When it comes to AI, I think we can all agree: The train has left the station. Moving at a speed never before seen, artificial intelligence adoption rates are more than double that of smartphones and tablets when they hit the scene in 2007.
The question is, how’s a real estate professional—and the industry at large—supposed to keep up? After all, when something is moving at warp speed, jumping on board is not only difficult but risky. That’s why real estate tech leaders on the forefront of AI have approached the movement thoughtfully, putting systems and guardrails in place to make sure AI works to your and your clients’ advantage. They want to put you, the human, not just in the loop, but in control.
For this exclusive roundtable cover story, RISMedia spoke with five real estate technologists on the forefront of AI: Ashley Fidler, chief product officer, MoxiWorks; Brian Tepfer, CEO, PropStream; Dave Carter, VP of Marketing, Lofty and Jim Crisera, CEO, Renowned. Here, they go beyond the hype to discuss the realities of AI, debunk the myths and provide sage advice for brokers and agents as they assess how artificial intelligence can help transform their businesses for real estate’s future.
What steps has your firm taken to keep up with the unprecedented pace of AI development?
Dave Carter: Long before AI became an industry buzzword, we were already building it. Lofty has been developing AI solutions for real estate since 2019, so in many ways we’ve spent the last several years setting the pace rather than chasing it. Today, AI tools like Claude Code enable our engineering teams to ship new features and platform updates faster than ever, keeping our customers ahead of the curve. That external push is matched internally. Our CEO, Joe Chen, is a vocal AI advocate who has driven adoption company-wide through dozens of internal AI tools, an AI awards program and regular in-office guest speakers and learning labs.
Jim Crisera: AI is how we deliver on the job we’ve always had: making it easier for agents to be successful. That job has two halves. One is taking the grind out of an agent’s day, so we integrated AI into our platform to capture each agent’s expertise—verified reviews, past sales, hyperlocal insight—and turn it into always-on marketing. The other is winning the listing, so we built AI into our consumer experience to match buyers and sellers with the right agent.
The newest step is measurement, because AI search gives you no record of what consumers asked or who got recommended. So we went to the only evidence that exists: our own server logs. Over May and June, we analyzed 125 million AI bot requests and isolated 764,000 moments when an AI assistant pulled our pages to answer a live consumer question. That’s what keeping up looks like for us: AI in the product, AI in the matching, and tracking how AI is behaving on our platform.
Ashley Fidler: We’re all about AI and use it in multiple ways. In the product, we have an agentic platform, so we can create context, make presentations and do email marketing. We can do all of that via chat, but also through proactive experiences. So if we see something happen in the system that says someone is interested in selling their house, we can automatically generate a CMA. Then, in terms of the company in general, we have a big developer platform that’s AI-based where we do a lot of our software development. As a company, we are very focused on making sure we are always at the cutting edge and monitoring what’s happening.
Jibin George: We are using AI in two different ways. One is implementing more AI features into the product itself, and the other is using AI in our development methodologies. In terms of product, we added an AI assistant that is integrated with some of our calculators and other property data, which will make the property analysis much more efficient for our end users. And in development, our goal in the next six months is to have AI generate all the code that we are writing. That doesn’t mean that we are letting AI rule our engineering. There are human gates at every step of the process to make sure we are reviewing every single line of code. We are not just vibe coding.
Tell us about the latest AI capability or product you’ve introduced, and how it helps real estate professionals.
Jim Crisera: We’ve built our Local Expert Marketing platform around a single job: helping agents strengthen their online presence. Recently, our focus has been centered on ensuring they get found and recommended by AI. RateMyAgent captures verified reviews tied to real transactions and distributes them across Google and our network of partner platforms. Social Studio turns those reviews, recent sales and hyperlocal market data into always-on content across the channels consumers and AI systems actually check. When a seller asks ChatGPT, “Who should I list my home with?”, the answer is assembled from whatever credible data exists about you. Most agents can’t control that. We make their track record visible, verified and citable.
Jibin George: Our No. 1 AI-driven product will be our new enhanced search. Right now, our platform gives users access to almost 160-plus filters to do property search. But for somebody new to the system, it’s very overwhelming to know which filters to use and how to combine them. So our AI search will let the users describe what they’re looking for in plain, everyday language, and the system will translate that into a combination of filters with the help of AI, so you can get to the desired results much faster and more easily. We also launched an AI assistant, which will help make the property analysis much simpler.
Dave Carter: This summer we introduced Lofty Cowork, the centerpiece of an expanded Lofty AOS, our agentic AI operating system. Most real estate AI still waits for agents to ask the right question. Cowork flips that. Presented in a familiar chat interface, it replaces a dashboard of widgets with a prioritized list of ready-to-execute tasks each morning, so agents never have to guess where to start. Built around how top-producing agents actually work, it lets them review leads, send mass texts, build Smart Plans and hand off entire workflows with a single conversation instead of dozens of clicks, freeing them to spend more time on relationships and less on managing software.
Ashley Fidler: Our new platform, RISE, has agentic AI and a lot of data all connected together under the hood. All of your data and all of your functionality is 
connected together. That’s what allows us to give really interesting capabilities that actually drive business value. As an industry, we know the things that drive people’s ability to get new clients and sell real estate, and we want to make sure those things come together using both chat and automation. For example, we get a lead in, now we can generate an email campaign for you. Go look at it, hit send if you like it. We’re taking steps out of the process and tying everything together end to end. We make that really easy for people, and that’s a big focus for us.
What are the biggest barriers preventing real estate professionals from fully embracing AI?
Ashley Fidler: A big part of the issue is understanding what the technology can and can’t do, and then really understanding your business and what you’re trying to accomplish. To use AI successfully as a broker, you need to understand why you want it, what benefit you think it’s going to provide, and you need to think about how you’re going to get that benefit. A lot of people just assume AI’s going to be really smart and figure that all out, but AI can’t figure out how you want to run your business. So you need to know and be grounded in yourself and your business as far as what you’re trying to do, and then understand what you need to do to make that technology successful.
Dave Carter: The biggest barrier isn’t willingness, it’s fatigue. Earlier AI tools required constant tending: prompts to initiate, pipelines to update, tasks to log. Salespeople want to be on the phone closing deals, not updating pipeline stages or producing reports, and all that system management feels like noise. It’s why so many promising tools get adopted for a few weeks and then quietly abandoned. Agentic AI removes that burden. Instead of waiting to be prompted, it runs entire workflows and only flags what actually needs a human decision, so agents can realize the gains without having to constantly interact with the system. That shift, not better prompting, is what will finally move adoption forward.
Brian Tepfer: AI is the most rapidly adopted technology in history. I think a lot of people who have used AI to date did not see it yield productive results, and because it didn’t perform to expectations, they pulled back. The biggest challenge for a lot of real estate professionals adopting AI is that they’re not seeing the value and how it helps them in their daily workflow. That’s what we’re trying to train our users on—that this is a valuable tool for you to do your job more efficiently and enhance your output. We’re leading people to the next step instead of giving them a blank page or not giving them contextual, relevant information for what they’re trying to accomplish.
Jim Crisera: The biggest barrier is that the shift is invisible. AI search is a closed system: Consumers ask, get an answer and often never click, so nothing shows up in an agent’s analytics. Second, most agents think of AI as a tool they use, not a channel that recommends them; those are completely different problems. Third, basic digital hygiene: 62% of agent profiles on our platform are unclaimed, even though AI is already reading them to answer consumers. Claiming a profile is free and lifts AI visibility 20% – 34% on its own. The barrier isn’t the technology; it’s that nobody has told agents the referral moment has moved.
What do you think the industry is underestimating about AI? What are the misperceptions?
Brian Tepfer: There’s this fear that AI is going to reduce human creativity, where we become less relevant as individuals. I don’t want AI to be misperceived as a tool that we’re using to replace any one job; we’re enabling its use as an advantage for agents to get deals done quicker and accelerate tasks. I think people are being naive about the ubiquity of where AI is going to be in the next few years. At some level, AI will be ingrained in everything we do on a daily basis. As an industry, I believe it will become the tool that the most productive and successful agents are utilizing to gain the advantage. The ones that are adopting it now are the ones that are going to be 10 steps ahead next year.
Ashley Fidler: There’s an old adage in technology that people overestimate the impact a technology’s going to have in the 10-year timeframe, but underestimate it in the 20-year timeframe. A new technology, especially a foundational technology like AI, is like a floodplain. It rises slowly and you don’t even necessarily notice all of the accumulated small changes over a longer period of time, and all of a sudden things change a lot. I think people get very excited about some of these flashier early things, and they forget that this floodplain is actually what transforms the way things work over a longer period of time. If you underestimate the long-term, you don’t start making the little changes as you go. If you don’t start now, you won’t notice it until you’re already way behind.
Jim Crisera: The industry is underestimating that this is already happening at scale. The first misperception is that AI visibility requires some new trick. It doesn’t. AI rewards the fundamentals: verified reviews, consistent data, a documented performance history, because it cross-checks sources before it recommends anyone. An agent with 100-plus reviews gets pulled into AI answers more than twice as often as one with under 50 reviews, and the curve steepens sharply from there. The second misperception is that clicks still measure success. Consumers increasingly get their answer without visiting anyone’s website. Reputations are being won and lost invisibly.
Dave Carter: I think the industry still pictures AI as a chatbot bolted onto existing software, something you prompt for an answer. That undersells where this is headed. The real opportunity is AI that works autonomously in the background—qualifying leads, updating records, keeping campaigns moving—without an agent lifting a finger. Many also assume adoption has mainly been a training problem, when the deeper issue is that most tools were designed around what software could automate rather than what agents were actually willing to stop doing themselves. And some still fear AI is coming for agents’ jobs, when it’s really coming for the busywork surrounding those jobs.
When it comes to AI, how can firms balance innovation with compliance and ethics?
Dave Carter: Balancing innovation with responsibility starts internally. Brokerages need to take the time to build clear policies around how AI can and can’t be used with client data, well before a tool goes live company-wide. But no firm can carry that burden alone. That’s where partnering with an established technology provider matters. The right partner absorbs much of the heavy lifting around data privacy, security and compliance, so brokerages can innovate confidently without having to become experts in AI governance themselves.
Jibin George: We do not replace human judgment in our process or in our product. Before we put any data in front of the customers, we make sure a human has verified and authorized that data. We are very upfront with our customers on what AI can and cannot do. We let customers know that they have to use their judgment before making a decision. From an ethical perspective, one of the fears that people have is that AI is going to take jobs away. We don’t have plans to cut any jobs. As a company that adopted a centralized protocol for AI development, we are actually teaching our engineers a new way of development. We are creating leaders that can go and make this happen in other companies.
Jim Crisera: In real estate, trust is the product. Getting ethics right is what makes innovation durable, not what slows it down. Three disciplines matter. First, anchor everything in verifiable truth. Every review on our platform is tied to a real closed transaction, because the moment consumers or AI platforms detect fabricated credibility signals, you’re worse off than having none. Second, be transparent with consumers about how their data is used, and collect only what serves them. Reputational data is a privilege consumers grant, not an asset you mine. Third, automate production, never accountability: AI can draft the content, but a human whose name is on it approves what’s published.
Ashley Fidler: We’ve seen in other industries that it is completely possible to do things in a secure and balanced way and also innovate and go forward with new technology. A few things that I think everyone should do: First of all, know the laws in your state. Then, you should have a policy in place as a broker that these are the tools you’re allowed to use. Then you want to set up whatever tools people are allowed to use in your environment. If you tell them they’re allowed to use ChatGPT or Claude, set up a corporate account because that gives you security, that gives you auditability so you can see what people are doing. Give them training, monitor what people are doing. Don’t make it hard for them to do the right thing.
Do you believe AI will primarily replace certain tasks or fundamentally change the residential real estate business model?
Jim Crisera: Both, in sequence. Tasks go first…and because these AI tools are cheap and available to everyone, it’s tempting to conclude that AI makes real estate an individual agent’s game: Agents automate their own marketing, AI recommends agents by name and the brokerage fades into the background. Our data says the opposite. When AI assistants pull from our platform to answer live consumer questions, brokerage and agency pages are read more than three times as often as individual agent profiles. AI treats the brokerage as the front door: It establishes trust in the brand first, then finds the agent inside it. And it compounds: Every agent’s verified reviews feed the authority of the brokerage’s own page. So preparation is a team sport, and it’s unglamorous: claim every profile, build verified reviews relentlessly, keep data consistent across every agent and office. The human work stays human. What changes is how you get chosen.
Ashley Fidler: Right now, I think it’s replacing tasks, but if you replace enough tasks over time, that could be a profound shift. Do I think AI is going to replace real estate agents? No, because it can’t build relationships with people. But I still think it can be transformative. As consumers start using AI, their patience for older tech and for things that don’t work fast and aren’t really well-connected is going to go down. Consumer behavior is already changing, and that means the behavior of our business has to evolve with that. Otherwise, we end up getting left behind.
Brian Tepfer: Yes, I believe AI will replace and improve tasks, especially rote tasks. But AI will not replace the agent. Any real estate transaction is an emotional transaction. You want someone who can guide you with confidence and clarity through what may be one of the most challenging times in your life. Does that mean that we could make the transaction more efficient using AI tools? Absolutely. But it’s not going to replace that empathy that people bring to that transaction. AI is interpretive, and people are contextual.
We are at a time where we are seeing the quickest adoption of a technology in the history of mankind. The more agents can utilize AI and recognize that it is a tool to do their jobs better, the bigger advantage they have in putting themselves out there in the market.
Dave Carter: AI won’t replace real estate professionals, but it will fundamentally change how they work. Real estate has always been, and will continue to be, a relationship business built on trust, local expertise and human judgment. What AI changes is everything that happens between those client interactions.
Today’s agents spend an extraordinary amount of time on administrative work, follow-up, marketing, research and transaction coordination, tasks that don’t directly create value for clients. As AI becomes more autonomous, it will increasingly handle those activities, freeing agents to focus on advising clients, negotiating deals and building relationships. The real competitive advantage won’t come from using AI to write an email faster; it will come from AI continuously working in the background to identify opportunities and keep business moving even while an agent is focused elsewhere.
I also expect AI to reshape the business model over time. The industry has been built around software that helps agents manage their work; we’re now entering an era where AI doesn’t just organize the work, it completes it. That will change expectations around productivity and the level of service clients receive.
The best preparation isn’t becoming an AI expert, it’s developing an AI-first mindset. Agents who treat AI as a teammate, not a threat, will be best positioned to deliver great client experiences while building more efficient, resilient businesses.
Visit https://moxiworks.com/ for more information.
