The future of real estate may not belong to the fastest talker or the flashiest marketer — but to the agent who knows how to talk to a machine.
Colorado eXp Realty agent Adam Gillespie has built a business on that belief, training agents in artificial intelligence (AI) ethics and efficiency.
Gillespie, founder of consulting firm Apex Elite AI and an instructor in the eXp University AI Accelerator Series, is pushing agents to transform how they work.
In a conversation with HousingWire, Gillespie and fellow industry experts urged peers to embrace AI as the tech moves beyond its novelty status or risk being left in the dust.
‘We have to market ourselves’
Gillespie began his real estate career in 2017 and soon discovered how his background as a musician and marketer fit the brokerage world.
“We used to use automations and AI all the way back in 2004 for my band,” he said. “We would program bots inside of MySpace that would automatically post my band’s music on famous people’s pages in the comment section. I realized quickly that when I got into real estate, it was very similar to being in a band — because what do we have to do? We have to market ourselves.
“Most of us are great agents, but we’re poor marketers, we’re poor accountants and we’re poor administrative assistants. And this is where I think that AI is not going to take our jobs as agents — because we’re still a very relationship-driven and highly subjective business, especially when it comes to pricing out homes.”
When ChatGPT launched for broad public use in November 2022, Gillespie knew the time had come.
He completed multiple certifications in machine learning, large-language models and prompt engineering.
“I brought all of that back into my real estate business and started implementing it everywhere I possibly could to take away some of that heavy lifting on the admin side,” he said. “Now I’m heavily dependent on the AI to be my partner inside my business.”
From zoning manuals to personality profiling
Gillespie emphasized that AI use isn’t just about glitzy marketing — it can solve real transactional obstacles.
He described a case where a property’s zoning had shifted, putting the deal at risk.
“I used AI to scrape the zoning manuals for the county that I was in,” he said. “Then, I wrote a nice little email with my AI, sent it off to the appraiser, and they were like, ‘Oh, you’re right,’ turned around and appraised the deal. We got her to the closing table.”
He also uses AI to improve negotiation strategy and relationships through personality profiling.
“My favorite thing is scraping personality profile statistics for the agents that I’m working with and then utilizing the AI to adjust my negotiation strategies based on their DISC profile,” he said. “I started creating a lot more partnerships with other agents and getting way more stuff done for my clients. It kind of got rid of that competitive stigma inside of real estate.”
Driving adoption at team and broker levels
Real estate coach Darryl Davis stressed the role of broker-owners and team leaders in driving AI uptake.
“I think it’s still fairly new for agents, in trying to find how to use it,” he said. “The majority of the agents that are using it, they’re using it for property descriptions. There’s so much more that AI can do that the agents nationwide haven’t really started to tap into yet.”
“Whenever there’s a quick adoption to something, it doesn’t stick well. What gradually works its way into society, those are the things that stay. As adoption grows by example, you’ll see exponential adoption. One agent in an office starts using it, then maybe two, and before you know it, the whole office is using it.”
Setting measurable goals while also striking a balance of adoption promoted by leaders and letting word of mouth play out naturally is paramount, Davis said.
“If a broker or manager wants the office to adopt it, then they need to keep pushing until they get 80% adoption,” he said. “Once they get 55% adoption in their office, the other 25 will happen by itself.”
Davis has even created his own “Digital Darryl,” an AI clone of himself.
“We’re actually the only real estate coach that’s created an AI coach like this,” he said. “We uploaded all my audio programs, my books, my blog posts. It became a brain of me.” Agents can role-play workouts or ask for pep talks if they’re feeling a little down and out.”
Vendor vetting, governance, transparency
Sharon Love-Bates, director of emerging technology with the National Association of Realtors, said adoption must always be paired with ethical standards, regulatory alignment and vendor assessment.
She recommended several checkpoints.
“You want to make sure the [AI or app] company itself is reputable,” Love-Bates said. “How long has that company been in business? If somebody just started yesterday, I’m not sure if you want to trust them with your data. You really want to understand what privacy and guardrails they have in place for their solution.
“Can you implement your own governance and policies for your brokerage? Does it integrate well with your current technology stack, your CRM, your lead-management tools?”
On ethics and client trust, Love-Bates warned of upticks in AI hallucinations and other instances where information output shouldn’t be taken at face value.
“Although you’re using a tool, you as an agent or brokerage are ultimately responsible for the information and data you’re giving to that provider,” she said. “You have to make sure you’re not violating client privacy and that you have the proper rules and governance set up.”
She noted that AI regulatory frameworks are still catching up, making internal policies more vital than ever.
“AI tools are wonderful and can definitely improve efficiency, but you have to use common sense — validate the information, protect client privacy and protect the firm,” Love-Bates said.
Agentic AI, AGI and human advantage
Gillespie, Davis and Love-Bates all see the next wave of technology as autonomous “agentic AI” systems — but they agree the human agent remains essential. Agentic AI systems automatically execute tasks and systems.
“We’re definitely going into the agentic era,” he said. “I think a lot of people are afraid of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, but I think we’re still a long ways away from that. The mid-2030s may bring AGI, but with the subjectivity of real estate, we’re quite a ways out from AI taking any of our jobs.”
Love-Bates said the next big leap on her radar is autonomous workflows.
“You’re going from copilot to autopilot. You can automate your marketing, determine the audience, publish on multiple channels, analyze results and improve over time,” she said. “But even then, you still have to be the human over the loop. You must review, approve, and validate what it’s doing.”
Davis echoed the idea that AI in its current state should be viewed as a partner, not a threat.
“What ChatGPT or any AI should be is a support tool, not a replacement tool,” he said. “ChatGPT is not going to show the property, it’s not going to do a listing appointment, it’s not going to coach buyers and sellers. Agents should harness it to strengthen their client relationships.
The experts also agreed that an exact future roadmap for AI in real estate or any industry is hard to nail down.
“I don’t know if I can even imagine what five years from now will be like,” Davis said. “Technology advances exponentially — one plus one is two, two plus two is four, four plus four is eight. This thing is like a boulder going down a hill, catching snow. Even in two years, it’ll be astronomical.”
