Here's Why Real Estate Agents Vow ChatGPT Is An Industry Game Changer

It's easy for a tech-forward publication to say AI will "change the world." After all, it has. Implementation of AI across all fields of human endeavor proceeds apace, yielding new wonders and terrors on the daily.

Far trickier is the question of how, exactly, AI will change the world. As long as self-improving algorithms are the new hotness, everyone is going to try to implement AI solutions in their workflow. Some succeed; some fail. Some places have tried and failed to automate jobs with it. To paraphrase The Verge and Plagiarism Today (really), what's good, or bad, CNET?

Success, of course, is a more interesting story. As AI is, at least in a limited way, a self-motivated agent, it's capable of finding niches and thriving inside them. For example, while coders have tried to train AI to paint masterpieces and write tech articles, the technology has quietly made itself indispensable to the real estate business.

As CNN Business has reported, realtors all over the country have found ChatGPT, Microsoft's AI assistant, to be a consistently excellent performer of the more routine aspects of their jobs. CNN quotes Andres Asion, broker for the Miami Real Estate Group: "I've been using it for more than a month, and I can't remember the last time something has wowed me this much."

Real estate professionals have found ChatGPT to be particularly useful as a writing tool. Speaking to CNN, JJ Johannes, a realtor in Cedar Rapids, said of ChatGPT's output, "It's not perfect but it was a great starting point. My background is in technology and writing something eloquent takes time. This made it so much easier."

That was a consistent theme of ChatGPT's success in the real estate game. It couldn't execute on the complex, people-oriented skills that realtors invest their time and experience into mastering. Rather, it could quantify the rote, repetitive parts of their jobs, writing advertisements, building schedules, confirming details, faster than ever before. Rather than a replacement, it functioned as an assistant.

Google and Microsoft seem to have already learned the relevant lesson, packaging their customer-facing AI tools not as outright replacement for personnel, but as support mechanisms. That seems to be AI's first best business destiny: clearing simple tasks so that workers can focus on the kind of complex, subjective, generally human work computers can't do ... at least not yet.