Speaker 1 (00:00):
Marketing is being eaten by ai, but what does that mean? And more importantly, what does that mean for you and your business? For answers, you've got two of the best marketing minds in the real estate industry, Jimmy Mackin and Jason Pantana right here in our third TechT episode. Specific ways to leverage generative AI and Agentic ai, how to balance efficiency with quality and how to balance new tools in tech with the good old human touch specific ways to enhance efficiency and profit. How do evolve past basic automations to improve your marketing and operations and specific tool recommendations to make all of this happen? You've got about 24 minutes with Jimmy, followed by 24 minutes with Jason. Enjoy our third eptember episode here on Real Estate Team os no matter where your business is

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team Os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Jimmy, I'm pretty sure we first met at NAR annual back in 2012 or 2013. You've been a friend to an advocate of me and of the entire industry all along. I'm psyched to have you here for TechT. Welcome to Real Estate Team os.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
First off, Ethan, you look exactly the same as you did 12 years ago, which is a compliment and yes, I do remember that and what's so cool is being able to see so many folks that I met early in my career in real estate go on and do amazing and interesting things and continue to deliver value to the industry. So I'm thrilled to be here, my friend, and hopefully we can help a lot of agents be successful here today.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, same back to you as well. It's been really awesome to see the communities you've built, the followings you've built, the things you've learned yourself from the people you've brought around you and what you've been able to teach back as a consequence. So we're going to be getting into a lot of that, mostly around the themes of AI and marketing, but we're going to kick it off with three quick questions. The first one is, on a scale of one to 10, how interested, excited or passionate would you say you are about New Tech in general?

Speaker 3 (02:03):
A thousand out of 10. I think the short answers we're living to the most interesting revolution in our time. AI is massively under hype right now. Hopefully today we'll have a chance to go a little bit deeper into why I believe this, but there has never been a better time to be in real estate right now because the businesses that are being built today are going to reshape the way in which businesses are being built in the future. So I could not be more excited about what's happening right now.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
Okay. Would you say then that you were maybe an 8, 9, 10, a couple years ago and what you've experienced over the past 18 to 24 months, it's just shot you over the top?

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Well, it's interesting. I always look at technology as a means to an end as every other person has. I got to say I was a little bit late to the AI game when chatt BT rolled out now, wherever it was three years ago, I was not the first person jumping on the train. We all have to remember we were coming on the back of the crypto boom, the Web3 boom, which were the biggest head fakes in technology. How many of us remember when people were talking about the blockchain disrupt, people have not mentioned the word blockchain in two and a half years and there's a reason why. And so I think what has happened is I think I was a little bit jaded, probably many people who are going to listen to this podcast. I've always loved products, I've always loved technology, but I was coming off the back of a lot of hype and then so going into ai, I saw the potential immediately, but then it became very quick. I realized very quickly, oh no, this is going to be it. There's no doubt in this, and obviously many people who've experienced that sort of moment realize the potential this thing has and how much it's going to impact every part of our businesses.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
To your point, I saw Web3 every day on LinkedIn and I haven't seen anyone refer to themselves being like a Web3 person in a long time, and that whole concept has been devoured by what Gen AI has done and now of course, ag Agentic, ai, et cetera. So the second question, if you were an agent starting today, if you were one week or one month or even one year into it, what are three types of tools that you would buy first? What does someone definitely need today if they were starting clean?

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Well, the bar is a lot lower than people realize. I mean, what do you actually need? I think the only mission critical piece of software you need in your business just to keep your sanity as a CRM, but put it aside for a second, I think that the type of people I would hire or work with is where things really begin to change. Historically in real estate as an individual agent, you'd buy a CRM, you'd buy a website, you'd buy maybe some marketing tools and then you would go out and hire an assistant. You'd go out there and hire a marketing coordinator. You might then go recruit a couple of buyer's agents. I think right now the best thing an individual agent could do is hire, and this is going to be a controversial opinion, but to hire a researcher, what do I mean by that?

Speaker 3 (05:11):
I mean that the thing that's preventing you from increasing your output, which is a necessary thing that needs to exist for you to get the input or get the results you're looking for is you kind of need to know what's happening and you need someone to set you up for success. Chris and I used to always say, let the talent be the talent. You the agent, are the talent could you outsource? In this case, if we're going to talk tools, Ethan, you should use perplexity to do research, right? So you got CRM, you got perplexity, that's probably all you need to be sending great emails, right? Creating great video content, creating market updates for your community. So if I were an individual starting over again, I get a CRM, so I have a place to keep my contacts and then I'm investing heavily in research tools so I can be the most knowledgeable, the most interesting, the most useful person in my space. I'm not necessarily worrying about my distribution tools. Those already kind of exist through social media. I'm much more interested in my research tools. So perplexity would be my answer to that, but I would push that further and probably hire a junior research assistant to help support me.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
What is one app, Jimmy, that you open every day that has little or nothing to do with real estate?

Speaker 3 (06:20):
There's an app called End, it's E-N-D-E-L, and it's an app I listen to for people who have a DH adhd, which I don't think I have a DH adhd, but that's probably something someone who has a DHD would say is music that you listen to that helps you focus. I cannot live without it, so I'll go in deep focus mode. The world becomes very narrow. It allows me to focus on what I'm focusing on in that particular moment. So I'm a huge fan and there's a whole bunch of my Brain FM and handful of others. I use that every day just to work just to be productive. And of course this is, I'd say not real estate specific, but real estate adjacent is I am obsessed with podcasts. I will listen to podcasts every day. If you look at my app, time is probably number one right behind Endo. So I'm opening Spotify every day. Founders podcast. I love Invest The Best is another podcast. I love the Pro G Markets, other podcast I love. I'm like for many of your audience probably in the same category. I'm a podcaster for sure. Spotify is my jam.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
I found binaural beats like that 12 hour playlist on Spotify. Also a huge fan of Prof. G Markets also a huge fan of founders. Let's get straight into AI and marketing. I have a note from a call you and I were on a couple of weeks ago. I had in quotes eaten by AI and in front of that was marketing is being, when I say marketing is being eaten by ai, back to you, what comes to mind? What is good about that isn't good about that? You mentioned under hyped and what's under hyped in this zone? Give us a spin on marketing being eaten by ai.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
Well, if you think about the process of marketing today, and this is traditionally how most marketing agencies work, this is how most people go through the process of doing marketing. First you have to research what exactly is working outside of my industry or in my industry. You're trying to figure out like, okay, what's the strategy as a whole? Then you start pivoting into, okay, well marketing runs on the back of content. I mean every single thing that we do is really on the back of content. It is ads, it's emails, it's postcards, it's mailers, it's our emails, it's our text. It's all in the back of content. So now you can say, I got to go out there and find really interesting content to create. Then you got to be able to create it. Then you got to be able to edit it. Then you got to be able to distribute it.

Speaker 3 (08:44):
Then you got to go out there and analyze it's working and identify what to do more of and what to do less of. And so that is marketing. Marketing is research, it's writing, it's recording, it's editing, it's packaging, it's distributing, it's analyzing. Every single part of that process is either being eaten by AI or amplified through ai and entire parts of it are being entirely removed because of ai. Lemme give you an example of this. There's a tool called Motion, which is a tool motion app, which is an advertising product because there's a few motions, one's like productivity, one's advertising, but it analyzes all of your ads and it identifies what's working and why and it makes recommendations on what you should do differently and it's incredibly smart, it's incredibly effective. And so if you're spending money on ads, Google, Facebook, whatever it might be, LinkedIn, a human being would have to look at that information and try to distill down the learnings and then come back and say, this is what we should do more of and do less of.

Speaker 3 (09:51):
Well, guess what? AI is now doing all of that, right? An entire function has been replaced or at least enhanced dramatically by AI research. We have already mentioned perplexity. Could you imagine doing research right now? I know you do a ton of research for the books you've written and also for the podcast. Could you imagine not using a tool like Perplexity for research? Could you imagine going back to Google and typing in like what's the social media marketing trends of the week? I mean, that's as insane. And so if I'm someone who's doing let's say a market snapshot of my area, I would again have to rely on an ulto research or my MLS, but now I can go, oh, lemme go look at the top 50 articles written about the market in my area from every single company who publishes every single week and condense that down into three big learnings.

Speaker 3 (10:42):
But then I can shoot content about, so research is getting eaten. Opus clip is a great example on the creator side, you and I can shoot a video like this and then you could throw it into an AI and it'll find what are the most viral things that I'm saying or you're saying, and cut those into short form clips that we can then distribute across social media. That was someone's job 12 months ago. And so when I say AI is eating marketing, what I'm saying is every single part of marketing is being augmented or replaced because of ai. And guess what, Ethan? It's only going to get more. It's only going to happen faster. It's only going to have a wider reach. Challenge we have is how do we ensure that we are still worshiping at the altar of quality, not just the altar of automation.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
Man, I am wrestling with myself and my own workflows at that intersection all the time,

Speaker 3 (11:43):
And I mean to be able to quickly and efficiently and through automation produce mediocre work is going to be the big trap everyone falls into. And so I am thinking deeply about this idea of where in AI they refer to as the human in the loop, and I see a lot of people in marketing resistance, they make in marketing friends of mine, people who are great marketers, they feel like they can't embrace AI because it's going to destroy their creativity. The human, hey, the authentic piece. Well, that to me is just such a flawed argument because if you can, I use AI to edit almost every email I send. If sometimes I'll write an email Ethan and I'll do 20% of it, AI does the next 70% and I do the next 10%. Now, if I was so dogmatic about it has to be my voice and my creativity and it has to have my DNA on this thing, otherwise it's not authentic, then I would produce a fraction of the output that I produce and frankly at a much lower quality. So I think this idea of the human in the loop is you have to personally decide where are you most useful in this process? Is it being the editor? Is it being the creator? Is it being the chief architect who orchestrates these things? But you are going to be involved in this process. Just decide where that makes the most sense for your business.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
If you are listening to this because it's playing on YouTube on your second screen underneath something else, there's a back button on YouTube, you should maybe give another go to that pass because it's dense. You offered so many important ideas in there. I want you to go into a little bit deeper kind of where you landed there toward the end, which is in light of all these things that are available to people with an eye to quality, but also with an honest eye to where does my touch really matter? Something I've been thinking a lot about and it really, again, it's that intersection that you led me to observe as well, which is quality versus efficiency. Both of those matter. And so when you think about the client experience today and an excellent client experience, whether buyer or seller, it doesn't matter. And then we think about the agent who is creating and delivering that.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
They're using AI to be more efficient about aspects of it. What's the right role of AI in automation? I know there's no exact right answers to this, but where do you see the right role of AI in automation and what are a couple of things that an agent should still be doing essentially by hand where the human touch super matters and probably will continue to matter or maybe even matter more in the years to come draw a line that's kind of on that human side in addition to challenging people who say, I can't take my hands off that. Go to the other side, which is don't take your hands off that maybe.

Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah, so to answer the great question, answer the first part of the question, we are now fully entering into a transition of AI that everyone should be aware of. If you define the sort of first category of ai, pre-chat DBT, it was just straight machine learning. Very, very minimal consumer facing implications, primarily used by big companies to analyze their data, to extract insight, to gain a little bit of alpha. That was phase one. Phase two is chat, TBT comes along and on the back of the Google paper, which changed everything, which is all you need is attention. And we entered into the generative AI world where now audio, video, written, text research, AI could do a lot of that for you, if not all of it for you, and it just became this incredible force or accelerant for your business. Now we've entered into a world where, and we are at the very beginning of this and it may feel like the world's passing by, but we are at the very beginning of this.

Speaker 3 (15:45):
We are entering into the agentic AI world where AI is going to be able to handle really complex workflows without you having to give it more than a simple prompt to be able to execute. Lemme give you an example of this. Let's say I wanted to in the past, sync my follow-up boss contacts to my MailChimp contacts with a specific tag and when they entered MailChimp, and if they open up an email, I want to add that to let's say a specific tag back to follow boss as part of a smart list that I can then use to call my prospects. And oh, by the way, I want to be able to analyze that data and kick out a report using maybe Google Sheets or Google Data Studio to show me how well I'm doing following up with these leads. Okay, you could probably do everything I just said using a combination of first party integrations with fob, maybe using Zapier, maybe using some off the shelf connector tools.

Speaker 3 (16:43):
But you would have to decide at every stage what's going to happen, okay, this needs to happen. And when this happens, and this is basic, if then logic and that has been by and large, automation as a category has been held up by very primitive if then logic. And so what appears to be relatively sophisticated, it's some poor person admin on your team having to set up all these rules-based engines for that. Well, guess what? Because of agenda ai, you can say, you know what, Ethan, I would love if the contacts in my follow-up boss database that have this specific tag get sent to each individual agent with a Slack message with a script on what to do, just nudge 'em, just text them. Okay, cool. AI will then develop a plan how to do that. You can review the plan, you can then approve the plan and then boom, it goes and does all of that logic for you.

Speaker 3 (17:47):
Someone tags an FU, B, it then sends a Slack notification, it then links you over with a script and then it gets sent out automatically with your approval or just with your oversight as an example. You can do that with AI right now and you're seeing this not just with tools like Zapier, which is going through a transformation, really incredible. You're seeing this on the customer service side, technical customer service, Intercom, Intercom. When chat TBT came out, Intercom took Intercom is a big company doing a couple hundred million dollars a year in revenue. They tore up their entire roadmap and they pivoted entirely to ai. They introduced a product called fin. Fin is a customer service tool end to end that will actually resolve your customer's issues 24 7 better than any single person on your team. Phone, text, email, fin handles it on the back of chat, GBT or large language models.

Speaker 3 (18:42):
That's an oversimplification, but you get the idea idea. Well, Finn, now last time I saw it is doing, we're going to do over a hundred million dollars revenue. It's a rapidly fast growing startup within a big company and I think it's resolving 70% of all customer support tickets without a human being being involved. And that number was like 30% 12 months ago, 50%, six months ago. It's probably going to be at 95% within 12 months. Talk about the customer experience side. Lemme give you an example of this, Ethan, if we were sort of pull the thread on this, the average agent probably answers 50 to a hundred questions from their buyers and sellers, but you know what a buyer and seller has to do? They have to call you and hope that you're not an appointment, they have to email you and wait for a reply.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
They have to text you and hope that you're going to have a chance to get to embody back at the end of the day. Well all the information that's in your brain, that information you can download into a tool like Finn, and it can be your AI assistant that provides a better experience for your customers than you can. So hey Ethan, I know you're going to have questions that I know getting back to you is really important. You can of course call, text or email me at any point, but also you're going to have some probably general questions that come up that AI is going to just be able to answer. And the good news is I've trained this ai, I've given it all my information, I've given it my help docs, I've given my contracts, I've given it access to the real estate law in our area and Finn will just answer questions for you.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
Now, the beauty of this and the word that everyone should be thinking about here, Ethan, as I take 12 minutes to answer your 32nd question here is this. Every time you hear the word efficiency, I want you to think of the word profit. So when I say efficiency, you say profit, I say efficiency, you say profit. If you use AI to become more efficient, you will make more money. You can then either reinvest that money into your business and thus grow your market share and thus generate more profit. Or you can just keep the money and buy jet ski. I don't care. But when I say efficiency, it's profit. And right now Ethan, people are running really inefficient real estate businesses and the really smart agents who listen to this podcast are going to recognize they can fix that with ai.

Speaker 1 (20:48):
When people talk about vibe, we don't need to go down this road, we don't have time for it. But when people talk about vibe, if you've heard the term vibe coding or vibe marketing, it's the spirit of what Jimmy just shared, which is I don't need to draw this giant map of all the things that are going to happen on my whiteboard

Speaker 4 (21:05):
Or

Speaker 1 (21:06):
In a Figma board or something else, a digital whiteboard. I just talk it or I type it blank slate into a tool perhaps Zapier's agent tool and it writes all the codes and demands all the connections and all these things for us, that's the spirit of it. So you get an idea, you talk it out and the thing will make it or largely make it without you having to know how to do any of that stuff. Okay, one more thing before ways people can connect with you and the work that you're doing these days with listing leads and maybe other projects, what are three or four things that an agent should be looking at? Like a couple of active things, they're like, oh my gosh, Jimmy's got me all lit up. I hear efficiency and I want profit. What are three or four things that they could do?

Speaker 3 (21:55):
Yeah, I think, well, let's talk about a real basic one, which is email, right? We are slaves, email inbox, fixer ai. We'll drop a note in the chat for this

Speaker 3 (22:06):
Fixer, F-Y-X-E-R. They will connect to your email, they will analyze your email, they'll identify what you should respond to, what you should be aware of and what you should ignore. And they'll do automatically that app's like 10 bucks a month. If you're spending six hours a week in your inbox and this can cut that down to two hours a week, is four hours worth $2 of your time? The answer, of course is objectively, a hundred percent yes. So that's one thing I would look as all the repeatable tasks that I have to do. I am looking to spend a little bit of time to streamline those tasks. The second thing I'm going to be doing here when it comes to using AI and for my business in particular is I am looking to spend more of my time prospecting for my next customer. Ethan, we are living through a world right now where agents are tired, they're overwhelmed, they are feeling disgruntled, they are feeling that this market has beaten them down, and the solution to that is very simple.

Speaker 3 (23:09):
Go out there and get more customers. Customers solve everything. They're going to be 4, 2, 4 0.2 million houses sell this year. Why not you? And right now we're seeing this big delta between the haves and haves nots of real estate and the one thing I've learned from these individuals is they spend so much more of their time prospecting. So what I might do is I might download my FUB and look at all of my converted leads and look at the communication history that I have had with that individual and identify any patterns that maybe have worked versus leads didn't convert, and then apply that as my SOP going forward. How many people do you know Ethan have established an SOP six years ago and have never changed it? And so this is a good opportunity now to sort of revisit the things you're doing, to find some insight in the data to be able to understand what you can be doing better.

Speaker 3 (24:03):
Is it five touches in the first 12 days or is it five over the next 30 days? What actually matters? What emails are you sending? They're actually getting responses and getting results. These are things that AI can do to help analyze your business. But the third thing I'd say this is going to be a little bit of a different take is while all of this is happening, do not forget the main thing you need to do is not go broke. I love efficiency, I love ai, I love experimenting these tools, but I am making it my mission to make sure I'm taking great care of my clients and getting referrals and repeat business. I'm making my mission to make sure that I'm either Ethan, there are only two ways to grow your real estate business. You can optimize an existing lead pillar or you can add a new one.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
I am making sure that I'm either optimizing existing lead pillar or I'm adding a new one. I am becoming so focused on revenue so that I can have the resources to invest in some of these longer term plays that will help me differentiate my business over the next three to five years. That's my mindset. So it's like gain some efficiency, reevaluate some of your SOPs, and then also the old quote from the guy who ran a OL Keep the main thing, the main thing, go out there, talk to a lot of people, help a lot of customers, keep growing your business,

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Love it. If someone wants to follow up on this, they want to stay in touch with what you're learning and what you're sharing, where should they go?

Speaker 3 (25:26):
Best place Instagram. I'm on Instagram, you'll see me sharing stories, sharing scripts, sharing ideas. I am on a mission to become the most useful person to follow on real estate. So if you want to say ke to me, definitely on Instagram just at Jimmy Mackin.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
Awesome. I appreciate you so much, Jimmy. I'm so glad we connected through Tech 10, continued success to you and have a great afternoon.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Thank you Ethan.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
Jimmy mentioned several specific tools and Jason's about to give you many more. They're all linked up right down below in the description no matter where you're watching and listening, so be sure to check those out and give Jimmy a follow. Next up, Jason Pantana, share some of what he's teaching in the AI Marketing Academy, including a three-step process to start intelligently automating your operations and specific ways to use AI for more segmented and personalized marketing. Jason, when I think AI in real estate, you're one of the first people who comes to mind. It's largely due to all of your work with the AI Marketing Academy. I'm psyched to have you here for a TechT conversation. Welcome to Real Estate Team os

Speaker 5 (26:30):
I am so excited to be on this show and I just have so much respect for the work you do. So thank you for thinking of me to be here to talk to you and your amazing audience.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
Awesome, absolute privilege. So we'll start with three rapid fire questions, then we'll move into so much of what you've learned and taught. I love the learning and teaching dynamic. I'm sure you're learning from some of your academy people and coaching clients as well as your own pursuit for your own purposes and kind of teaching it back and forth. So there's a really powerful dynamic there. So I want to unlock some of what you learned, but I want to start with on a scale of one to 10, how excited or passionate or interested are you in New Tech in general?

Speaker 5 (27:09):
I don't want to say I'm a 10 because I think there are people who are more excited about tech than I am, so I'd say I'm like an eight or a nine only because I don't want to be like the, oh, I'm a 10

Speaker 1 (27:18):
And

Speaker 5 (27:18):
Have no real subjective basis for what you or objective basis for what you're imagining. But I am pretty darn excited about it.

Speaker 1 (27:25):
Has it always been that way when you were, I don't know, a teenager, were you psyched about the new stuff or did it emerge as you became a professional or

Speaker 5 (27:34):
Yeah, I was. So I remember playing with when I first found Photoshop back as a 14, 15-year-old and goofing off and figuring things out, that was exciting for me. The truth is I was a musician, so most of my excitement got into wiring amps and pedal boards and gear along those lines, audio equipment that really excited me. And then over time I moved more into the world of video and that kind of hardware and then software and marketing and it's all just, I just like putting things together and making them work. It's fun

Speaker 1 (28:04):
And music is a great foundation for that. It's like so many benefits to it, the hardware side. Now of course, software has been in that space forever, right? Question number two, what is one of the most underused pieces of tech or one of the most underused tools in real estate businesses right now?

Speaker 5 (28:22):
Email. Email marketing is underused in real estate business right now, or it's misused. It's one giant email to my 20,000 leads and contacts in my database thinking that their situation is identical from the next 19,999 people and a failure to personalize segment and send meaningful content. We live in a world inundated by noise, and the way to cut through the noise is by sending strategic messaging at the right time to the right audience. And the way you do that is through understanding who's in your database and who your audience is, and I think you'll leverage the tools. I've been using this metaphor quite often about AI and what is ai, and the example is I actually got this metaphor from my brother, so credit goes to my older brother,

Speaker 5 (29:05):
He's a software developer, AI entrepreneur, and all those things, and he compared it to an autonomous driving vehicle. When you think about ai, the metaphor of an autonomous driving vehicle holds true in the sense that it's still a vehicle, it has tires, it has an axle, it drives and moves, it's still a car. What's changed is how it's being operated. And so AI is coming in to help operationalize that. When I think about the tools of the day, email is not new, it's still a car if you follow the analogy. It's just the ability to personalize segment and send meaningful communications to different groups within your database. That's where the opportunity to ahead and nurture and qualify leads is greater than it's ever been right now.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, AI is powering a lot of that, especially with regard to app pending useful information to a client record so that we can surface them at the right time and say something super relevant to them. So great email is what's underused email is used just not well and consistently. Third one is, what would your 2015 self say about the tech that you're using in 2025 here?

Speaker 5 (30:11):
What a great question, Ethan. What a great question. Use it more is what my 2015 self would say. Think back to how long things took or how difficult it was to find information and think about innovations that were occurring in that moment in time and how you regret not taking greater action to leverage those in that moment and then multiply that by a hundred because that's the level of opportunity right now, and so do it more. Do it faster, do it better, lean in harder. That's what I would tell myself right now.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
I love it. I'm glad you enjoyed that question. One of the reasons I decided to include it was I looked into what was going on in 2015. That was really the flip from desktop to mobile where mobile use of mobile access to the internet became dominant. Alexa and Apple Watch were both brand new Pokemon Go and TikTok hadn't even been released. Both of them were still a year away. Netflix, I know that's not really tech, but Netflix was just starting to get into their own produced content with House of Cards as the example. So you hear some of that and you're like, oh, that doesn't seem that long ago. And some of 'em were like, wow, that feels like forever ago or now. It feels like it's always been that way.

Speaker 5 (31:24):
Well, and I would say to that point, think about the fact that it feels like forever ago, we can't imagine a world where Netflix wasn't producing its own content where we didn't have some of the access and devices we have, and then analyze how quickly did this become the norm to us, and how much more quickly will today become the norm that in five years from now, we're going to look back and think, remember when we didn't have this or that? It's going to be an unfamiliar memory of the past, all the more reason to lean in.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Yeah. Okay. I would love for you to speak to whether it's a team leader or brokerage owner, operations leader, like an ops manager, COO, director of ops, whatever, or an agent who is not really up to speed on AI in general, and you're trying to connect with them and just set the tone at a high level, how should they be thinking about ai?

Speaker 5 (32:12):
Yeah, specifically in the operations side, I would tell you that if you're not paying attention to the trends and evolution of Ag Agentic ai, you are missing the single greatest operational enhancement advantage ever known to technology. And its right under your nose right now, a agentic ai, or you might've heard it called AI agents. It doesn't mean real estate agents. It means AI able to perform complex autonomous tasks that involve multiple steps in a sequence. And so if you're an operator, you're like, that's my entire job. My job is executing, creating and executing SOPs. And I'm like, yeah, that's right. And so I tend to focus on the marketing operations of a business. And so I think operations is a relatively broad subject and it involves a lot of different types of procedures, but even from a marketing standpoint, this is something I've noticed, Ethan, I talked to a lot of, I can think of a handful of Super Tech super in the know types of operators for some of the teams we coach and work with.

Speaker 5 (33:09):
And they're leveraging tools like N Innate N and Make and Zapier, and they're creating automation sequences for all their operations. However, what I would suggest is that a lot of them don't think like marketers, and so they're overlooking the absolute marketing opportunity. For example, you've got this beautiful database and it's being segmented and categorized based upon the actions people are taking and the communications and how they're replying. And the AI has the ability to your point, Ethan, to learn and then create different groupings within that database. You can create automations that are like, Hey, when this person does this, I want you to sync them over to this custom audience in meta. So they get this deployment of ads all the time, and then I want these emails to start firing off and this sequence of events first this, then this, then this, and then deploy these videos across these social channels or in this, your ability to just wave a magic wand and orchestrate serious operations is incredible.

Speaker 5 (34:02):
But what I want to say that's specifically different tools like NAN Zapier make. They've been around for a while. We know the game of automation. Automation was a buzzword, what, seven, eight years ago, something like that. And people were going crazy about it. But what's new is ag agentic is replacing it is the autonomous driving vehicle, so to speak of automation because there's this gray space in automation where it requires decision making. There needs to be an analysis that says, should I go left or right? Should I go straight? Should I stop? Should I go backwards? Should I detour and go a different direction in the workflow? And that typically has required somebody to do it. Just for example, there's a new feature is a beta feature inside of Zapier called Agents where if anybody who's listening or watching on this episode has ever created an automation workflow for any kind of a zap, and I'm using that term kind of ubiquitously, I'm under the assumption most people have some exposure to a Zap or something like that where, hey, when this file gets added to this Google Drive, send this email to these people, some kind of an automation.

Speaker 5 (35:05):
Well, those automations have always required custom configuration, but now they've launched this agent where it's just a blank canvas, just a text. It's like a Microsoft Word document and you just say, I want this to happen when this happens and then do this, but if that happens, don't do that. Do this. And instead of actually custom configuring your workflow, you just type it like it's a genie and then it will automatically infer, well, these are the app connections we need and these are the functions to perform with those respective app connections. And this is the order of events. And what's so amazing is Zapier actually built this platform. It's on top of OpenAI, which is Chad Chip T, and so you can say things inside of the prompt that don't require any kind of configuration. You can say like, Hey, I want you to scan my inbox for any emails that look like they came from my customers about these topics or those topics. There is no custom node, there's no app that's doing that. It is the AI itself. I call that the gray space. It's occupying the role that would've otherwise required an assistant or a person to be the one scrutinizing. So I would say to the operator, and I'm sorry if I got too advanced too quick. That's

Speaker 1 (36:13):
Good. Well, I'll pull you back a little bit. If any of the types of folks I mentioned are thinking about some of the things that they either A, are doing regularly

Speaker 1 (36:24):
And or B would like to do, but they just don't really have the time maybe or the inclination to do it, I have a tool available to me that allows me to do exactly what you just described, which is open doc. Essentially it's like a big open text box that you can put thousands of characters into. I'm typing all the things that I want to have happen related to when I get an episode edited and I have a finished transcript. I want all these things to happen, so I just type it all out and it turned it into a five step chain and I just upload the transcript of my final edit of an episode. It's going to happen with this and it produces all this stuff for me. Now, it's not as sophisticated as what you're talking about, including go over here and get that, go over there and do that, but break that down again, just in a really simple way. If there's something you're doing very often, you can treat it this way or if there's something you would like to do, but you just don't really have time or you don't really have the inclination to do it, you could actually just type this up. Great agent will make itself, I think is a big part of what you shared.

Speaker 5 (37:33):
So I think that's what I'm trying to pull the curtain back on is that it just got easier to do these types of processes. So I think if it were me coaching you on this, I would say first take inventory of all your checklists, all your SOPs, all your operations. There's an old quote, I can't remember who to attribute it to, said anything that can be automated will be automated. And I would look and say, what are we doing that is manual that needs to be potentially automated here? And with ai, specifically agen ai, where the AI can start getting into the execution of the tasks and deciding should I or should I shouldn't. I think that's that. I would just look at what are we doing now that could be automated? That's the first step. The second step is what are things I've dreamed about doing but don't have the bandwidth to pull it off that could potentially be automated. And then the third step is the tool I would probably get started with is that Zapier agents, it's really easy to use. I mean it's just the magic box you type in. And there are other tools that are cropping up like that. I mean you could use, depending upon your level of sophistication, I'm not sure which tool you might be using Ethan, but it's like there are lots of these tools out there where

Speaker 1 (38:39):
It's an enterprise AI thing. It's essentially addressing layer over top of chat GPT, it's called Glean, but an enterprise AI solution that is powered by chat GPT, same as the describing

Speaker 5 (38:54):
It's wrapper

Speaker 5 (38:56):
For the average person. I'm going to assume then the easiest point of access is probably Zapier's agent function. And so you just log into your Zapier account, Z-A-P-I-E r.com, and then on the left hand sidebar, click agents and then just screw around for a little bit, see what you can come up with. And I would go back to, yes, Ethan, I was describing very complex multifaceted workflows. To me though, the real beauty is not how complex of a process can I create, it's how many processes can I automate? I'm thinking about one of our members inside of AI Marketing Academy, his name is Derek Caldwell, runs an awesome business team out of the Cincinnati ish area and he has workflows for everything. And so the complexity of his business is not this one workflow that does all these things for me, like it's some kind of a machine that shaves me and makes me toast in the morning all the same. One of those big giant contraptions, that's not what it's,

Speaker 5 (39:55):
The beauty is in the time he's taken to automate all the systems and processes, it may be a one two punch cut, Hey, when this happens, do that. And then he goes to the next SOP and when that happens, do this and then layered together. He now has this army of AI that's working in the background enabling his team and his business to scale and grow and do way more and do it for way less money. And so to me, if I'm talking to an operator, I'm telling you, you got to look and study and understand a agentic ai. I was on a podcast yesterday, Jimmy Mackin was chatting and he used this term that we're moving more into AI is not just this, I copy and paste the output from Chad Chip T, but I'm starting to co-work with it.

Speaker 4 (40:38):
I'm

Speaker 5 (40:38):
Using it as a collaborator more and more. And so that's the world we're pushing into as to where we all have to push into.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, I love it. And that's certainly the theme of this conversation so far. I would love to go to the flip side of it a little bit, which is for the people who are way out ahead and maybe have gone too far with what they've automated in their business and also to the people on the far other end that are like, I'm not going to do any of that stuff. It's all about me and my relationship with my people. There's a happy medium here where it's the human with the tech. At a high level, how do you think about that? What aspects of an agent, let's focus on an agent now, an agent day to day, what aspects should they take care to be personal, intimate, human, et cetera, and what should definitely get offloaded in your opinion?

Speaker 5 (41:28):
That's a really great distinction, a good line to kind of think on. And I would be the first to agree that real estate is a relationship business. However, I would ask the question, how many of the tasks you're performing in your clerical time of the day are relational? And the answer is zero. None of them. I mean you making sure the paper gets put in the right folder so to speak, has no impact on your relationship with the client. But if it doesn't happen properly, it has a devastating impact because something went kaboom and it didn't close or there was an error. I don't think I need to peel that much further. I think that's pretty self-evident

Speaker 5 (42:02):
In terms of where I'd be thinking about it. I would tell you, I had a call this morning with a coaching client. I always ask in a coaching session, what's your win? And he said, got another listing. And we were just chatting about it and I was like, how'd you get the listing? He said, they told me I answered my phone. And I was laughing because I hear that statement more frequently than you would think if you just pick up the phone. So you asked the question, what should an agent be spending their time doing? You should answer the phone when it rings. You should be out in the field showing property to your clients. You should be calling and texting and checking in, and the business should be running like it's Amazon in the background. That's the way I look at it. And so I would certainly not suggest you need to necessarily automate your relationships. You need to free yourself up from the dogma of your business so that you can be more relational in the way you talk to your clients. And that is where I see AI streamlining things. I would also tell you an organized business is a talkable difference. If you are just this never answering the phone hot mess, running around craziness all the time, I'll get to it when I get to it. How is that facilitating or fostering a better relationship with your client? Because it isn't,

Speaker 5 (43:17):
And I don't think that's the audience I'm really addressing right now, but I think we know that is not that atypical in any kind of a sales based industry to see folks who are operating that way and that's not operating at all. That's survival. And I believe we're in a world right now where domination is possible, and so you should look at how do I get my little well oiled machine to serve my clients really, really well, where there's never any guessing, never any wondering, never any waiting. It's happening on autopilot as much as can be done so that I can be free to just be their agent, be their advisor, check in on them and so forth.

Speaker 1 (43:51):
That distinction you made with survival versus I'm surviving versus I'm actually operating a business. You're just not showing up as your best self if you're showing up to an inbound call or an outbound call or an appointment or anything else. If you're in survival mode, you feel like a superhero sometimes when you are able to survive, you're like, I can't believe I got through that day or that week. But ultimately it doesn't serve anyone best. To your point, give me a couple quick hits or give the audience a couple quick hits. Like what are a couple use cases in general or tools in particular that you're seeing a wide variety of your coaching clients and students really enjoying? What are a couple low hanging things that people really seem to be getting value out of?

Speaker 5 (44:38):
So inside of AI Marketing Academy, it's a training membership where we're producing, we have rookie level materials and rockstar level materials. Every month we're putting out new AI based strategies for marketing. And so if you're the kind of person who's looking to keep pushing the envelope, that's what we do. We also include some sort of baked into your membership when you sign up. We have a starter course called Essentials, and it's designed for people who are new to AI to just be able to quickly indoctrinate to what it means, what it is, and what it can do. So you understand the terminology and the technology. And in that we explain that AI is fundamentally, it's an input output system. Who's the input? Well, you are, it's your ideas. You're making an instruction a prompt, whatever words you want to use for it, and it produces an output.

Speaker 5 (45:22):
The output, if you look across top AI tools, the outputs almost always come in the size, shape and form of words, images, sounds, and videos. And if I think about what are the raw materials of modern marketing, I can look at emails, I can look at postcards, I can look at videos, social media ads. They are a combination of words, images, sounds, and videos. So if I can influence the raw materials, I can almost like a chef with their ingredients, I can cook anything I want so to speak. And so we create that baseline understanding of it. And so I would first give yourself the freedom to start compartmentalizing, okay, these are the tools I use for writing copy. These are the tools I use for creating content. These are the tools I use for editing videos. Where are you in need of saving time or scaling or sharpening the acts from a marketing standpoint.

Speaker 5 (46:09):
So as far as quick hits go, we spend a lot of time in the core language models. We talk a lot about chat, GPT and Claude. How do you personalize it so it becomes an extension of you and not just out of the box? We get a lot into really Marketing Academy. AI Marketing Academy is focused on outputs, so we talk a lot about send these emails, here's how Claude creates them. Create this landing page sequence. Here's how Claude or chatt helps you do it. Some of the other tools we're using from a video standpoint, I would tell you if you're not using tools like Cap Cut or DES script or captions, you should look at those tools, but some of the helpers we talk a lot about is eye contact correction. I posted a video yesterday. I had AI help me write the script. I read a teleprompter and then after the fact I pushed one button. AI moves my eyes, so I look like I'm looking at the camera and not reading a screen and just the ability to more turnkey the output of videos and keep up with the pace and the demands of these greedy algorithms. It helps a lot.

Speaker 5 (47:09):
Other tools, I'm seeing massive innovation happening on the cloning side of things. Voice cloning, video cloning. We're teaching our students inside of AI Marketing Academy. There's a tool called 11 Labs. It's the number 11 spelled out where you can create a voice clone of yourself. And I mean, it's almost uncanny how close it sounds to you. How can you grab your MLS data drag and drop that MLS data, like maybe you're a geographic farmer or you want to dominate the condos on the beachfront, whatever it is, you grab all that data into a spreadsheet. Most MLSs let you take it, and then I teach you how to put it into a tool like chat chip PT. It analyzes the data and then it fashions a podcast script based upon it that I then copy and paste into 11 labs and then boom, I have a podcast that you can send to your database that's all about the segment.

Speaker 5 (47:57):
It's about this building or this neighborhood or that area. And so your ability to create content that is, we talked about segmenting and tailoring to people's interest. It's not one podcast, it's a dozen podcasts. It's not one YouTube channel, it's a dozen YouTube channels. Your ability to divide and conquer and really personalize content right now to the audience that is hungry for it and then create that authority with them is huge. Right now, I don't know if that was too cryptic, but some of the tools I named were I'd be paying attention to voice cloning, video cloning. That's 11 Labs in Hagen. I would certainly be getting yourself familiar with how do you get the most utility out of a tool like Chat Chippie or Claude. And we spent a lot of our time dealing with those types of tools in the academy.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
Give me 20 seconds on chat. GPT versus Claude. When? When the other,

Speaker 5 (48:48):
Claude, when I'm using Code, so if I wanted to write code for an HTML newsletter, I want to write code for a landing page, I want to do some kind of a task that requires sophisticated analysis. It's better at working with Data Chat, GPTI find to be a better writer and more creative. So if it's a copywriting task, I'm using Chad GPT.

Speaker 1 (49:05):
Cool. And the name of the tool to correct your eyes?

Speaker 5 (49:09):
There are a few that do it. I use the app called Captions.

Speaker 4 (49:13):
There's

Speaker 5 (49:13):
A free version or a 10 bucks a month version. It's an app. Some use DS script. Cap Cut now has the feature as well. I still use captions and then some are using a tool called Big View, B-I-G-V-U.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Cool. All of those are linked up right down below. I'll be diligent about that. And frankly, AI does a pretty good job of rounding up those URLs for me simply by mention. Jason, I appreciate you so much. If someone wants to learn more about you and the work that you're doing or about the academy, where would you send folks

Speaker 5 (49:41):
If they want to head over to AI Marketing academy.ai, they're welcome to go check it out. If it's okay, I will share. We are running a promo right now. We're offering half off membership. It's half off for life. So if they click join now and they get to the checkout screen, if they put the code AI M 50 off, that's aim as an AI marketing Aim 50 off. They're going to get half off their membership forever, whether they do monthly or annual, as long as they're a member, it's half off forever.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
Awesome. Sweet deal. Thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate you and continued success to you and all the folks that you're working with.

Speaker 5 (50:12):
Ethan, likewise. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (50:15):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up@realestateteamos.com.