By Kevin Hawkins with Korey Hawkins | Vol. 2 Post 38
REAL AI is a human-created weekly roundup of all things related to artificial intelligence in real estate and emerging AI innovations in other sectors likely to impact our industry. We post a new edition every Friday, and our free newsletter is delivered every Monday.
KW and practical AI
At the burgeoning Blueprint VC-tech conference in Las Vegas this week, I had a chance to meet with Chris Cox, Chief Technology and Digital Officer at Keller Williams.
KW is the world’s largest real estate franchise by agent count, with over 1,000 offices and 173,000 associates in more than a dozen countries worldwide, No. 1 as a franchise in units and sales volume in the U.S. It’s massive.
For as long as I can remember, KW has been a tech-forward company with a strong people focus. Evidence: they call their annual convention “Family Reunion.” It is a sea of red, corporate colors that their agents proudly wear. At that event in 2017, founder Gary Keller proclaimed that KW was a tech company.
I spent about 30 minutes interviewing Chris about KW and artificial intelligence, his own take on the industry and AI, and, as one of the brokerage’s industry’s veteran tech leaders, what he sees on the horizon for AI.
Chris’s tech tenure gives him a deep perspective on the risks and rewards that occur as new technology evolves.
During the internet boom, Chris was doing risk management consulting for the financial services industry at KPMG when “there was this massive shift of the workforce” because every business needed to get online.
It’s the same kind of shift we are seeing in AI today. Just like we experienced a massive hype cycle with the internet, the AI hype cycle was in full view all over Blueprint.
But Chris and KW are AI pragmatists. His ongoing mission is to provide “actionable intelligence” and “competitive advantages” for agents that help serve their clients better.
He knows AI, like the internet, has staying power. He describes AI’s emergence into residential real estate as “gradually, at all once.” Pieces of AI were being used in the real estate industry well before ChatGPT came on the scene.
Today, KW uses many of those original AI pieces, like predictive analytics, to drive leads, retention, and recruiting efforts.
AI is helping KW agents identify people in their sphere who are likely getting ready to buy or sell. AI also is helping KW managers identify indicators to reach out to agents who are more likely to move to another brokerage internally and externally.
One of its newest and most successful AI innovations is KWIQ. Creating a gated ChatGPT trained solely on KW materials – Gary’s books, its educational and training materials, etc. – creates a repository of KW knowledge. It was initially designed to be an educational tool for agents to prompt it 24/7 and get immediate answers.
Over 50% of KW agents found a much different use, turning to KWIQ for writing listing descriptions and blog posts – things that help agents do their work more effectively. Thousands of inquiries now occur every week, the majority are for tasks.
“Generative AI is all about enhancing productivity,” he said, adding, “So we fundamentally believe that despite all of this technology and what you’ll hear from vendors at this show, agents aren’t going to be disintermediated – no – but the technologies will make them better.” (-Kevin)
AI Washing and other Blueprint notes
One of the newer AI phrases I heard discussed at Blueprint onstage and off was “AI washing.”
AI washing refers to the practice of exaggerating or falsely promoting products or services as being powered by artificial intelligence (AI) when they don’t genuinely use AI or only use it in a limited or superficial way.
It is done by companies to attract attention, investment, or credibility, leveraging the growing popularity of proven AI tools – like ChatGPT – without actually creating AI innovations themselves.
It’s like “greenwashing,” where businesses overstate their environmental efforts. AI washing misleads people about the technological capabilities of a product, potentially eroding trust in AI over time.
As Daniel Paulino of Bozzuto said, if a company is just plugging in AI, “I would not call them an AI company, I would say they are using AI in their product.” There’s a big difference.
Other Blueprint notes
As you can imagine, AI was all over the place at Blueprint.
CoreLogic was a top sponsor from our space, and Devi Mateti, President of Enterprise Digital Solutions, took the stage to lay out CoreLogic’s AI approach and its new umbrella AI offering, Araya, a data management platform leveraging AI.
Araya takes CoreLogic’s high-octane AI fuel – its mega data repositories – and applies advanced analytics and predictive models to reveal an unmatched view of a property’s complete ecosystem within a single interface, integrating CoreLogic’s property intelligence, data licensing, and real estate solutions.
The best line of the conference for me was when Devi encouraged the audience to try out the deep dive Araya provides by entering their own address in the demo at their exhibit, or better yet, “Enter the address of your boss” and see how they live.
But my favorite personal find was SewerAI. No, it doesn’t detect disease outbreaks, but it catches something perhaps more valuable. It uses computer vision to inspect and detect needed repairs and sewer line replacements. There are over 1.2 million miles of sewer lines in the US – that’s 6.34 billion feet!
Why should agents care? Could there be anything worse for a homeowner than their sewer (or septic) system breaking down? (-Kevin)
AI Facts
- 73% of customers are on the lookout for AI enhancing personalization – Salesforce
- 47% of marketers trust AI for Ad Targeting – Statista
- 43% of employees admit they would use AI to understand data and trends for improved decision-making – SnapLogic
- 21% of businesses use 20-50 data sources for informing their AI – IBM
- 37% of business leaders stated they saw improved employee experiences and skills acquisition through AI – PwC
Source: The Social Shepherd (-Korey)
AI Headlines
5 Easy Ways To Tell If An Image Is AI Generated | 9/19/24 Forbes
The need to spot fake images versus the real ones is growing – here’s how.
Why natural language AI scripting in Microsoft Excel could be a game changer | 9/16/24 ZDNET
Microsoft’s spreadsheet editor may soon be getting an AI upgrade.
Experts Warn OpenAI’s Chatty New Model May Be Too Smart | 9/16/24 Inc.
ChatGPT o1 is forming its own memories.
LinkedIn Secretly Training Its AIs on User Data | 9/19/24 Inc.
Another company has fallen into the AI data scraping trap.
YouTube announces new generative AI features for video, music and inspiration | 9/18/24 NBC News
New AI tools were introduced at the Made on YouTube event this week. (-Korey)
AI Quote of the Week
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