Thad Wong warns against AI replacing the personal client connection

Technology has long been a focus for Thad Wong, the co-founder and co-CEO of @properties Christie’s International Real Estate, which is now owned by Compass International Holdings. In fact, he built an AI platform years ago for @properties that has evolved over the years. Wong said he and his team have been careful to ensure that any AI implementations should enhance the agent-client relationship, not replace it. “The piece of the agent that’s most valuable to the customer, that gets that referral, are either the unique qualities and the communication style of that agent or the connection they have with their customer,” Wong told attendees of HousingWire’s AI Summit on Tuesday afternoon. Lessons learned At first, Wong said he and his team looked at replacing conversations between agents and clients with AI. “We were looking at replacing interaction so we could have a dialogue with a customer and then once it got to a substantive point, we’d hand it off to the agent and there’d be a switch. That was a really bad idea. It was good to explore it, to learn it, but really what it was, was just not a good use of technology,” Wong said. Wong said they discovered through this process that ...