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As I wrote for World Property Journal 10 years ago, when I first saw the film Her in late 2014, I immediately connected the film to AI and the future of real estate agents.
Set in a near-future Los Angeles, “Her” is a romantic comedy starring Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely man who forms a unique bond with his artificially intelligent virtual assistant, Samantha, an anthropomorphized smartphone super app voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
In the film, “Samantha” represents an advanced general intelligence (aka “AGI”) with cognitive thinking capabilities, conversational speech recognition, quantum computing processing power, and sentient emotions.
Throughout the story, “Samantha” systematically absorbs the man's entire world of history, preferences, and activities, scanning his emails, tracking his movements with GPS, scouring the web for information related to him, and quickly building a highly comprehensive, accurate, and predictive data profile about him.
As “Samantha” gets to know the man better, she engages him in meaningful conversations, often making suggestions tailored to his wants and needs before he even has a say in them. Eventually, the man develops an emotional dating bond with the AI (Samantha). This intimate connection surpasses the companionship that many relationships offer because “Samantha” has no emotional bias or judgment towards the man.
While this concept may have seemed like science fiction when the film was released in 2013, today it reflects today’s reality and the rapid advancement trajectory of our capabilities in dealing with AI, large datasets, and the automation of many human tasks.
In this new era of generative AI, and soon AGI, the proliferation of big data and interconnected devices around the world means AI has the ability to analyze vast amounts of information in real time and provide accurate, personalized recommendations across a range of domains, from consumer behavior to financial transactions.
This evolution of AI poses major challenges to traditional professions, and over the next decade, roles such as real estate agents, asset managers, doctors, teachers, accountants, and lawyers may be replaced by efficient AI-driven solutions. Today alone, a large portion of daily stock trading is done by automated AI, and its impact is quickly spreading to other industries such as real estate, finance, journalism, and even coders themselves.
AI has the potential to not only disrupt the traditional real estate brokerage business model in the coming years by automating the role of real estate agents from the real estate transaction itself, but also the entire underlying information architecture and ecosystem on which the industry currently operates, including MLS and online listing search platforms.
If these advances continue, they could significantly lower transaction costs associated with a range of services, reshaping industries such as real estate and replacing traditional fee structures with streamlined AI processes and automated services.
While these developments may unsettle some experts and businesses, especially those in the service industry, they are indicative of a broader global market shift towards automation and efficiency driven by technological innovation.
After all, technological evolution, like gravity, is non-negotiable.
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