The environment
I’m mini golfing with my kids on a day off when a request comes in from one of my agents. She needs market data to present to a client. After 20 years in this business, I know where the market stands. Years ago, a presentation this big would have taken me hours to write up. I’m not stressed at all, so I tell her she’ll have something within the hour.
I spent 50 of those 60 minutes wrapping up the round and trying to wrangle my kids and their friend through the last few holes, because it was free ice cream day. The other 10 minutes, once I got home, were one prompt and one email.
I can say plainly that AI has made my life better. In the past, I would have been stressed on that course, cut the day short, and spent far longer working once I got home. I’m grateful for that time, because being there for my kids is paramount.
I’m sure many working parents feel the same. In a Lurie Children’s Hospital survey of 1,004 parents, 81% said they use AI for parenting tasks, and on average they said it saves them 58 minutes a week. That leads to wider adoption of tools you can simply talk to, tools that help you run your life and build on your own experience. That last point is important, and I’ll come back to it.
The pickup in AI agents is enormous. ChatGPT alone now has 1.2 billion weekly users, up from 400 million in February 2025. I text a new agent on my train ride in. Within minutes I’m finding what I want faster, getting ahead of what I need to do and staying on track.
The result is more productivity, more peace of mind and less stress.
Disrupting the disruptors
I grew up with the internet at a time when most adults barely knew what it was. Being adaptable and willing to try new things has always given me an edge. One example is that I adopted real estate tech early in my career. I was one of the first agents in NYC to buy leads from the big portals, and I rode that wave. To be clear, I’m incredibly grateful to those companies for helping build my career. I’m a huge supporter of what they’ve done, and I still see value in them.
Still, it’s hard to ignore the changing of the guard. It feels like the internet in the ‘90s and early 2000s again, only now it’s AI, and it’s moving faster than anything did back then. My gratitude to those sites is giving way to a growing gratitude for the work and life balance we all strive for. Until now, new tech gave us more, more, more and actually less balance. Today’s tech is starting to shift that balance back.
Instead of visiting several sites to find the best deal on a new pair of running shoes, I can ask my AI agent to do it for me. Need a discount code? No problem. Why spend valuable minutes on that? This is the new starting point for me and for a growing number of consumers. People in sales call that starting point the top of the funnel.
The shift is already showing up in the data. Adobe found that traffic from AI sources to U.S. retail sites rose 693% year over year during the 2025 holiday season. By July 2026, shoppers arriving from AI converted 60% better than other traffic.
What happens when a new Top of the funnel appears?
Data gathered in one place starts to matter less. Consumer eyeballs on those places matter less. Information becomes more democratized. That spells trouble for companies built on search engine funnels, companies that earn a lot from ad dollars and companies that overcharge their users.
The clicks are already disappearing. Pew Research found that when Google showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in just 8% of visits, compared with 15% without one. They clicked a link inside the summary only 1% of the time.
For example, I own an Airbnb home. I pay Airbnb a lot of money every time it’s booked, and I’ve been happy to do that for years. This fall, Airbnb moved all U.S. hosts to a single 15.5% host fee, up from roughly 3%. As long as my place is somewhere AI can find it, why wouldn’t guests find me directly?
If your new lawn equipment is $10 cheaper directly from Home Depot than on Amazon, why would a shopper ever go back to searching only on Amazon? The aggregators know this. Amazon has blocked dozens of AI agents, including ChatGPT, and sued Perplexity over its shopping agent. In August, a federal appeals court overturned the ban, the first appellate ruling on whether AI agents acting for users can access these platforms. Perplexity’s argument says it all: AI agents “don’t have eyeballs to see the pervasive advertising.”
Bloat
For years I’ve watched fees climb on all of these platforms while real tech innovation stalled. Most of the innovation now goes into holding their ground. Amazon’s take from a typical seller has passed 50% of revenue, up from 40% five years earlier. Seller services brought Amazon $172 billion in 2025.
It reminds me of cable before people cut the cord, and of music before Napster and then Spotify. Recorded music revenue fell from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.97 billion in 2014 before streaming rebuilt it. Today streaming makes up 49% of all TV viewing, versus 18.7% for cable.
Every aggregator is headed for major disruption as consumers move the top of the funnel to AI agents.
What it means for real estate
Our industry is pushing hard right now to house information and be the go-to source. A lot of money is going into legal fees, time and energy on policies around that. If you follow the logic above, much of it is wasted effort. Compass sued Zillow over listing rules and then dropped the case. Zillow then sued Compass and Chicago’s MLS, and lost its bid for an injunction in September.
In a world where most consumers talk to their AI agent, every broker with a listing is empowered. Everyone seems to be racing to build the real “National MLS,” but no single company will win it. It will live across a decentralized web of AI agents, each able to pull everything together at any moment. Even Zillow sees it: It launched an app inside ChatGPT so it can meet buyers where they now start.
Buyers are already there. Nearly half of Americans planning to buy a home in the next year say they’ll use AI in the process. In a Q3 2026 survey, 78% of agents said their clients had used AI tools to research pricing, listings or the transaction.
Once consumer use reaches a tipping point, paying to feature a listing matters less. Paying for buyer leads matters less, and the list goes on. Zillow’s residential business, mostly agent advertising and lead products, brought in $1.7 billion in 2025. That’s a lot of agent money tied to a funnel that is moving. Getting your listing out there, and getting your own unique experience out into the world, will become paramount.
What it means for agents
I’m also seeing more people willing to pay for higher-touch, higher-value service. Look at endurance sports: I’m continually shocked at how many amateurs now pay for coaches. Real estate is no different. 44% of buyers say they would pay more for a human professional to check what AI tells them, and trust in AI alone to find a home fell from 30% to 16% in a year.
We can all have enough time with our families, work where we add the most value and share that with others. If that’s real estate for you, great. If it’s being a running coach, great.
Spending more time with my family and getting paid for my own life experience and expertise is a world I’m excited about.
This is no knock on aggregators. It’s a changing of the guard. It will probably get messier before it gets better, and the big question is adoption.
When do we all just text our morning AI and get everything we need? If and when that hits critical mass, that’s when we’ll see this shift.
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