10 Dec AI and automating tasks

Some practical examples of how AI and Bots are helping agents become more dollar productive.

Topic – Top 5 Prop Tech developments of 2018

Mentor – Kylie Davis

• Not just robots
• We are leading the way
• Allow you stay focused on $ productive tasks

Marketing Monday – Getting quoted in the press.

Transcript:

Kevin:   And our special guest, as mentor this week, is Kylie Davis. Kylie is from RealContent.guru. There’s a link on all the pages on Uncut all this week. Good day, Kylie. How are you doing?

Kylie:   Good. Thanks, Kevin. How are you?

Kevin:   Yeah, fantastic. Getting really excited because we’re going to go to New York to launch the property TV platform. More about that later, but Kylie’s gonna be with us, and she’ll be one of our expert commentators as we stream back some content live from the Inman Conference in New York late in January. It’s going to be an exciting time, Kylie, I think.

Kylie:   Oh, I can’t wait. It’s my favourite conference and New York’s such a great town, even in the middle of winter.

Kevin:   Yeah, it is. Yeah, well, we’re giving you an opportunity, too, to come with us if you’d like, an invitation to come with us to New York. There’s a button on the home page on RE Uncut that’ll take you straight to a brochure that’ll tell you all about it. We’ll organise your flights, your accommodation and your entry into the conference and you can even watch us live stream and maybe even join in. You’ll certainly get to meet all the experts who we’ll be talking to. So click on that button and find out a little bit more about it.

Kevin:   Okay, down to business, Kylie is with me all week and we’re going to be talking about the top five PropTech developments or innovations, I guess, and we’re not necessarily going to be talking about products, just areas of innovation during 2018. Kylie, the first one you nominated was AI, artificial intelligence and automating tasks. Let’s talk about that.

Kylie:   I think when we think of AI, we tend to think of C-3PO or robots that follow us around and do everything from making coffee but what we’re seeing and some of the Australian companies are actually leading this way, is technology that is algorithms that are sitting in the background that are doing a lot of the repetitive tasks that agents do that they don’t necessarily think about.

Kylie:   So let me give you an example. RiTA, which is the bot that is run by Aire, with Ian Campbell and Sarah Bell. RiTA basically has lots of different applications but some of the best ones I’ve seen are, she can act like a 24/7 assistant on the front desk. If you think about what the girl or boy on the front desk does for real estate agents, when inquiries come in, they read those inquiries, they work out about a property, they’ll respond to them if they can, if there’s something they can answer or they’ll forward it on to the agent to make sure that the agent calls the person back.

Kylie:   But the trouble with that is that’s really a lumpy workflow. So those inquiries will come in huge amounts over the weekend when people are in property searching mode, they often come in silly hours of the morning when people are looking for property drinking wine and then of course, the poor old assistant comes in first thing on Monday morning and they’ve got to get through all the work that got to be done Monday morning and deal with all the weekend’s backlog.

Kylie:   Whereas what RiTA can do is simply respond immediately to people based on if they’ve asked a question on something that RiTA already knows because it’s the opening for inspection time or she can send messages or text messages to the agents to tell them that they need to call somebody urgently. But she’ll also take in new data and then add it to the CRM and do that in a really consistent way. So that when you come in on Monday morning, everything’s done and in fact, it’s being done constantly in the background to a much higher standard.

Kevin:   The other thing I love about this is that one, it gets done, you know it’s going to be done. It’s going to be done proficiently because you’ve set all the parameters for it but it also allows you to focus very much on the tasks that need you, that you can’t automate. And that is, talking to buyers and sellers and actually doing the negotiation. This really helps you stay focused on those doller productive activities.

Kylie:   Absolutely. And the thing is, too, that these quite boring tasks. The thing about big data is that human beings are terrible at big data, our brains can only process and deal with so much at a time and a lot of data work is actually really dreary. You’ve got to enter names and addresses or contact details into databases. That’s really boring work to make a person do but the bots are able to do that, they have no opinions about the boringness of it. They just process the work through and if it comes in at two in the morning-

Kevin:   They’ll do it.

Kylie:   They’ll do it, they’ll flick it through really quickly, so we’re seeing some really great developments in that space. Some other things like, we’re seeing platform automations as well. Things like ActivePipe have got more intelligence in them to start to recognise people’s behaviour, which means that you can start to automate your marketing to people.

Kylie:   We’re seeing increasingly, even today, someone sent me an email, a company called Cribs. It was just a piece of tech that they were using which is called x.ai, which lets you schedule meetings really quickly with people. And I thought they had an assistant who was trying to set a time for us but in fact it was just a little piece of AI that was saying, “Look, I can see in the calendar that John’s got these three spots available, which one would work for you?”

Kevin:   Goodness.

Kylie:   I downloaded it straight away.

Kevin:   It’s amazing. Just where it’s all headed.

Kylie:   Her name was Amy, I thought Amy was a real person.

Kevin:   I know an Amy, Amy Engelmann from Beepo. But anyway Kylie, thank you for today, we look forward to catching up tomorrow. We’re going to talk about another one of the innovations or PropTech developments with Kylie Davis and tomorrow we’ll talk about outsourcing and streamlining the process; taking one step further from what we’ve done today. Kylie, we’ll talk to you again tomorrow morning, thank you.

Kylie:   No worries, thanks Kevin, speak to you soon.