I have listened and sat through enough panels now to know the script.
Somebody gets on stage, says AI is not going to replace agents, says it frees you up to focus on relationships, gets a round of applause, and everybody goes back to the exhibit hall. Nobody leaves knowing what to actually do on Monday morning.
So let me be more specific than that, because I think the comfortable version of this conversation is doing our industry a disservice.
The part nobody says out loud
AI is not coming for the agent. It is coming for the parts of the job that were never really agent work in the first place.
Pulling comps into a format a human can read. Rewriting the same follow up email for the ninth time this week. Turning a set of property details into a listing description. Building the market summary. Chasing the document that never came back.
None of that is why a seller hires you. All of it eats your week.
Here is the uncomfortable version: the agents AI replaces were doing a computer's job. If your entire value is speed of information delivery, you were already in trouble before any of this showed up. The internet started that fight twenty years ago and AI is just finishing it.
That is not a threat to good agents. It is a filter.
Why I have a front row seat
I did not come to this from the outside. I am a Founding Agent with SERHANT. in Myrtle Beach, SC and the company has raised $45 million to build AI infrastructure for agents. The Wall Street Journal has covered it. Ryan's public position is that AI pushes this business away from access to information and toward the depth of the relationship, and I have watched that argument get built into actual tooling instead of repeated from a stage.
That is a real advantage and I do not take it for granted.
It is also not a substitute for a point of view. National platform strategy and what works on a Tuesday afternoon in Myrtle Beach are two different problems. A brokerage can hand you the technology. Nobody can hand you the judgment about where to point it, and that call is local, personal, and yours.
So here is mine.
What actually changed for me
Since I joined SERHANT., my average sale price is up 72.9%. I want to be careful about what I claim caused that, because plenty of it is market, mentorship, and a lot of hours. But I can tell you what AI did and did not do.
It did not bring me a single client. It did not close anything. It has never once been the reason someone trusted me with a seven figure decision.
What it did was give me back the hours the transaction was eating.
That distinction matters more than any tool recommendation I could give you. AI did not give me more deals. It gave me back the time the deals were consuming. Then I spent that time the only way that actually moves a business, which is in front of people.
Every hour AI takes off my desk goes back into someone's living room.
Three places it earns its keep
I want to give you real examples rather than theory, so here is where it has held up in my business.
Preparation depth. I can go into a listing appointment having actually studied the property, the street, the competing inventory, and the history of what did not sell nearby, instead of skimming three comps in the car. The analysis is not the value. What I notice inside the analysis is the value. AI just gets me to the noticing faster.
First drafts, never final ones. Client communication starts as a draft I did not have to stare at a blank screen to begin. Then I rewrite it, because the version that goes out has to sound like a person who knows them. A draft you send unread is not efficiency. It is a message that tells your client you were not really there.
Volume work in content and follow up. The pieces of marketing and follow up that are genuinely repeatable are exactly the pieces that should be systematized. Not the thinking. The assembly.
Notice the pattern. Every one of those is transaction work. None of them is relationship work.
That is the whole rule, and it is the line I will not cross:
Automate the transaction. Never automate the relationship.
The moment a client can tell a machine wrote it, you have spent trust to save four minutes. That is the worst trade in this business.
Why most agents are not going to get this right
Because they are asking the wrong question. The question I hear constantly is which tool should I buy.
The better question is what should this tool be doing, and what should never leave my hands.
AI is leverage on judgment. If you do not have any, it just helps you be wrong faster. It will let you generate a pricing opinion with more confidence and less basis than you have ever had before. It will produce a beautiful market analysis built on a premise you never checked. Confidence is the easiest thing in the world to manufacture right now, and confidence has never been what a $2M seller is actually paying for.
A machine can write the email. It cannot sit across from someone and tell them their number is wrong.
I priced a property recently well below where two prior agents had it listed. Not because a model told me to. Because I looked at what the market had already said and I was willing to say it out loud to a seller who did not want to hear it. No tool on earth does that part.
That is the job. Everything else is logistics.
The second thing I want agents thinking about
There is a related conversation happening quietly at the same time, and I think it matters just as much.
Most agents do not own anything. We rent our business from a handful of vendors. Rented lead sources, rented systems, rented audience on platforms that change the rules whenever they feel like it. Then commission structures shift and everybody discovers at the same moment how little of the machine they actually control.
If your income only exists while you are closing, you do not own a business. You own a job with good months.
I am not saying quit selling real estate. Real estate is my vocation and I have no interest in doing anything else. I am saying that the same skills you are building right now, the systems thinking, the process design, the ability to look at a workflow and see what is wasted, are transferable into things you own outright. Most agents are sitting on that capability and have never once thought of it as an asset.
That is a longer conversation than one post. But if you are learning to build with these tools, you are already closer to it than you think.
The test I run everything through
Before I hand any part of my business to a machine, I ask one question. Does this build trust, or does it just take time?
If it only takes time, automate it without sentiment. If it builds trust, it stays in my hands permanently, no matter how good the technology gets.
That is the entire framework. It is not complicated, but almost nobody applies it consistently, which is why you see agents automating the exact touchpoints that were winning them business and hand keying the exact tasks a computer should have finished in nine seconds.
Run your week through that filter and you will find both mistakes inside an afternoon.
Where I have landed
Years in, my position is this.
AI made me a more present agent, not a more automated one. It moved my hours out of the file and back into the room. It did not make me faster at being human, because that part does not scale and should not.
The agents who win the next five years will not be the ones with the best stack. They will be the ones who were ruthless about what they handed to a machine and immovable about what they kept.
I am building my business on that line, and I will keep publishing what I learn on the way. If you are an agent, a team lead, or a brokerage trying to work out where that line sits in your own operation, reach out. This is the conversation I want to be having.
Mitchell Adkins, [email protected]
Mitchell Adkins is a luxury real estate advisor and Founding Agent with SERHANT., serving Myrtle Beach, the Grand Strand, and Charleston. Precision Marketing. Premier Results.
