I started my first software company in 1983. I remember when Apple released the first mouse. The other day I was talking with my business partner, Brad Clayton, and he asked me where I thought AI was going. I said: “I’ve seen this movie before.”
What’s happening with AI right now really reminds me of what happened when the Internet first arrived—the changes will just be faster, and on a much larger scale.
The early Internet was like the wild west. There was no Google. There were a dozen search engines competing for your attention — AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Ask Jeeves, WebCrawler, Dogpile, Infoseek. Google came later. The best product didn’t show up first. It showed up when the market was ready for it.
Email existed before most people knew what it was. CompuServe assigned you an email address—except it wasn’t a name, it was a number. Then AOL came along and made email something your grandmother could use. AOL didn’t invent email. They made it easy—and fun. Email just needed a better user experience.
That’s exactly where we are with AI today.
We have the major large language models—Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and others—and they are incredibly powerful. But setting up AI agents and managers, integrating tools and building workflows is still complicated. It requires technical knowledge that most business owners and professionals don’t have. The raw capability is there. The accessibility isn’t. Not yet.
But it’s coming. What will happen—what always happens—is that a new layer of products will emerge that sits on top of these AI models and makes them usable for everyone. First they’ll be generalized, then they’ll be industry-specific. Creating AI agents and managers will become as easy as setting up an email account. They won’t replace Claude or ChatGPT any more than AOL replaced the underlying Internet infrastructure. They’ll just improve the end-user experience. That’s when AI stops being something people read about and starts being something they use every day without thinking about it.
Here’s a suggestion from my early Internet days: don’t wait for that moment to arrive. Dive in now. The people who will get the most out of the new tools are the ones who already understand what’s underneath them. Take the time to educate yourself. Use the large language models today — experiment, make mistakes, figure out what they can do. Have some fun. When the bridge finally gets built, you’ll be the first one across it. You won’t regret the investment of time and energy on the front end.
I’ve watched this cycle play out more than once. The technology arrives raw and complicated, most people won’t take the time to learn it and then someone builds the bridge and everything changes overnight.
That moment is coming faster than you think. Some real estate tech products already have AI integration. Take the three finalists in the RISMedia Tech Showdown earlier this year: Oppy’s agents are built on AI. Courted uses AI for its recruiting and retention tools. FIJIapp.com uses AI to help brokerages and teams dramatically increase their value, cash flow and find brokerage buyers and sellers. Don’t stand on the sidelines waiting for it to get easier. Jump into the deep end now—the people already swimming will have a massive head start when the rest of the world catches up.
For more information, visit http://fijiapp.com/.
