates will automate a workflow that leverages AI to produce content for agents. 

CompassAI is integrated behind each of these workflows and tied to the Compass data lake, which contains information about the agent, the agent’s social media profiles, the agent’s listings, the agent’s customers, and public record data. Agents do not need to compile any information, compose, or create anything from scratch; CompassAI does it for them.

Unlike ChatGPT, which simply provides a Google-like text box to get started, CompassAI encourages agents to get started with a click. This is a keynote to the usability of the application. Starting with a blank slate is often a roadblock for agents who do not have experience leveraging AI in their business.

The right-hand panel is another example of great usability. CompassAI suggests a long list of tasks or action items that can be deployed by CompassAI with a single click. These include prewritten, structured prompts for creating social media posts, creating a listing description, drafting an email, writing a blog post, and many more.

The automation of these excellent marketing activities is going to make the work just about effortless. Remember, AI automates the draft process, but agents are still responsible for reviewing, editing, and finalizing before sending.

Moreover, the firm has trained CompassAI to embed keywords and hashtags in marketing that will create a groundswell of content that lends to the strength of Compass’ overall SEO strategy. When hundreds or thousands of agents combine their efforts, the impact to SEO is awesome. The adoption of these SEO efforts that sit in the background use the crowd of agents to benefit each and every agent.

Prospecting

Compass is among the few firms in America who are licensing public record data for prospecting. In this case, they are using CoreLogic analytical data to enable prospecting to people in the agents’ CRM who are likely to sell. 

If you have not spoken to a client in your database in a while, these outreach efforts can seem awkward. Here, CompassAI is doing the heavy lifting. They comb through the agent’s database to discover key items that make that customer likely to sell, then highlight those customers for the agent. From there, the agent can pick up the phone and call them or invite CompassAI to draft an email to reconnect with that potential client. 

Remember, this is the initial launch of CompassAI, which represents their MVP for the development. We expect this innovation to hit hard in driving agent productivity and effectiveness by automating and improving the basic tasks that, when repeated, will keep agents closer to their clients and grow agent production volume. 

We all know that a customer record is a leaky bucket when it comes to transactions. Nearly every client says they would use their agent in a future transaction, but only 1 in 5 do. The number one reason is that the agent did not stay in touch. 

About CompassAI on OpenAI Privacy and Security

Whenever any brokerage firm initiates an AI strategy, they need to begin with privacy and security. For Compass, all agent and company data is secured and not shared. 

Compass engineering began developing on OpenAI in 2019, when the ChatGPT-2 language model was released. The benefits of using OpenAI versus the public version of ChatGPT are significant in three primary ways. 

First is ownership. Working directly with OpenAI, you own and control your data. With OpenAI, the Compass business data and usage is not shared publicly, and the content is not shared outside of their organization. Compass owns the inputs and outputs, and Compass controls how long their data is used and retained by OpenAI. 

Secondly, the enterprise-level authentication through SAML SSO, control over access and features, and custom models developed by Compass are exclusive and not shared with anyone else. 

Lastly, OpenAI gives Compass comprehensive security with SOC 2 compliance and data encryption at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.2+). I know that this sounds like a bunch of geek speak, but agents or firms who are not focused on the safety and security of their data when using AI are exposing their information in ways that may cause disparaging results. 

Suffice to say that Compass deployed AI as well as can be expected. In this case, CompassAI is safely closed off to others.

Congratulations to Compass and the team behind CompassAI for this successful launch.