NOW OR NEVER: HOW TO PREPARE C.A.R. FOR AN AI-ENABLED FUTURE PATIENT BY TRENT GILLESPIE
FOR CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS
Thanks for attending my keynote talk!
Here are the additional resources I promised:
- Key Slides
- My free Generative AI at Work AI Course.
- My Future Customer Analyzer to identify your Future Customer and how they change.
- My AI Strategy Assessment & 90 Day Action Plan tool
- My AI Roadmap Creation Tool for REALTORS.
- Below is the AI summary of the keynote talk.
Need help with AI? Here is a link to the AI Jumpstart service through my company, Stellis AI.
Have other questions? Contact Trent
Now or Never: How to Prepare C.A.R.
for an AI-Enabled Future
California Association of Realtors | Keynote by Trent Gillespie
The Moment You're In
On his third day at Amazon, Trent Gillespie was summoned to the VP's office and asked to fix Amazon's global growth. He had no business being in that room. He said yes anyway. That decision led to driving Amazon's expansion from London to Dubai, reinventing last-mile delivery, and defining global privacy standards for Amazon Alexa.
Every one of you is in that same conference room right now. You may not feel prepared. You might feel uncertain. But that is not the question. The question is whether you will lead into this future -- ready or not.
The leaders winning with AI today are not the best-funded or the most technically expert. They are experimenting. They are solving problems that have been stuck for years, inventing new services, and building their future instead of reacting to it. That opportunity is in front of CAR and every California Realtor right now.
Two Mistakes Most Leaders Are Making
Mistake 1: Treating AI as a tool rollout
AI is not a CRM upgrade. It is a complete rewiring of your business -- changing how you deliver services, your cost structures, the skills required of you and your people, and potentially who your customer is. That is the core of Operational AI™: a leadership, vision, and action challenge, not a technology one.
Mistake 2: Optimizing for a world that no longer exists
Most organizations are trying to apply AI to how they worked five, ten, or twenty years ago. The right question is not how to use AI to do old work faster. It is how to reinvent entirely for a future where intelligence is cheap, instant, and always on.
Where the Industry Stands Today
Your clients are already using AI. They arrive better informed, with different expectations. These signals from the CAR audience and current research show the pace of change is not hypothetical.
| Signal | Data Point |
|---|---|
| Buyers using AI for home insights | 82% already doing this |
| Buyers expecting AI on property websites | Majority expect AI tools on sites like Redfin or Zillow |
| Buyers willing to pay extra for human verification of AI decisions | A measurable segment willing to pay a premium |
| Gen Z buyers who say AI increases their confidence in buying | Significant and growing share |
| CAR audience using AI daily | Approximately 60% of the room |
| CAR audience who have used AI to help a client in the last 30 days | Similar proportion to daily users |
| Audience who have had clients use AI before calling them | Higher proportion -- expectations are already shifting |
| Expected agent decline within 5 years (subgroup survey) | 20-30%, with 32% expecting an even larger decline |
Key message: The organizations winning right now are not waiting for AI adoption to stabilize. Client expectations have already shifted. Your competitors -- and well-funded proptech companies -- are building now.
Your Future Customer™
At Amazon, one relentless question drove every product decision: What will our future customer want? That mindset -- imagining the future and working backwards to build it before anyone else -- is how Amazon created the Kindle, Alexa, and reinvented e-commerce. Trent applied this same framework to the CAR context through the Future Customer™ Method.
The Future Customer™ Method: Five Questions
Work through all five questions to establish your future vision. Questions 1-3 surface your risk. Questions 4 and 5 are where your future is built.
- What do your home buyers and sellers say they value most about you today?
- Which of those values will still differentiate your services when know-how is free and instant?
- Which of those values can you no longer charge extra for -- because they become table stakes?
- Where will customers still desire and pay for a uniquely human touch?
- What brand-new value could you create because intelligence is cheap -- something customers don't even ask for yet?
Future Scenarios CAR Evaluated
The CAR Strategic Planning Forum worked through two potential futures, rated by 83% of participants as very or mostly realistic:
| Future Home Buyer Scenario | Future Home Seller Scenario |
|---|---|
| AI searches every listing, generates valuations, flags property issues in minutes | AI recommends optimal list dates, prices, and improvement ROI before listing |
| Showings are auto-scheduled, learning buyer preferences after each one | Listing, marketing, virtual staging, and showings are fully automated |
| Offers drafted and negotiated within preset buyer limits | AI analyzes every offer by risk and net proceeds, counters on seller's behalf |
| Buyer only weighs in on decisions that require a human | Human involvement reserved for final decisions and relationship moments |
Note: Some of these scenarios involve AI performing licensed work. DRE has issued preliminary guidance, but the future remains uncertain. CAR must plan around these possibilities now -- not after they arrive.
Applying the Five Questions: CAR Context
| Past Customer Expectation | AI-Powered Shift | Future Customer Expectation |
|---|---|---|
| Realtor prices the home | AI generates instant pricing with comps and trend data | Human validates AI recommendation, brings negotiation strategy |
| Realtor markets the listing | AI creates virtual staging, video, and targeted campaigns automatically | Realtor curates quality and applies relationship advantage |
| Realtor finds qualified buyers | Platforms surface buyers through AI matching | Realtor maintains proprietary buyer relationships AI cannot replicate |
| Realtor manages paperwork | AI monitors contracts, flags issues, auto-fills routine fields | Human provides ethical judgment and fiduciary oversight |
What Stays Human (Questions 4 and 5)
The CAR group identified human skills that will not be replicated: emotional intelligence, handling complex transactions, conflict resolution, ethical judgment, and trust. They also identified potential new roles AI creates rather than eliminates: offer strategy specialists, property data and due diligence analysts, AI valuation and market analysts, AI transaction coordinators, and AI compliance specialists.
What Changes When Intelligence Is Cheap?
For the entirety of human history, intelligence -- decision-making, creativity, judgment -- is what we have paid the most for. We build organizational structures around it. There is never enough. Now it is instant. Think of it like electricity, but for thinking. Sam Altman has said the cost of intelligence is approaching the cost of electricity as data center production becomes automated. And unlike electricity, which waits for you to plug something in, AI is watching, monitoring, and taking action.
To make this tangible, Trent demonstrated what is possible today. He asked ChatGPT to design a client relationship app -- called Homeversary -- that reminds Realtors of each client's home purchase anniversary and sends a personalized reconnection email. ChatGPT generated business requirements in eight seconds. Those were pasted into Replit, an AI application builder. The result: a fully functional app with a dashboard, contact import, campaign management, templates, and automated anniversary outreach.
If anyone can build that for less than the cost of a coffee, the only question is who does it first -- you, your competitors, or a proptech company already funded with billions in investment.
The Agent Landscape: Two Types to Know
General Purpose AI
Tools like ChatGPT and Copilot function like Swiss Army knives -- trained on the world's information, capable across many tasks. They are increasingly becoming the primary interface of the entire workday, potentially replacing email and CRM systems as the main way work gets done.
Specialty Agents
Built for your specific process, with access to your data. These are not a distant future scenario. They are available now, even within ChatGPT.
Trent demonstrated ChatGPT in agent mode opening a virtual computer, navigating to HubSpot, logging in, searching for a contact, and creating a follow-up task -- selecting a custom date from a calendar dropdown -- without any human input at each step. This is the direction your workflow is heading. Last week, OpenAI gave everyone the ability to create an agent and share it within ChatGPT. The pace of progress is not slowing.
Reinventing Processes with Agent Chains
Individual agents are powerful. Chains of agents are transformative. Here is how Trent is reinventing the sales process for organizations today:
| Agent | Role in the Chain |
|---|---|
| Prospecting Agent | Searches for new prospects 24/7 and passes qualified leads forward |
| Qualifier Agent | Evaluates fit against your criteria, products, and service area |
| Research Agent | Gathers LinkedIn profiles, public statements, earnings reports, and matches to your value proposition |
| Strategy Output | Delivers a hyper-personalized sales strategy for each qualified prospect -- ready when you arrive at work |
Your job becomes managing and improving those agents -- not performing the work they handle. Redfin and Zillow are already integrated into ChatGPT. A buyer today can search for a home and receive results without visiting your website. In the near future, their AI may contact your listing's AI directly, book a showing, and notify you -- without the buyer ever calling or emailing.
Timeline: AI-to-AI commerce is already happening at the consumer level. Business-to-business is 12-18 months away. Organizations with their systems ready will capture that traffic. Those that do not may simply not make the cut.
The CAR Strategic Vision: Two Paths
The CAR Strategic Planning Forum evaluated two possible directions for the organization's response to AI.
Protect the traditional agent through support and member services -- continuing to do what CAR has always done.
Redefine CAR's role as the governance layer and standards authority for AI-enabled real estate in California.
The group's strongest feedback on the proposed five-year implementation timeline: it is too slow. Do it in two years.
Five Strategic Pillars
Your Action Items
- Assess your current AI usage honestly. Daily AI users gain approximately 20% productivity. If you are not there yet, start this week -- with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot.
- Work through all five Future Customer™ questions for your own practice: what clients value today, what still differentiates you when know-how is free, and where new value can be created.
- Identify one process to begin reinventing with AI. Start with client relationship maintenance -- the Homeversary example is available today, built in 14 minutes for under $5.
- Explore the specialty agents most relevant to your work: pricing, listing preparation, contract review, or closing coordination. These are available now.
- Engage with CAR's AI strategy development. The five strategic pillars require member input to be credible, durable, and representative of the full membership.
- Build a personal experimentation cadence. Test something, share what you learn, iterate. Do not wait for a perfect plan. The biggest risk Trent sees in organizations is not moving.
- Do not give away your human advantage. Apply AI to what AI does well. Protect the relationship layer that clients cannot get from a machine -- that is your primary asset.
The Choice
CAR's mission is to shape, promote, and protect an environment for the entire real estate industry -- one in which California Realtors can succeed in meeting the real property needs of consumers.
That mission was built on the belief that the human in the transaction matters. That trust, judgment, and relationship cannot be automated away. AI does not change that belief. It changes the conditions under which you must act on it.
The question is not whether AI will disrupt real estate in California. It will. The question is whether CAR leads what comes next -- defining the standards, shaping the regulations, training the membership, and building the platforms that make sure the future of California real estate is one where your members thrive.
Every day you start with that hunger to make a difference for a client, to solve a problem, to help a family into a home -- that is Day One. Bring that energy to this moment.
This is your moment.Q&A Highlights
Trent recommended starting with the right data -- consumer and member surveys across California. AI can then perform sentiment analysis on that data, identifying hotspots and tracking how issues are trending by geography. After sentiment analysis, predictive analytics become possible: proactively identifying shifts based on population, climate, and market changes. The long-term opportunity is making CAR's data a platform that legislators and others reference as the authoritative source for California real estate intelligence.
Trent pushed back on the framing. Most organizations are not laying people off because of AI -- they cannot hire enough people to grow as it is. AI is helping them become more efficient so they can expand. The job impact only comes if CAR allows it. Advocacy communicating the importance of human fiduciary duty in complex transactions is a critical counterweight. The goal is expanding what Realtors do, not just defending what they currently do.
If source data is wrong, AI output will be wrong. AI accuracy for well-structured questions is approximately 90-95% and improving, but source data quality remains the foundation. Trent suggested CAR consider establishing itself as the accurate, validated database that AI systems check against -- a standards and quality control role that reinforces CAR's value in an AI-enabled market.
Trent was direct: if your key differentiator is client relationships, do not outsource those to AI agents. Use AI to enable and improve those relationships -- research clients before meetings, prepare for conversations, follow up faster -- but keep the relationship itself human. The moment the client's relationship is with the AI and not with you, you have given away your primary asset.
The primary risks Trent sees are not bias or regulation -- they are speed and willingness to fail. Most organizations are moving too slowly. Three years into the AI era, many still lack a concrete plan. A willingness to experiment, iterate, and share what you learn is the antidote. CAR is competing against proptech companies with billions in funding. Matching their pace of learning, even without matching their budgets, is essential.
Use whichever tool is most familiar. Google Workspace users: Gemini is well-integrated and cost-effective. ChatGPT users: continue there and explore agent mode. Copilot is less capable by comparison but usable if it is what you have access to. The tool matters less than building the daily habit and learning how to ask the right questions in the right way.