I consider myself an early adopter, I love new technology and I come by it honestly. I can remember hearing stories about my maternal grandfather having one of the first colour televisions in Hamilton. Considering my grandfather emigrated to Canada in 1951, with $100 in his pocket, it became somewhat legendary that he managed to buy a colour TV just 3 years later. I do not profess to be legendary but I do love the latest and greatest. A lot of technology went into the colour television and it greatly improved the audience experience, and on the flip side it vastly improved sales for advertisers who could now showcase their products in vivid colour, which is a clear example of a win win technology.
Car Sharing Revolutionized How We Get Around
I, like many of you, embraced car sharing the minute it came out, I remember bragging to my friends that I took an Uber in Chicago in early 2011, they had never heard of Uber, I was legendary until the very next year when it came to Toronto. As Uber and Lyft became the norm in many travel destinations I skipped the car rental line, the taxi line and went right to the E-Hailing world of Uber and Lyft. The convenience of this new way to travel began to tarnish for me when I calculated the ride-sharing charges on my trips. I’m probably not going to rent a car when I go to NYC, but when I’m in the Florida Panhandle, or Palm Beach, or in Milano, I’m probably going to rent a car, as I did in all those places over the last 60 days. I started with just simple calculations of what an Uber costs to go to and from the airport, especially if I wanted to travel in something cleaner and roomier. Those 2 trips amounted to 50% of the cost of the rental, not to mention, all the short trips to and from restaurants, convention venues etc. Furthermore, I lost some flexibility and found myself restricting my movement when I would just rely on Uber. When you look at the global car rental market against the global ride share market, they are running neck and neck, albeit the CAGR (compound annual growth rate) is stronger for ride share but it still exists for car rental companies, meaning they are not a business going the way of Blockbuster. So, I am not alone in my mobility thoughts where an old school method still has merit.
The ChatGPT Early Adopter – A One Day Legend
So how many of us are interacting with AI on a regular basis? Adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just 2 months, making the early adopters a ‘single day legend’. Colour televisions became available to North American Consumers in 1954, and it took over a decade for the colour TV to reach 1 million users, so those early adopters kept their legendary status for a long, long time.
Is AI Going Mainstream?
In February 2024 on X, CEO Sam Altman posted that OpenAI generates 100 billion words per day. So, I went to ChatGPT to give me perspective, and asked how long it would take an average person reading for 8 hours a day every day to consume all those words, and how long it would take an avid reader, which AI calculated to be approximately 5.4 million words annually to do the same. The answer is 2,283 years and 18,519 years respectively. This is just the tip of the iceberg, imagine when our entire planet’s population (which are producing 100 trillion words a day) starts using AI and disseminating all that content with their own particular twist on it.
So how are we expected to sift through all of this continuous word avalanche, and where will trusted information come from? Forget about the space race, the AI race is to create models which can consume as much information as the entire internet, yes the internet!!! With all this text making its way from just one source (OpenAI) can you imagine what these platforms will have to ingest. Currently there are 70,000 AI companies worldwide, with 40% of them based in North America. As a matter of fact it is conceivable that this so-called AI word vomit will be ingested again by the same platform which created it in the first place. Giving new meaning to the ailment of acid reflux, without the purple pill to cure it. As content is created exponentially, these AI companies will not only recycle their own output but will take in the output of another, adding to the layers of content confusion.
Our Opportunity to be THE Trusted Source is Upon Us
So, what does the future look like for consumers who want to get informed on… let’s say the subject of real estate. Are we all going to have fact-checking bots which will filter through our AI information feed and separate fact from fiction. I really love technology and have an appreciation for the heavy lifting AI does for me to round off the edges of an email, a company communication, a marketing piece or a simple text. And particularly, how AI can absorb vast amounts of information in a single gulp, segment it, interpret it, and then summarize it in seconds.
One of the ways I use AI is to find trends in our own proprietary data (Appointment Report) to establish trends, single out anomalies to not only predict the future, but also to give context to this moment in time. Several times I have had to challenge some of the outputs, but I am only able to do that because I am familiar with the data, which I have followed for the last 10+ years we have collected it. But not everyone has that luxury, and it’s beholden to all of us who are real estate practitioners, to keep our pulse on the data. So, when we encounter a hallucination with the AI platform we or our clients are using, we can step in with prompts to recalibrate the outcome which is in keeping with past data sets.
A Copy of a Copy Degrades Over Time
So, how are consumers going to know if the AI they are relying on has a hallucination, or draws from some other word vomit of a so-called expert who has fashioned his or her content to get their own message across. As these companies evolve, and generative AI is trained on its own output there is a theory that what will be occurring is output which is a copy of a copy. Remember back in the day when you made a photocopy of a photocopy, the quality diminished, it was readable but its clarity became compromised. So, imagine content being created from copies so-to-speak, every millisecond of every day, what would that do to the sharpness of the content.
Outputs will lose originality and lack innovation, errors will be replicated, and biases will be compounded. By no means do I profess to be an expert on any of this, and there are people who graduated summa cum laude in quantum mathematics working on this right now, and will be able to figure this out. One thing I know for sure is we as experts in our industry need to embrace data, albeit consumer behaviour data around appointments or search, or sales frequency in a certain neighbourhood. It is beholden upon us to be the purveyors of data, making sure it is current/fresh and from a trusted source.
What Will the Agent of the Future Look Like
The skills of an agent of the future will centre around our ability to harvest all of this information and provide it to our customers in a way they want to consume it. That on the surface may sound like something we are already doing, but without the fire hose of compromised content which is in front of us through many AI platforms. It is time we all start to familiarize ourselves with the data that surrounds us and to input it into an AI platform we trust. Be that early adopter who uses AI to streamline your customer’s journey, and to sift through data to empower your clients to make momentous decisions. But remember some of the noise of the market can inhibit success, and your ability to hack time to fulfill your clients needs may be derailed, so beware of the latest and greatest which on the surface makes sense but can compromise your ability to serve your clients best interests.
The normalization of using AI will be commonplace and seamless, the dialogue around our customers needs will be formalized using AI, and will be as simple as a conversation. But we need to continue to be a part of that conversation, and the only way we can assure our place in it, is if we live, breathe and embrace the data. Market share will increase for those agents who are able to primarily deal with the intricacies of the transaction, along with the increased noise generated by AI which surrounds it.
Conrad Zurini
Broker of Record / Manager
conrad@rmxemail.com | 905-719-3033