Balancing Human and Artificial Intelligence in Your Business – Sean Provencher

Sean Provencher: Okay, so if there's two things you take away from this conversation today, the first one is you should give it a try, and the second one is, don't trust what it gives you back until you double check.

Shaun Majumder: Dude, you don't talk to first dates like this, do you? Is this how you engage–

Sean: Hey, everybody. I am so excited about today's conversation because today we're talking about something that is everywhere right now. It's all around us. It blows through us. It is, of course, the force from Star– No? That's not what we're talking about? Oh, AI. Yes, AI. Sorry. AI, guys.

Today we are going to talk about the incredibly dynamic world of AI and understanding the tools that are coming on the market so fast. It's almost dizzying how fast these new tools are being made available to REALTORS®. We're going to un-dizzify today. That's what we're going to do. That's the correct term, I looked it up on ChatGPT, un-dizzify the whole experience when it comes to AI.

Today we're talking to Sean Provencher. He is a veteran REALTOR®, and he's the founder of Endgame Coaching, but he has been using AI on his day-to-day real estate business, and he's found a really good niche. He's self-described as not an expert in AI, but he's somebody who's he's been using it so much. He brings a lot of great knowledge, a lot of great tips to help you, the REALTOR®, understand these tools and how best to use them.

Shaun: I'm just jamming out. It seems like I'm listening to music on my headphones, but really I'm not. I'm actually getting ready to have a chat with Sean.

Sean: That's your pregame?

Shaun: This is my pregame. What is your pregame music? Do you have pregame music? What have you been listening to?

Sean: No, I don't. Honestly, usually I just chill out. My experience has been, I do best if I don't think at all right before stuff. If I had an exam to take, I'd study like crazy the day before. I might flip through my notes two hours in advance, but then after that, I'm just-

Shaun: Absorb.

Sean: Yes, just chill. Be like, "No, I got this." I found that if I try to cram right before something, it doesn't help.

Shaun: That is actually a great method, I think, for all things. As an actor, I have to memorize scripts. You stress so much about getting the lines right or getting whatever it is you're going to do right that it takes you out of being able just to be present and listen and be in the moment. I agree. This was not pregame music. I have no pregame music. If it was, it would be Enya and I would allow the soft soothing tones of Enya to wash over me to get me into my fire breathing into my belly to get us relaxed, because that's a human thing.

Sean, we're not here to talk about human things today, are we? We're here to talk about something so amazing and everybody needs to know about this technology that's happening that I don't think anybody's heard of yet. You and I are going to be the first people, I think, on planet Earth to talk about something called AI. Why don't you tell everybody who's watching and listening what this acronym-- Is that right? Is it acronym? No.

Sean: Yes, I'd say so.

Shaun: What those thingies are? What those two letters together, A.I., stand for? Because nobody's heard of it yet.

Sean: Today, Sean, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence.

Shaun: First, I've heard of it. It's amazing.

Sean: It's a brand new thing. This is a brand new thing. I think it might end up being a big deal.

Shaun: I think it's not.

Sean: Possible.

Shaun: I think it's passed. I don't think it's going to do much. I think it's a hot trend and it'll be gone in a week or two.

Sean: Go back to normal, folks. Nothing to see here.

Shaun: Back to normal. No, of course, AI, and we're talking real estate and we're talking AI, bringing those two together, like peanut butter and chocolate. You have a really good idea about AI.

Now, I don't think you claim to be an expert. However, you are very, very, very much involved. Why don't you tell us a little bit about, for example, how you got started with Endgame Coaching and how that's now evolved to where it is today?

Sean: I'll give you my quick rundown. Despite this youthful look, I've actually been in real estate close to two decades now, right around 17 years, something like that. I ran a big team in Toronto. I've traded consistently through this whole time. I moved to Victoria a few years ago, and when I moved out here, as opposed to jumping straight back into the saddle in a new location, I actually spent a few years doing coaching. It's something that I've done on and off throughout my career, just helping real estate agents try to figure out how to either get started or move from-- you're in momentum, now you want to start figuring out how to hire an assistant, build a team, that kind of stuff. I love helping people. In coaching, you get to have a longer life cycle with every client. You really get to see things grow and develop. I love doing it.

Shaun: Would agents say, "Hey, look, I'm just starting out, I need to know best practices? You and I are going to do one on one for a while? How would that happen? Would you just then work with them individually for a long time, or does it expand into their team? How would that coaching work?

Sean: Great question. Usually with new agents in coaching, I would do them in groups. They all need the same thing. We'd help them get a business plan set up. Honestly, a lot of the time, Sean, it's like, "Hey, what do I say? I'm going to see someone, they're talking about listing their house. I have no clue. What's the arc of a meeting going to look like? What are the things I need to cover? How do I price it?" I did that mostly in group stuff.

Then my favorite is helping people who are $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, $600,000 in commissions. They're doing really well, and they're overworked, and they're burning out, and they don't have any experience with, team building and leadership, and I'll help them write a business plan to step back from some of their responsibilities, bring in other people and help those people find opportunity, and they all grow together. That was my coaching business.

Shaun: Awesome. That was Endgame. Are you still doing that as an individual?

Sean: Less now. No, I've started trading again, I found that I got a little zoomed out. Now I'm trading in Victoria, BC, it's beautiful out here. Then, naturally, when I started trading, again, I started receiving all these agent-to-agent referrals, because, I've showed you how to do the business. I'm out here and helping people. If you have someone in need, you can trust that I do a good job.

I received a lot of agent-to-agent referrals, piqued my interest. I started focusing on agent-to-agent referrals. That's actually growing into this new project of mine called Boomerang Realty Network. Really neat. We've got a vetted group of agents across Canada, we're about to start growing into the United States. The whole idea is one agent, any move everywhere. No matter where someone is, no matter where they're going, we've got someone that's vetted, tried and trusted that you can be put in touch with.

For us, it solves two problems. I can send people anywhere, and trust that they're going to be in good hands. Every time I add another 10 people to the list, I have another 10 referral partners that I'm that to them. It's growing that pillar in my business as well. It's been really fun.

Shaun: Boomerang sounds like an amazing network. Can anybody just join? Is there a website I can go if I'm an agent and be like, "I'm joining Boomerang," pay a fee, boom, I'm in?

Sean: We're really picky, because the whole idea is that I don't want to bring people in who aren't going to do an outstanding job. We vet people. It's a yes and no. If someone wants to join, I'd love to talk to them. We do have a bit of a process that we go through, we have certain expectations, and we need someone to have at least a certain amount of momentum in the business and a certain amount of experience in the business, because we accept rock stars only.

Shaun: I love it. Oh, that's so good. What I'm hearing so far in our conversation, there's a whole lot of focus on human interaction like the importance when you started talking about, coaching, "What are you going to say? What are you literally going to say when you meet another person face to face?" The networking, how that is all human to human, referrals. Tell me more about the importance, by the way, of networking, on that level when it comes to real estate.

Sean: There's a bunch of reasons that I think REALTORS® naturally gravitate towards this. First of all, if you look at REALTORS®, we all enter this business because we have a bit of a servant's heart. We're entrepreneurial, we want to be around people, we want to be helping people. We have this natural craving for being part of something. Usually that centers around our community. That's why so many times you see REALTORS® who create these amazing charitable efforts and stuff like that, or lead groups in their local communities.

In real estate, I think people also really want to have the opportunity to connect with other people who know what the day-to-day of the business looks like. You've got real big highs and real dark lows from time to time when things are challenging. REALTORS®, and myself in particular, have really enjoyed having the opportunity to connect with one another. That's certainly been my experience in real estate. I think just finding ways to be part of something that's bigger than just yourself and the business is something that really keeps the energy that people need to push through this business.

Shaun: Yes, connection is really, really important, I think. I don't just mean connections in the business sense, just being a human, a part of a tribe is really, really important. It sounds like what you've created with Boomerang, like-minded, very motivated, high achievers all coming together to help each other out across North America.

Sean: Yes, absolutely. It's something you'll find that REALTORS® don't put a lot of energy into it early in the business because they're just so excited and they're just running around trying stuff. Then as they become more rooted in the business, that's why so many of them turn towards things like coaching or joining networks or flying out of town to go to masterminds and learn. It betters yourself, it lets you get better service to your clients, and it feeds something that I think we all need in this business, which is to have the feeling that you got people who have your back.

Shaun: Right. Now, this leads us to the idea of AI and artificial intelligence, which is not human to human at all. However, it is sweeping the nation, as you might say.

Sean: The world.

Shaun: The world. Now, tell me about when you started using AI tools in your business. Tell me about your experience with AI. Did you help create AI? What level are you at? Tell me about your story and your journey with using AI tools.

Sean: You alluded to this, and I'm just going to dig into it right out the gate, I love talking about AI. It's something that I jumped on the bandwagon with early. I'll just put a full disclaimer out there. If you are an expert on this stuff, you're better than me. I am not the person who's going to stand here and say, "I'm the one who knows the most about AI and real estate." The reason I love talking about it is because of that. I think there's a lot of people who are scared to try using it.

I am just a regular person who has found all kinds of opportunities to do better and do things faster, just through using it. My first forays into AI were just, like many people, I heard about this thing called ChatGPT. I opened it up, and I started using it for really basic stuff. "Can you write me a listing description for this property?" I've got a weird email I'm trying to phrase, or I'm putting together a pamphlet, and I would just type stuff in, and I became pretty impressed with it really quickly.

I've just, since then, tried to find all these things that I wasn't sure if it could do, and I just would ask it. "Hey, can you help me with this?" "What's this thing?" "Have you seen this?" It's incredible, some of the stuff that I've found it helpful with.

Shaun: Those are some of the first early days uses of AI in real estate?

Sean: Yes. I think, Sean, most people who explore it probably do try and start that way. If you haven't used it yet, because it's surprising, there's a lot of people who just haven't checked it out, they figure, "Oh, whatever, I'm not a very techie person," the whole point of it is that it's easy to use. If you're trying to figure out what to do first, just open one of the applications. ChatGPT is by far the namesake of AI. Just open it up and ask it stuff. Have a conversation with it. See what it's capable of. You'll be amazed how simple it is to get it to do what you want.

Shaun: I can't imagine any human who hasn't dabbled yet. Am I just like you where as soon as this technology came out, I was immediately intrigued and wanted to start tinkering with it? In the world of real estate, what are some other practical uses of AI for someone who's never used it yet?

Sean: We'll bang out the obvious ones first. Lots of agents are using it for listing descriptions. It's read probably a billion different listing descriptions now. It has an idea of what the flow of a listing description that someone, as a consumer, would be comfortable reading, right?

Shaun: Right.

Sean: Beyond that, I think if you're writing a marketing piece, you have something that you want to put out in front of a whole bunch of people, you're going to blast your database, you're going to put it on social media, you can either just say, "Hey, here's what I'm doing. Can you craft this for me?" Personally, I really like to put a lot of energy in early. I'll start out by giving it a lot of context on what I'm doing, so, "Hey, I'm hosting a party for my- my clients. Here's the date and time, here's the theme, here's what I'm thinking, and here's what I want it to look like." We'll talk more about prompts later.

If you've already written the invite, you can put that in and you can have it rephrase it. I do this all the time where I'll write an email and be like, "That's pretty good but I feel like it's a little bit clunky." You can drop that in, and it'll just polish it for you. That kind of stuff is really easy to do. I'm talking so far about AI being used as a language model. That's the original old school use of just putting in text and receiving text back.

There's AI for all kinds of different use cases. There's AI to generate videos, there's AI to generate images and stuff like that. We'll talk more about that later. Sticking with just text based, you'll be amazed at some of the stuff that you can do. You might have, for example, a string of text messages that you have with someone who's being a little bit challenging. Maybe they're not seeing your perspective, or you're trying to negotiate and your two clients don't see eye to eye. You can screen grab your text messages, drop them in, ask it to reflect on the two people and how they're communicating and give you ideas on how to move the conversation to a resolution.

It's amazing what it can do. It'll psychoanalyze the person on the other side of a text thread and give you really helpful advice on what's going on in their head.

Shaun: This is a tool that you would use not only when you think about being efficient and being time saving, and saving yourself some time. It also sounds like as a human being to use AI in those finicky moments of being a person dealing with other people, that it's almost like it's an assistant or a coach, like you were, or somebody to bounce ideas off of. There's no personal connection. That sounds like something that would be incredibly valuable to not only REALTORS®, but to human beings in general. Sean, how is real estate uniquely positioned in this incredibly dynamic world where AI feels like it's everywhere now, like electricity?

Sean: The thing that I love about real estate is that so much of our role in our business and also in our communities is about bringing value to people around us. It's about that human to human connection. It's about trust. With AI, there's a lot of stuff in our day to day that it's going to do a great job of taking care of for us. When I look at that, what I think smart agents are going to do is they're going to allow AI to take things off their plate, and they're going to reinvest that time into the human to human connection.

Instead of saying, "Oh, I'll kick my feet up and I'm going to let the computer do my job for me," they're going to take the stuff that's less impactful, maybe it's important, but it's not the thing that their clients need them to be there for them at the highest level, so writing the marketing blurb, composing the newsletter, whatever those things are that you use it for, and they're going to reinvest that time in serving their community, getting close with people.

If you look at AI, it's really great at analytical tasks, at brainstorming things. It's really great at repetitive tasks and things like that. Those aren't the things that make us the best REALTOR®. The thing that makes us the best REALTOR® are those moments of empathy. It's the moments that you spend with someone really building trust and building a relationship where they think about you, and they're like, "That is a person who I want to guide me through this."

You think about AI, and it's going to take part in all kinds of our lives as a society. I like to compare it to a surgeon. If you were going in for surgery, and they said, "Hey, we've got all these robotics, we've got all these computers, we've got AI models that are going to be analyzing every move we make to make sure that we protect you and we serve you at the highest level and that we don't cut the wrong tube, because we've got so many different things watching this and helping us perform this at the highest level," I'd be cool with that, I'd be great with that. Yes, make the smallest incision you can and take care of what you need to take care of and get out of there.

However, I wouldn't be comfortable with having AI explain the procedure to me. I wouldn't feel comfortable having it answer my questions. I would want to have that human to human connection where I had someone who I felt like I could trust and I could be open with emotionally and an interpersonal relationship with to beam that bedside candor that I would need to plan it.

I think real estate's the same way. It's one of the biggest transactions that someone's going to take in their life. I don't think they'll ever trust the whole thing to an online website or portal. I think they're always going to crave that interpersonal relationship because that's what we bring to the table.

Shaun: It's also the human management. Let's say you are listing your house and you think it deserves X, Y, and Z pricing, and then all of a sudden the market shuts down, something happens, there's a fire nearby. All of a sudden you're not going to get the price you have. Statistically, the chatbot is going to tell you, "Yes, this is exactly what you should be getting," but that does not help the stress and anxiety and the human emotional rollercoaster that we go through as clients. That's, I think, another example of how important it is to have that human to human connection.

Sean: Absolutely. It's that trust thing. It's having a person there who you trust that you've built rapport with that can be empathetic, we can sense their emotions, we can read between the lines, we have maybe some history with that person, hopefully, that we can know about their backstory, know about their family. That's something that is unique to an interpersonal relationship. Again, I think if we're smart, we use AI for all the repetitive stuff that we don't want to do anyways, and we reinvest that energy in the place where we have the most impact and where people want us the most.

Shaun: How has AI started to become more prevalent in real estate?

Sean: If you look at AI, it's still a baby. That's the crazy thing. It's got all these incredible abilities and it's still in the very early stages of its development. Right now we have a huge use of AI on the internet. Again, I reference that author I really like, Kai-Fu Lee. He walks through the stages they expect it to go through. The AI of the internet is what we all think of. It's word prompts telling you how to finish a sentence as ChatGPT, stuff like that.

The second stage they expect to move into is AI of business where they take those tools and they start to expand on them for specific use cases and specific industries. Then, the third stage would be more of an immersive AI. You think about putting on glasses and it alters your environment a little bit. They don't know if we'll ever get there, but eventually they're wondering if we'll create AI that can actually think for itself. We're still a baby.

Right now we've seen a lot of use where we started talking about. Agents are using it to create listing descriptions and marketing kits. One thing that I really like to use it as is a brainstorming tool, "Hey, I'm planning a video shoot. Can you help me write a script?" or, "I want to have a series of events on my social media. Can you help me plan a bunch of client things that I can put together?"

What we're seeing really exciting stuff developing in now is where it's actually doing more of the work for you. We're seeing a lot of it being geared towards specific industries. Again, medical, "All right, go to the doctor now." They record the conversation and make AI notes after the conversation.

A couple of things that I've really enjoyed using are visual content creation tools. You can enter something as simple as a prompt. it could be two or three sentences, or it could be a much longer prompt, and it'll take that and create a, basically, graphic design and content for you. I've done booklets as lead magnets. The one that I worked on was a downsizing booklet. I do a lot of work with seniors communities, and I work with the people who run the facilities to help them as a referral source when their clients, who are moving in, need to sell their home.

I created about a 16-page book that talks about the process of moving from your home, listing your home on MLS, what to expect, how the negotiations take place, how long it all takes, what you should do first to get started, the different kinds of facilities they can move into, and what to look for and what to expect living there. I created a 16-page book and it took me a few hours. I put a lot of work into it because I had a lot of experience that I wanted to use as context for the content of the book.

On this one site I've been playing with recently, gamma.app, G-A-M-M-A dot A-P-P, you can literally just give it a sentence and it'll create you a five-page website. You could literally just log in and say, "Make me a five-page website. Go research the podcast, learn as much as you can about the host and their guests and what they talk about and create me a five-page website about it." It will just go do all the research. It'll type up all the content. It'll come up with what it thinks the most valuable pages would be, following the typical experience that people have online, about us, contact, episode lists, meet our hosts, and all that kind of stuff. It does a really good job.

Shaun: It's amazing. That's amazing.

Sean: There's all kinds of stuff. I had another one I tinkered with. I was doing a talk on AI, and I wanted to give a disclaimer about why people should proof their work. I thought it'd be fun if I read the disclaimer in a video, but I used an app that takes video of you saying whatever you want, and then creates an avatar, and you give it a script. I had this video I created of me saying, it was basically a disclaimer, "Use it at your own risk, make sure that you proof read it. It can make mistakes, so double-check things."

I sat in front of the camera, and I just talked about nothing for five minutes. It needed to sample me. I talked about my kid's birthday party or something that was coming up, just saying words. Then afterwards, I typed in a script, which was the disclaimer, "Use at your own risk, AI is powerful, it's really fun, but proof-check, it can make mistakes," and then it created this video of me. Sean, the video fooled my wife and my dad. I'm not even kidding.

Shaun: I don't know if that's, "Your relationship with your wife and dad needs some thinking about," or, "Wow, AI."

Sean: There's all kinds of stuff like this, though. Again, I only know that the tip of the iceberg, but we're seeing more and more on a weekly and monthly basis. It's just going to accelerate, because as things continue to develop, it's training itself, it's writing new code faster. What we're going to see over the next few years, it's going to become challenging to keep up with in every aspect of life, and especially as a business owner.

Shaun: With real estate, we already established how important human connection is, but with these tools that REALTORS® can use to integrate into their business, I would imagine it would just accelerate efficiency, free up time so that you can do regular human things, not feel so burnt out, be present, feeling good about yourself and your other relationships, because I would imagine people get burnt out pretty easy doing what REALTORS® do.

Sean: People ask me all the time, "Hey, I'm getting into real estate. I don't love social media. Do I have to be a social media influencer to sell real estate?" It's like, "No, not at all." You look online, and if you go on social media, yes, you're going to see the people who put a lot of energy and effort into being influential on social media because they're going to show up because they're the ones on social media. For every one of those, there's just as many agents who do a great job and are posting on TikTok and Facebook every three hours.

You can find ways to run a successful real estate business however you want. I think AI is an amazing tool because if you get good at it, it lets you-- again, like you were saying, you can increase your face time with your clients, or if you're already doing great, you put in eight hours of client meetings, the last thing any of us want to come home and do is come home and create a marketing piece or write an appraisal letter or something like that.

I like to think of it like, my goal is to take the most important money generation tasks that I do with my time every single day, that's client meetings, negotiations, generating leads, taking care of my database, all of that stuff, I want to take those things, I want to spend as much of a percentage of my time as possible doing those things, and I want to shrink down all the rest. When I come home from eight hours in the car and I'm burnt out, I can chill with my family, I can exercise. I'm not worried all the time that I have projects I'm falling behind on.

If we can just make that our mindset, we'll still give amazing client service, we'll still be a big part of our community, we'll do that network thing that we started talking about, and we'll enjoy the business more, because that's what we came here to do. We didn't come here to do the administrative side of this business, but it adds up.

Shaun: Oh, I want to just backtrack for a second, because we keep using the word "prompt". For those people out there who have no idea what that means, can you explain exactly what a prompt is?

Sean: Thank you. This wasn't a thing until a couple of years ago. If you look online, this is now an entire industry. Basically, the way that you engage AI to do something for you, almost unanimously at this point, is by prompting it. Our prompt can be anything from a sentence, "Make me a social media post about how excited I am that I just sold this house," or it could be really, really long and elaborate, but essentially that's it. The prompt is just your command telling the AI what you'd like it to give you.

Fun story. Right now, this is actually an exploding industry job. It's a new job that's appeared with AI, where there's thousands of people, tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of people working right now as prompt engineers. I don't know how you get into it. Essentially, what they've gotten really good at is structuring the command that they give the AI in a way that gives it all the context it needs to give a really good result, really clear instructions on what you want, and don't want, and outlining how you want it delivered.

Shaun: We make a lot of assumptions when we talk to somebody. If we go to a store, and we want assistance about this hot tub I'm thinking about buying, I'm going to go in and say, "Hey, I'm looking for a hot tub. It's me and my family. What do you got?" Now you say that to AI, you're probably not going to get the answer you're hoping to find. When you have a human, they can decipher a little more on the fly. Why is it so important to really get dialed in with prompts to really accelerate your real estate business?

Sean: The way to look at a prompt is the better the prompt, the better the output. If I say, "Write me a blog about real estate in Victoria, BC," the blog could be about what it finds online saying the best neighborhoods are, it could be about the home types, it might give you a market report, it might create a blog about anything, really. That's such a broad prompt.

If instead I said, "Write me a blog post as a real estate professional. I serve the Victoria, BC marketplace, and I want to talk about the type of housing that we have, current market conditions, and best steps for someone to take when choosing an agent. Please research online, and pull the most recent market reports from our board. Go to REALTOR.ca and look at all the current inventory and provide a summary of price ranges and different housing types depending on someone's budget, and then provide an outline for what someone should look at when they're creating their plans to start shopping for a REALTOR®.

I'd like your response to be between 700 and 1,000 words. I'd like you to use simple language that anyone would be able to read at about a three or four grade level without being childish in any way. I'd like your response to be direct and straightforward and professional, but make it playful and fun without decreasing how people would perceive me as a professional. By the way, make sure that it's easy to read. Don't use anything that would stop it from being evergreen and use best practices for search engine optimization." If you give it that, you'll get a beautiful blog post.

Shaun: Dude, you don't talk to first dates like this, do you? Is this how you engage speed dating?

Sean: Me and my wife, it's like I said, we've got a weird relationship. You can tell the difference between me and AI on video. I don't know why. 

Shaun: Oh, I love it. You talk about specificity right there. That's amazing.

Sean: We talk about specificity. I've done a lot of this, because I use it daily. If you're just getting started, one of my favorite things to do is-- Again, I'm a ChatGPT user. There's about a half a dozen of them now. I'm sure they're all great. I haven't taken the time to go in deep because I've got mine set up. However, usually when I'm doing something, I will simply just turn on-- They've got a chat mic button. I'll just speak to it for about three to five minutes, "Oh, I want to create this invite. I'm hosting a party. There's going to be pickles and cheese, and we're going to be in my backyard. You can come by for a burger between 2:00 and 3:00. We're going to do a piñata because, whatever, kids are going to be there." It'll give you what it thinks you want. If you give it a good prompt, usually you're going to be 80%, 90% of the way there.

Then from there, what I like to do is I'll give it some revisions, "Hey, that was great. By the way, I forgot to give you the date and time. Here's the date and time and they can register on Eventbrite using this link." You give it that and it'll spit something back. Then you'll say, "Hey, well, that was great, but you mentioned the piñata at the front. What I'm really excited about is the pickles and cheese. Put the pickles and cheese up top, move the piñata down and tell them that that's going to be at 3:00 PM if they just want to come by for that." It'll just keep reiterating until it gives you something that is almost perfect. At a certain point, you pull the chute, you take it out, you clean it up on your own.

Shaun: You were talking about the process. I remember hearing something about, you have a general rule of the percentage of time you spend on certain parts of this. Can you explain that?

Sean: I've got this rule. I call it 10-80-10. I can't take credit for it. I pulled it from a leadership book. I can't remember the name, but I was like, "This makes total sense." I'm going to be working on something and this might be something I'm working on with AI. If you're hiring someone to do a job for you, same rules apply, try this out, or if you have an assistant, it's a beautiful way to make something yourself without doing 80% of the work.

Here's how we do it. The first 10% is going to be me. I'm going to be doing the prompt. I'm going to be giving the directions. I'm going to be giving the layout. I'm going to tell it the sections I want in the book or whatever. The next 80% is going to be AI. It's going to go and create all that stuff for me. Then I'm going to loop back in at the last 10%, and there's two main things I'm going to do. First of all, I'm going to fact-check. AI is known to hallucinate, so all it can do is research what we have on the internet and provide you with its best guess. It makes mistakes all the time still. You make it yours. You're going to add your personality back in.

Shaun: Take me through a practical use case for a REALTOR® that might create something using that role. What are some common day-to-day things that REALTORS® could be using very specifically, using this model? What are their tasks that they could be doing?

Sean: Okay. I'll give you one that most REALTORS®, 97% of REALTORS®, struggle with. What the heck do I put on my social media? By the way, I'm not huge on social media. We just hired a company. They're really helping us out. When it comes to trying to plan social media, I draw a blank. You're like, "Oh, I should post something every day." You wake up and you're like, "Crap. What am I going to post?"

What I would tell someone to do is just open up the record setting on ChatGPT or whatever your flavor of choice is for a language model AI tool, and then tell it what you're doing. "Hey, I'm a real estate agent. Here's the area that I serve. Here's how you spell my name, by the way. I enjoy Instagram and Facebook, but I don't post enough. I'm trying to come up with a plan to create engaging content.

I want at least 80% of the content to be about me and my life. I'm really into running. I'm an active runner and I really enjoy my new hot tub that I just got. I'm going to post about running and hot tubs and cooking and my dog. 80% of stuff, I want to be about that, and then 20% of it, I want to be about real estate. Can you help me out by researching what other influential REALTORS® post about their real estate business and provide me with two or three main types of posts that I can cycle between that'll create a bit of a theme? I'd like you to outline the whole thing on a monthly calendar.

Then also just because I'm not that creative, can you give me five to 10 different ideas for personal posts that I could get into a rhythm with that are somewhat repetitive, that would help me stay on top of that side so that it doesn't get dominated by real estate? All of this, I'd like you to deliver to me in such and such a format." Let's make it a checklist, let's put it on a calendar. Whatever you want to do. "Then, once you're done, I'd like you to actually write the posts."

Then the last 10%, what I'm probably going to do is I'm going to make it make all that stuff. I'm like, "You put too much of dog and hot tub, and I also want you to include some exploring the city stuff. Can we mix some of that in?" You get your new result. A lot of people would be like, "Okay, I got to try to do this now."

You can just have it do the next step too. You say, "Well, great. I love that recent version that you created. Now I want you to take that, and I'd like you to work it into a series of posts. I want you to actually make image suggestions, what images I'm going to go out and take pictures of, and video suggestions. I want you to suggest reels, and I want you to write the title and the body of every post. Please use best practices for SEO. Please go and write this all in a way that is in keeping with my style. Oh, and by the way, don't use too many emojis. For the love of God, let's tone that back a little bit." Poof, you get your entire month of content.

Shaun: Wow. That's a dream. How long do you think this takes to do something like that?

Sean: If you were to do this, like the prompt you just heard me do it, you could literally just screen capture that and drop it in. It would work. Then you'll probably spend 20 minutes going back and forth on the monthly calendar. Once you get the calendar that you like, you'll ask it to give you the actual results. You provide it with exactly what format you want that put in.

From there, it'll provide you with a whole pile of stuff. You'll probably spend more time reading it than correcting it, I'd say. All told, you could do an entire month of social media planning, including the written copy, in an hour to an hour-and-a-half, and then you just need to go out and take some pictures while you're on the road.

Shaun: You're talking about social media being used as a combination, sales tool, brand building. If I'm an individual REALTOR®, I want to make sure that who I am is being put out there, not what an AI may think I am. How do REALTORS® use AI and still maintain their original voice?

Sean: There's a few parts to this. We already talked about taking over for the last 10%. That is critical. That last 10%, you can still be doing prompts. You don't have to go and edit out all the emojis. Just say, "Take out all the emojis." I don't do that when I post.

Shaun: You say that, yes.

Sean: Then it'll give you the exact-- It's really quick at picking up what you want. The cool thing is, and this is why everyone should start as soon as they can, the more that you use each individual tool-- so I'm well-cooked into ChatGPT at this point. I don't even really want to go exploring because it knows Sean really well. It knows my hobbies because I ask it. I don't just use it for work. If I'm trying to figure out a recipe to cook at home, I'll ask it to give me some ideas. It knows what my interests are because I use it for all kinds of stuff.

Also, by the way, it has a really good idea of how I talk because when I prompt it, I'm literally just talking to it. I'll leave an eight-minute or a 10-minute voice note thing to my AI, and then it'll take that. It knows exactly how I communicate. The sooner you start using it, the more that you use it and the longer that you use it, like time on task over time, the more of that that you put into AI, the more it is going to be able to communicate like you. Then you're just a prompt away from being-- like at this point, I just say, "Please, use my normal direct and friendly tone," and it composes things that are very, very good. I'm just going in, I'm touching things up, I'm changing the dates, and I'm off to the races.

Shaun: What it sounds like and what I'm hearing you say is the more you use it, the more it mimics you, learns your patterns, learns your tone, learns your style. Is that right? Then, when you are asking it to write something in your voice, it will know. It's not guessing anymore, correct?

Sean: Yes. I still touch it up. It's not nailing it. One other thing that I started doing as well that's really helpful is after you get something out, you edit it to make it the way you would say it or the way that you like it. This is an extra step. Most people don't do this because it just takes a little bit of extra time, but, man, if you do this, it makes a huge difference.

Give it what you ended up with, as opposed to just going away, and it's like, "Well, I don't know if that was good or bad. Is Sean mad at me because he left?" Instead, what I do is I give it back the edited version. Be like, "Hey, you did a great job. Here's the edited version I ended up posting. Save this for future reference so you get a better idea of what I'm looking for."

Shaun: It sounds like when people are using AI, REALTORS® or not, the AI learns about the person and then, not so much becomes that person, but learns of how they act like you would with any relationship. Is that exactly what you're saying? Is that across the board? Is that all AIs, they generally do that?

Sean: Yes and no. Basically, all that is going to happen is it's going to start to use everything that you've done or said to it in the past as part of its context, but not everywhere. Google now has AI search results. If I go to the library and I'm using a computer I've never used and I type in a question, it might try to give me an AI answer. It's not going to have any context from my previous conversations. Same thing with-- there's probably 10,000 different AI apps that you could use now. I can't say across the board that all of them are going to get to know you.

I would say a good rule of thumb is there's probably a chance that it's saving some context. If you created a login and you saved your email and your password or whatever, you keep logging back in when you do stuff, there's a good chance it's starting to learn, but not guaranteed. I know for the ones that I use, they seem to get a lot better with time. Particularly, I do 90% of my work in ChatGPT. Again, it's simple. I've been using it a long time, and it's definitely come a long way in creating responses that are a lot closer to what I want, or I sound like, on its first try.

Shaun: It does sound like in the end, when it gives you whatever it gives you, be sure to go back, verify, edit, and don't depend on just, "Oh no, it'll get my voice out of the gates," right?

Sean: If there's two things you take away from this conversation today, the first one is you should give it a try. The second one is, don't trust what it gives you back until you double-check.

Shaun: Yes. Talk to me about this method of prompting called RISEN.

Sean: This is cool. You notice I had that long example I gave you of a prompt. I was doing my best. I think I did a pretty good job of following this. It's within prompt engineering. There's all kinds of different formats you can use for prompts. RISEN is one that I find delivers the best results for most use cases in real estate. It stands for R is role, I is info, S is steps, E is end result, and N is narrowing.

The role. Take the role of a real estate agent. "My name is Sean Provencher. I serve Victoria, BC." Info is the context. "I'm writing a blog post about Victoria, BC, and I want to include one, two, three. Here's what I'm talking about. By the way, it's really important to me that this is evergreen, so don't reference current market statistics," and stuff like that. I'll give it all of the context I can in the info steps.

Shaun: Info.

Sean: That's info. R, I, S stands for steps. This is where I'm going to give it some homework. I'm going to say, "Okay, what I want you to do is I want you to go and reference the Victoria Real Estate Board. I want you to look at all the different neighborhoods. I want you to get an idea of what's trending in terms of where people are moving their favorite neighborhoods. You can also look at some statistics if it helps, but again, I don't want you to reference live statistics. You can make generalities instead." I'll give it all kinds of steps.

Then end result is what I want it to produce. "I want you to write me the blog post between 750 and 1,000 words. I'd like to use such and such a style of language, my usual direct tone." Then N, so R-I-S-E-N. N stands for narrowing. That's where you tell it what you don't want. "Don't be too opinionated," or, "Don't pull any punches." You can go any direction you want, but tell it what not to do. I always throw in, "Don't use too many emojis. You can use one or two here or there, but I don't want this to be an emoji next to each check mark. That's not how humans do stuff."

Shaun: Is that common practice with AI? Do you find it just knee-jerks to emojis? Is there emoji ethics? 

Sean: Its emoji game is next level. Most people have a couple in their most recent emojis that they'll default to, like check mark, check mark, check mark, or like thumbs up or heart emoji, but it's got the entire library. If you write a checklist or make sure you talk to someone, open a phone, and then, we're going to talk about a house. Go grab a little house. It's like-

Shaun: Makes it a little too--

Sean: -it's too much. The other thing that I find it did a lot in the beginning until I trained it out of it was it would use really salesy language or way too professional. You were really stiff. You just got to tell it what tone and style you want, and you telling it what you don't want is every bit as important as telling you what you do want.

Shaun: We hear about ChatGPT a lot. You said that there's other models. Explain a bit about all the different models to people who maybe aren't familiar with that idea, and how are they trained? As quickly as we can, but talk about that.

Sean: Most AI that people think of right now is a language model. What it does is you give it a query or a question, it references all the available information on the internet in a split second, it guesses what you want, and then it provides an answer for you. That's the majority of what we've being talking about today. Now, they've taken that intellectual thought and they've used it-- they repurpose and repackage it to create other tools like the video stuff, the graphic design stuff that I was talking about, but it's still got the same underpinning.

ChatGPT, if you want to go exploring before you commit to one, there's Claude, there's Grok, and there's Gemini. Each of them are owned by different companies. The interesting thing is they're all going to reference the internet, but then these creepy companies have been listening in on us and watching us and collecting information on individuals for years. This is just a part of life in today's age.

Shaun: Yes.

Sean: Each of them has a different data set. Google has a massive data set, but they were second to the punch, whereas ChatGPT was the first out the gate. They still had a really good stronghold. I think first mover's advantage combined with the fact that just so many people are using it, it's growing its knowledge base through that as well. They still do a really good job. I haven't explored Grok or Claude really, but I hear they're great, too.

I talked a little bit about Gamma. That's the web design-- you can do web pages, you can do slide decks, you can do marketing pieces, like if you want to create a document or something like that, it does the graphic design for you. It's all just from a prompt. You can create the prompt and then put it in, and then it'll just do all the work. Another really neat one is Notebook.Lm. It's another language model tool, but this one, instead of referencing all of the internet, you can provide source material. If you wanted to research a 1,000-page book, this one can be really useful. You can put in the entire book and then start asking questions about the book.

In BC, for some reason, real estate agents, we do a lot of reviewing of condo documentation, so budgets, bylaws, meeting history, and stuff like that. Something like this can be useful for that. I've found that I've made mistakes in the past. You always want to cross-reference and check everything before you answer anyone's questions based on it. If you need to put in-- like condo documents will typically be 60, 80 documents, detailing meeting minutes, and then there'll be a 90-page depreciation report.

I'll drop that in, and I'll just say, "Hey, are there any lawsuits going on? What are the pet rules? Can you go through the meeting minutes and see if there's any issues of contention between property owners inside the condo court?"

Shaun: This is with Notebook?

Sean: Notebook, yes.

Shaun: Specifically.

Sean: That one's really neat.

Shaun: That's cool.

Sean: Then get this one. This one, these sneaky devils, they've taken it, and you can put source material in, and then it'll create a podcast where they talk about it.

Shaun: What?

Sean: Don't be scared, Shaun. We're still okay for a little bit. Yes. You'll have these two fun characters. I can put in these condo documents. I just click the podcast button, adjust it to be 11 minutes long, because that's how much time I have in the car, and they'll talk about the Condo Corporation while I'm driving to my next meeting.

Shaun: Which model is that? What is it called?

Sean: Notebook.LM. I'm telling you.

Shaun: Oh, so that's Notebook.LM. Oh my God.

Sean: Yes. You drop your stuff in, and they'll talk about it.

Shaun: Are they all free?

Sean: That's a great question. If you have a business account with Google, Notebook is currently free. ChatGPT, you can go pretty far for free. I ended up paying-- I'm on the junior subscription. It's $20 a month. What I was able to do is you can create, they call them custom GPTs. It's basically where you fine-tune and save an instruction set. For example, I've been doing a lot of appraisals recently. I'm running appraisal advertisements, and people call up, "Hey, I've got this property or starting to think about X, Y, Z." I'll go, and I'll give them an opinion. I wanted to deliver a really nice narrative product. I've designed this custom GPT that I'll drop in my voice note, because I hate typing.

Shaun: Voice notes are amazing, by the way. I fully support the voice notes.

Sean: Chef's kiss. I'll drop in my voice note, the subject properties, one, two, three main streets, a three-bedroom, two-story home with three bathrooms, and it's modern finishes. I think it's worth between this and this, and here's what the comparisons look like. Then I'll just grab a bunch of MLS sheets. I'll print a PDF or export a PDF, a bunch of MLS sheets that are the comps I want to use.

I'll drop those in, and I've taught it to create, basically, a table chart showing the best comps for the property, where it details the square footage, the sold price, the time on market, whatever I tell it to. Then it'll write up this beautiful report. Usually, they come out about two pages. I've saved all the instructions for that. I'll make a three-minute voice note, and it'll create this appraisal. I'll send it back through. That's $20 a month to have access to creating those per ChatGPT.

Shaun: Oh, so you can't do that with the free version?

Sean: You can save your prompt, and you can just enter the same prompt every time. I'm able to have a bunch of pre-programmed tools that I use. Then, also, the other thing that it lets you do is you can load examples in. I've given it two or three examples of appraisals I really liked, saying mimic this in your output, and it's $20 a month. I'm using it every single day. It also responds quicker. You get a higher status for requests. If you're requesting images, it'll spit them out quicker.

When it comes to some apps, there's no free version. Gamma, that's the web design/graphic design one. You absolutely have to pay $8 a month. That it's $8 a month. If you're creating a bunch of websites or pamphlets, it's incredibly affordable compared to other options. I talked about the video creation one, HeyGen. That one was pretty cool. That's where I did my video disclaimer that fooled my wife and my dad of me.

Shaun: It's amazing.

Sean: I think I gave it $20. That one's interesting that you pay for credits because it takes a lot of processing power to create the video. Depending on how long of a video or how many videos you make, you buy credits that allow you to do a certain amount.

Shaun: Right. That's amazing. I think for REALTORS®, obviously, you will come to a point where you're using these tools after exploring them for a long time, where you'll realize, oh-- You're going to get nudged one way or the other to be like, "Oh, I need more prompts. I need more volume. I need to be able to do more." Then you'll pick your model after dancing with a bunch of them.

Sean: Yes. Frankly, if you're just trying to figure out what to do first, just start with one of the language models. ChatGPT is the most popular. You can go with Claude, you could go with Grok, you could go with Gemini. Those are the big four. Any of them will do a great job. Just start chatting with it, ask it questions. Just brainstorm something, "Hey, here's one I'm trying to work on. Can you help?" You'll be amazed what it starts to spit out.

Shaun: Is there a risk of REALTORS® or anybody, but specifically we're talking about REALTORS®, of getting to that place where, oh my gosh, we can rely on AI just a little too much? What are the risks there when it comes to using it? Because it's pretty amazing when you start using it. You're like, "Oh, I don't have to do anything anymore. I'm just going to let--" and just give it over to AI, and just sit back and watch the dollars roll in.

Sean: Yes. I think, to me, what we should be using AI for is to enhance our ability to be a human connector. Don't focus on taking yourself completely out. Focus on using it to take out the busy work so you can enhance what you do with your clients. Then the other risk is, it still makes a lot of mistakes. I was writing a YouTube video about interest rate changes and how it was affecting our market. This was like two, three months ago. I said, "Hey, just go online, check the Bank of Canada rate. I want to detail, when did they start going back down, and what were all the key dates that we had rate drops." Pretty straightforward.

Bold face, it starts telling me that rates have only gone up. Like, "Rates have been going up, blah, blah, blah. They keep going up. They keep going up." I said, "No, I want to talk about when they started coming back down. I know they went up, but that was a little while ago. Tell me when they came down." No. It was just absolutely set in this idea that rates were going up. I don't know what was going on.

At one point, I had to be like, "Okay. Dear GPT. Today's date is X, Y, Z. Rates have been going down for like six or eight months now. I want you to go back and look specifically at six or eight months ago and tell me when they started coming down. Give me the timeline." Then it's like, "Oh, I'm so sorry." It still makes a lot of mistakes, and that's a huge risk. The last thing it'll say is that--

Shaun: You should never leave it to AI.

Sean: No, never. No, never. Then I also think there's a certain things that you shouldn't ask it to do. Don't have it negotiate. Don't have it being your legal assistant. If you're not sure if you should leave something to AI, ask yourself, "If this goes bad and you've got to explain yourself to a judge, are you going to feel smart?" Because if you don't think you're going to feel smart, don't do it. Do it yourself. You've got your broker manager, your broker record. Reach out to them if you're unsure. Have them talk you through it. Let's be smart about where we put it.

Shaun: Right. Don't just trust. Trust and verify. Verify, verify, verify. Do your homework, and never just leave it to AI. I guess that's what you're talking about when it comes to sensitive information. I'm not a legal mind by any means, and I've signed contracts. Contracts can be tangly, and I'm not going to read through every word. You use contracts all the time and amendments to contracts. Tell me about that. Can AI help in that way, or should you avoid that altogether?

Sean: Sometimes I'll put something in and say, "Hey, did I miss anything?" I'm doing a seller extension to closing, or we're going to assume the tenants, or we're not going to assume the tenants, some of that stuff. If I have to custom-craft a clause, I might put it in after I've written it and say, "Hey, is there anything I should add?" Then after that, I'm going to do what I would normally do, and we should all do anyways, I'm going to send it off to my broker manager. They're there for a reason, and I'm going to have them give it the final proof.

You can use it to check if you missed anything. You can use it to refine things, just like if you're writing an email. Again, the buck stops with you and the people above you who are responsible are your broker manager. If you're unsure of something, we're all in this together, we're all here to help, use the help you have of your hands.

Shaun: We're dealing a lot with data, a lot of information. How can REALTORS® protect clients' data using AI, or in the event of using AI? Because that sounds like something that would be risky.

Sean: Yes. I can tell you that I've never put any of my clients' information into AI. I think that's probably the best place to start, because it learns from everything you feed it. I'm sure somewhere in the fine print, when I signed up, they've got that Bible-sized book that you signed, "I agree to all your terms and service." It's 1,000, 2,000 words, probably. No one reads this stuff. At least I don't. I should have asked it to read it for me.

Shaun: That's a good use of AI right there.

Sean: I'm sure that they have all kinds of rights with the stuff that you talk to it about. What I always do, if I'm looking at my recycling bin next to my desk, I have a rule. If it has a name or a number on it, I shred it. I think we should probably use that same rule with our client's information for AI.

Shaun: Makes sense. Simple way to protect it, just don't use it. Wow, this is such a fascinating conversation. We could talk about this forever. I'm always left with that feeling of human connection will rise above it all. What's your feeling about that again as we close up this conversation? How important is human connection when it comes to real estate, and again, just reiterate that whole thing? Do you see human connection going away in any way, shape, or form?

Sean: It's so funny. I think not just in real estate, but as a community, as a civilization, if you look at the past number of years, it got a little funky, that we had COVID, and we're all like, "Oh, I can't be around anyone." I think a lot of us came out of that with a whole bunch of new tools in our toolkit. We're here meeting virtually. This is now a normal part of life. At the same time, because of that, I think a lot of us now are getting less human-to-human, I could touch your hand right now, interaction. I think it's streamlined things in a lot of ways. I think a lot of us are yearning for that sense of community, that sense of personal, emotional, relational connectivity that we get.

I don't think real estate's any different. I think that is the part of our role in people's lives that will be the most valuable, like spend your energy building, nurturing, loving on your community. Then the time that you have with your clients, focus on really listening to them and advising them, and use your human-to-human experience to help them make better decisions for themselves. That's where we're going to come out of this whole thing, able to provide such a next level of service compared to what we've done in the past.

We've been burdened with all this stuff that we will, as it continues to progress, have less and less responsibility for. Again, what we shouldn't do is try to automate everything and treat all our clients like we're a robot because there are robots who are better at being robots than humans are. Let's lean in where we belong.

Shaun: I love that. I think that's so important. A really great comparison to, not really a comparison, but someone was commenting on the evolution of AI, and everybody has that thought of where AI will go. AI, we have to always remember in real estate, in all industries, it's mimicking. It's not becoming. Who knows where it's going to go? The fact that AI is, what I call, dry brain versus a wet brain-- we have wet brains, we have emotions, or messy, we don't get things right. We're not perfect. We're not aiming to be perfect. I think we're all going to be safe on that front.

It's that stuff that it can never take away, which is that human connection. When it comes to AI, what would you say are-- where AI is headed in the future? What are some exciting uses of AI in real estate, as surprising things that we may see in the future of it all?

Sean: There's a really great book on this. I've been looking for an excuse to mention it. It's by Kai-Fu Lee, and it is called AI 2041, I believe is the name. I can send you a copy. I'll drop it in the show notes. It's a really neat book. It was written by Kai-Fu Lee, who is one of the world's predominant thought leaders on this. Then, what he did is he teamed up with a fictional writer. He came up with 10 example scenarios of what AI should be doing. He wrote it in 2021. Yes, 2041, that was 20 years after he wrote it.

The concept of the book is here's 10 short story narratives, giving you an idea of what our lives might actually look like in 20 years. Then he follows up and actually provides contextual technological backing to lke, "Here's why this is going to happen because we're actually developing this which is going to lead to this." Really cool book. You don't have to be an AI person to enjoy it. It's really fun. It's an easy read.

I think where we're going to see AI continue to get better and better in the short term is going to be in analysis research and just generating content and ideas. When we look at things like, for example, pricing a property, there's-- a friend of mine worked at a company that was developing AI. It was a Toronto startup, and they had a real foothold in Calgary. In Calgary, their AI model was finalizing sales at an average of 3% from what they thought it would sell for. The AI was within 3% of the final sale price. There's no REALTOR® on earth, and if they are, they've only sold one property, and they got lucky.

There's no REALTOR® on earth who has 97% pricing accuracy. It's really hard to know exactly what something's going to go for. They got within 3%. This was years ago, and it's getting better and better. I think as AI continues to get better, there's going to be more and more resources and tools to help us better serve our clients, just in terms of research and stuff like that. Obviously, right now, it's already doing great with content creation, marketing, planning, business planning, any planning and research and being a collaborative brainstorming partner. That is something that it does a great job of.

What'll be really interesting is we talk a little bit about the phases of AI. Right now we're in the AI of the internet and the AI of business. The next one is the perception AI. That's where they start to develop tools that help us by changing the way that we perceive our environment. Think about Google glasses. I know they were funky, and they didn't really take off, but that was the first iteration. Things that you could use. I'm walking into a home, and I'm either looking around with something that I'm wearing on my head, or I'm pointing my phone around even, and it's reading the environment around me and providing extra context to what I might be seeing in the home.

It might be virtual staging. It might be pointing things out, "Hey, there's galvanized piping in the ceiling. You're down in the basement right now. By the way, that's efflorescence, that's knob and tube wiring." There's all kinds of things that AI could help us suss out about a property that we might not pick up on if we were inexperienced. I think to the consumer, that could be something that's really useful.

Then you take that concept of a more immersive experience with technology, whether it creeps you out or not. There are a lot of different use cases that you could imagine being really neat beyond just the obvious, like visual cues and stuff like that. I'm really excited to see how it expands in that area to help us with the actual practical side of viewing and exploring properties and learning about neighborhoods.

Shaun: Yes, that's incredible. Finally, Sean, as a coach, you're back with your individual agent. They brought you in, they've come back, and they said, "Hey, you helped me in those early days, but now I'm being told that this AI thing is taking over the world. What are the top three things that I need to do right now to get ahead of the game and then stay ahead of the game when it comes to AI and using those tools for my business?"

Sean: The coaches love to talk about mindset. The first thing that I would do is I'd address why they up till now had a mindset that they weren't going to explore this. Usually, you're going to find that it just has to do with the fact that people think it's more complex and hard. You think about early computers, you try to get your printer working, you had to find a floppy disk and get the right driver, and then understand all this weird stuff. People, if they got hurt early in their technology journey, they can find it hard to be open to trying new things, and they get into avoiding it. I'd address the mindset.

The next thing that I would say is, it doesn't even have to be real estate-related. Just get on it and start using it to do little things that you might enjoy in your life. You want to develop a cocktail recipe, you want to write a workout plan. I was tracking my macros for a while. I'd built a little command set to help attract my macros. I'd tell it what I ate and say, "You've got this much protein so far, you've got this many carbohydrates." There's all kinds of fun, goofy things that you could do to have it help you in your day-to-day. Just start out by having some fun. Then look at one area in your business that you don't enjoy doing the homework on and try giving it some homework.

Beyond that, start asking it what else it can do, because that's the other thing that's so cool. It's at the point now it's training itself, and it's better at training people how to use it than they are at knowing what it can do. Just start asking it, "Hey, I'm trying to figure out this. Can you help me put together an outline? Can you help me create a video? Can you help me lay out a marketing brochure?" You might get something back that's amazing. It might not be amazing, but just you're exploring. I think that's the most important part of getting started. Just have fun, explore, and change your mindset. It's not hard.

Shaun: Change your mindset and always love your AI because, Sean, I got to reveal something to you. I know this might come as a shock. This is not the real Shaun Majumder. Shaun Majumder is actually playing with his kids right now. This is just AI-generated, and I'm a chatbot. Look at the future. Look at how great it's going to be. Buddy, this has been amazing. I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. I'm sure REALTORS® who are watching this right now have taken so much from this conversation. A huge thanks to you, man. What can I say, but good luck and keep giving. Where can people follow you and find you?

Sean: You can find me on any social platform. sean, S-E-A-N, .p.victoria. That's the easiest. Whichever one you're on, you'll find me there.

Shaun: What a silly way to spell it. Anyway--

Sean: I know, it's terrible. It's less letters, though. No use, no end. Straightforward.

Shaun: Sean, thanks so much for chatting, man. Thanks so much for joining us in REAL TIME.

Sean: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Shaun: All right. Be well. Thanks, Sean, spelled with an E-A. What a conversation. That was incredible. My takeaways from this conversation are that despite AI being so prevalent in life, everything we do, it is going to create lots of opportunity for REALTORS® to be able to use the tool to be able to reinvest the time that they would normally spend on tedious tasks, and reinvest it back into their businesses. Who knows? Maybe even reinvest it back in to spend the time with their kids. One thing for sure, the human connection is something that will never, ever go away. The importance of human connection will always be there in real estate.

Thanks again, Sean. That was a great conversation. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I know I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. If you enjoyed it, please go and subscribe and like and write us a review on your favorite podcast platforms. REAL TIME is brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association, CREA. Production courtesy of Alphabet® Creative. My name is Shaun Majumder. Thank you so much for joining us on REAL TIME.

Sean: Yes.

Producer: We do see that bounce, though, Sean, your video--

Shaun: I know, I know, I know. I'm literally on a tiny, little plant table.

Sean: It's a milk crate and a wish.

Shaun: Oh, yes.