I recently had a super interesting meeting with a prospect I am pitching for a new AI-related project I've been working on. No, I am not fully ready to talk about it publicly, and yes, you can contact me directly if you're super curious.
It really was a great conversation all around as I got to hear what problems real brokers, agents, team leaders, and their admin staff are trying to solve in the real world. What was even more interesting, however, is what the conversation revealed about mental models.
I couldn't shake that thought as I've been engaging in conversation after conversation with MLS leaders about AI. Then I see this post from WAV Group, "The MLS Industry Just Reached Its First Real AI Infrastructure Moment." It's essentially a marketing piece for FBS and WAV Group, both of whom have been promoting the MCP server. But what got my interest was this:
The more important question is much deeper and much more consequential. How will AI systems securely, responsibly, and governably interact with MLS data itself? Today, AI accesses data by circumventing the MLS. Now, the MLS can support customers with direct connections that are carefully accessed and supervised.
What occurs to me is that Victor Lund and Michael Wurzer are operating under a mental model of what AI is. It isn't all that different from how the people in my meeting were thinking about what AI is.
I thought it worth discussing because I think I have a very different mental model of what AI is than most of the people in the industry, including leaders like Lund and Wurzer. Maybe it's because I'm weird, or maybe it's because I have not spent my entire career immersed in the details of real estate technology. So it could be simple ignorance and lack of experience.
I think that your mental model of what AI is should and would fundamentally change your response to it and how you think about its impact on your strategic and tactical decision-making.
Let us work through this together, as I often figure out what I think about something after reading what I have written.
