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In the world of artificial intelligence, six months is an entire generation. That’s why agents need to be using the technology regularly to stay ahead of the curve
Seth Watts, co-founder of CampaignAgent, who regularly presents to real estate audiences as The AI Guy, knows how fast these tools are moving and has a pretty good idea of the innovations coming for the real estate industry in the months to come.
Fresh off his win in the category of AI Leader of the Year - Enterprise at the inaugural Australian AI Awards, Seth spoke with REB’s Juliet Helmke about the tools he’s most excited about, and where real estate professionals should start if they’re new to AI.
Here’s how the conversation went:
Juliet Helmke, REB - Seth, first off, congratulations on the win.
Seth Watts, Campaign Agent co-founder - It was truly special recognition and a real honour to be involved in the process.
The fact that Momentum Media recognised the importance and the hard work that's happening in the Australian technology and business community around AI, but also had this great vision of not just making it about verticals, real estate, lawyers or professional services, but bringing everybody together to have a chance to look at the industry and the state of AI in Australia, across sectors, made it special.
JH: Before we move on to the AI Awards though, I'd love to hear what it meant to you because I want to note that the category you were nominated in was not property-specific. You were up against people working across a range of functions at other major companies.
SW: That was interesting, and what I'm trying to do in this space is a little bit different. With the AI guy, what we're trying to do here is a recognition that education is going to be the first step for everybody. We are focusing on making sure there's great awareness and in my case, in my particular community, which is property - and that's where we take great passion.
But more broadly, to help people understand that AI is a transformative technology. There's going to be some radical shifts, opportunities, and a few threats, but all of us are going to be on this journey together.
I felt particularly privileged to be recognised, not for application, but really for education, to help all of us get better at it.
JH: This space is almost nothing without education. Can you give us a little bit of a rundown about what the AI Guy looks like and what you are doing with that?
SW: The AI Guy theme has been about trying to live six or twelve months into the future, not only thinking about what we can do today – and in the world of AI, six months is a generation ahead.
When people were going to ChatGPT and asking questions, and getting great answers, we were thinking about how we can show automated voice agents. As ChatGPT went multimodal, we were thinking about how we could create the next generation, which might be video avatars. Now we're thinking deeply about agentic workflow, which is an idea that you can take an AI and get it to do stuff by itself.
Our shows on the AI guy have always been about the future. It's developed so we're not just showing what's possible, we're actually putting coders and developers to the task of building products that will exist in six months, which has been pretty cool. I think most of the stuff we showed back two years ago became a reality a year later. The stuff we showed last year is now a reality today. I do not doubt that the latest version of the AI Guy show is showing people what reality is going to be like in the next six months.
In that sense, we're trying to be in the future on the cutting edge and share a bit of insight as to what's coming so people can prepare for it.
JH: You do these shows in front of property professionals. What have been some of their reactions to this? I can imagine it must run the gamut.
SW: It's really interesting – if you're presenting to an audience that's a commissionable income, you can just feel this palpable excitement, there's just this energy and enthusiasm. You can see their brains ticking over.
When you're speaking to executive teams in real estate or outside of real estate, it's a much more measured response. There's a real sense of “this is powerful, I'm terrified of my competitors having it but it's unclear how I would introduce it” -- it's a difficult technology at times to roll out for leaders.
And then finally, on a more difficult note, you do get a bit of pushback from certain audiences, predominantly those who are doing sort of computer-based task functions like people in administrative and back office roles who find it quite threatening when they see that it could replace functions they are doing -- but I think AI is going to make them more valuable, not less.
JH: You can understand how property professionals would have a level of excitement about this, but also a level of fear about, it’s a big change. How do you approach that?
SW: Firstly, this is super nascent early technology. We are on what I think is a 20-year journey that's going to radically transform how work is done and how the economy works. Right now, we are in the first one or two years, we're early on this journey. I want to remind everybody that you're not too late -- it's a great time to get involved. If you feel like you haven't mastered it yet or you feel like you're being left behind, just drop that, because you're not, you are absolutely on the cutting edge if you're thinking about how to apply it.
Secondly, because we're at this early stage, there is just this massive wave of experimentation.
We've got people trying to figure out what to do with it and most of the big applications haven't figured it out. ChatGPT and a few of the competitors in there are genuinely transformative, but unlike rolling out a CRM in real estate, which is where you have a project team and you've got the boss and the operations manager all working together and everybody has a training day before you roll it out, you can't do that with AI because there's no product to do it with.
What we're finding is the best uses of AI are not that top-down, but rather bottom-down experimentation. The best way for most of us to use AI at this stage is actually to use it to solve specific problems.
If you're a buyer agent in a real estate business, that might involve helping deal with buyer inquiries, doing automated responses, putting out marketing material or getting a ChatGPT to write it. You need to think about it as an assistant that can help, it's a nice way to learn the technology because what we're finding is some of the things it's good at aren't obvious.
So what we're encouraging our teams to do is this bottom-up approach and we're kind of waiting for the big companies to catch up a bit and give us the tools.
At this stage, I always encourage my audience to have what I call an AI-first month, which is for one month, every single problem you solve in your personal and business life involves a computer. What you'll find is that about 30 per cent of the time it is unbelievably powerful.
JH: What are your thoughts on making sure that professionals are doing their due diligence in this space too?
SW: Sometimes, if you ask ChatGPT to give you an answer, no matter how ridiculous the question is, it will give you an answer. In other words, it'll flat-out lie and that's dangerous. If you're going to send information out to your customers, heaven forbid, to a regulator or whatever, you don't want to lie.
If we want it to analyse consumer trends, suburb data or look at buyer trends, whatever it might be, what we do is we'll go to a source that we trust – that might be prop track, that might be a database, it might be Wikipedia. In the prompt, we need to say: “Here is a piece of data, could you please explain this for an executive or a consumer or a buyer audience? Could you spin this around and make me look amazing to my potential prospect?” We always include the actual numbers and the data or the truth in our prompt because speaking frankly, we don't trust the system to pull the right data.
That's a really good lesson in generative AI: if you've got a prompt and a question, and you know what the truth is and you want to just spin it or elaborate on it, whatever you want to do, give it the source of truth, don't rely on the system to find it for you, because that can be dangerous.
JH: It's about the input as well, right? Do you think that people understand AI, what it's capable of, and what it does, that matches with the reality of where we are right at this current moment?
SW: There's always the part of the public that thinks this is magical and it's going to change the world and the other part that just thinks “it’s cool” and has used it a couple of times to talk about it at a dinner party and then that's about it.
I think that's a missed opportunity because there is this massive amount of innovation happening. ChatGPT is a good example, there have been eight different features released in the last six months which have radically changed that product. If you're not playing with it regularly, you're probably getting behind. If you're not using it three or four times a week, you're not thinking about the technology.
JH: I feel like a lot of people coming out of this conversation are going to go back to their computers to dive in. Where do you suggest they start?
SW: If you are not sure where to start, go to ChatGPT and introduce yourself.
Tell it more such as “Hey, here's a little bit about me. I'm a sales professional, I'm a marketing professional. I'd like you to help me do my job better, but I don't know where to start.” The amazing thing about this technology, is it'll just come back and give you lots of good tips, some of which will be great, some of which won't, but then you just follow the bouncing ball to where you want to take it - and as the system gets to know you better, it'll become more and more relevant to actually helping you do your job.
JH: We are coming up to the end of the year. What do you think 2025 might bring, particularly for that sector in terms of innovation? Anything you're excited about?
SW: I've been in real estate for almost 30 years and there has been one constant in that 30 years: that our office is our telephone.
No matter how good technology gets, no matter how good electronic and social media get, the most effective tool we have in our arsenal is still the telephone call and connecting with real live customers, prospects, buyers or vendors.
What gets me excited is tools like Bland.ai and Air.ai and a few of the other voice automation tools that are just getting good. We're starting to see initial rollouts of people using it.
I think all of us, me included, are a little bit nervous about unleashing automated calling out to people, but we've been testing it internally for inbound calls to help people resolve. It's such a vastly better experience than “push one for that, push two for that”, you still need to be able to have calls passed over to humans, but you can create fantastic personalities with AI. You can make them funny, warm, professional, get them to deeply understand your business and provide amazing customer service.
The ability for all of us, but property management may specifically to make automated phone calls to get AI to do some of the work and to build relationships for us, as crazy as that sounds that technology is going to build relationships,
JH: Seth, thank you so much. I've so appreciated your time in telling us about a lot of the things that might be coming and just the possibilities that are out there in this space. If people want to reach out to you, how can they?
SW: Absolutely, CampaignAgent.com.au connect with us. We'd love to come out and have a chat and if anybody would like an AI Guy presentation, just let us know.
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