Bigger. Better. Bolder. Inman Connect is heading to San Diego. Join thousands of real estate pros, connect with the Inman Community, and gain insights from hundreds of leading minds shaping the industry. If you’re ready to grow your business and invest in yourself, this is where you need to be. Go BIG in San Diego!
In 2023, Compass launched the first iteration of its artificial intelligence tool, Compass AI. At that time, the tool, which is housed within Compass’ tech platform, could generate content for agents, including for social media posts, listing descriptions, emails and more.
Now, agents will have the ability to simply speak prompts to Compass AI, and the improved tool will be able to do things like create follow-ups, develop marketing collateral, send client invitations to Compass One (the firm’s public-facing platform), create custom listing presentations, build transaction timelines, update and organize client contacts and more.
“So this represents a really big acceleration of [the platform,]” Rory Golod, president of growth and West regions at Compass, told Inman.
“This allows, effectively all of the administrative work that comes with a day-to-day for an agent to be done by AI,” Golod continued. “So what I think you’ll see [are] massive productivity gains, but also massive increases in ease.”
When Compass founder Robert Reffkin announced the updates during Compass’ annual retreat on June 3, agents gave Reffkin a standing ovation for two minutes, Golod said.
The latest version of Compass AI is currently being beta tested by select agents, and will roll out across the company later this year.
Inman spoke with Golod about the new tool and how it will improve agent efficiency. Here’s what he had to say, edited for brevity and clarity.
Inman: Could you clarify what’s new about this rendition of Compass AI?
Rory Golod: What we launched a few years ago was kind of like that first iteration, where it was really about creating content or giving advice. This is now a whole workload, this is actually, do actual work for me. This is like a true digital assistant, an AI assistant, because now I’m able to tell the system: create this, email the client, send this, put this together. Do all the stuff, whereas, the first version was, write a listing description, create a social media post, which was great at the time. That was a big deal. But the world’s evolved and so this is just far more expansive now. This is more about like, ‘Hey, Compass AI: do work for me.’
That’s something that agents have been really wanting to do for quite some time.
In this latest rendition of Compass AI, the tool will be able to track buyer behavior and tell agents which of their past clients are most likely to sell soon. That sounds similar to Compass’ ‘Likely-to-Sell’ tool that has been around since 2020. Does this mean that ‘Likely-to-Sell’ is going to be sunsetted?
None of our tools are going to go away. All it is, is it’s just going to make it easier. It will take ‘Likely-to-Sell’ and put it on steroids.
Imagine being able to ask for likely to sell based on all different types of factors. Right now it’s based on looking at their address and the comps around it, but what about, I want to see the 10 clients that have been the most active looking at listings online right now. Who of my clients doesn’t have an agent in New York? Who of my clients are looking at listings outside of New York state right now? Who of my clients have been on a collection [of listings] and commented on the collection or shared it with a friend or a spouse?
It’s infinite what it can do, so ‘Likely-to-Sell’ will be a big part of it. But now with [Compass] AI, we can go even bigger and bigger.
At the Compass retreat earlier this month, Robert Reffkin said there will be some tasks that Compass AI will just complete in the background without an agent prompting them at all. Could you clarify what those tasks are?
Right now, a lot of that will be the intermediate steps to creating all of this, and setting these things up and building out folders and all sorts of things that can just happen. Setting appointments, reminders, coordinating schedules, so much of that can just happen.
And then being able to automate steps through a transaction. When you’re doing a transaction with a client, you’re going through the transaction, there’s a full checklist of tasks and all those things. Now, they’ll have the ability to have all this be able to effectively be automated. So the agent is the one being updated — not the agent having to do the updating. That’s part of what makes this really, really exciting.
Definitely. At this point, what features do you think agents are most excited about?
I think it’s just the totality of the fact that they can just run the workflow. That [Compass AI promo] video is a minute-and-a-half, but that probably represents what would have been maybe a few hours of work. And even just the intelligence of the system, for it to be able to respond back and say, ‘Oh great, I’ll add this client. Are they a buyer? Are they a seller?’ You hear little things like that, and you’re like, ‘Oh wow, it’s smart. It knows what to ask.’ So I think that’s kind of one of the things that’s got people really excited.
How do you think Compass AI stands apart from other AI tools launched by brokerages over the past few yearss?
There’s no shortcuts in building technology. If we took over 10 years and $1.5 billion to build this platform, and we invest over $100 million per year in R&D, with some of the best engineering talent in the country, I don’t know how other companies that just don’t have anywhere near the financial resources to invest will be able to make that investment or are ever going to be able to build anything that’s comparable.
I think what happens is, a lot of the stuff we see are things that demo really well and look really good, but don’t actually work. And I think you can measure it by agent adoption and usage. You can show off great technology very easily but can you get people to actually use it? Does it work? Is it fully integrated? Does it do enough?
The challenge that I think exists, which is an opportunity for us with AI, is agents want to be able to ask it to do anything. If you give someone a car and you tell them they can go drive, but it only goes up to 40 miles per hour, it’s not going to be super effective, right? They want to be able to drive fast, slow, go long distances, whatever it is. So I think one of the things that really sets us apart is, because we have this platform, there are so many different workflows that this can quickly do. We don’t need to go get another piece of technology from another company to try to fit into what we’re doing for each one of these workflows. All these workflows exist. They all exist in Compass and all the data in the interactions and the interconnection exists.
If you’re creating a collection for a client, and then you want Compass AI to then write a beautiful email to your client with certain things in it, and then send that email, Compass AI can do that because it’s connected to your email. It’s connected to your CRM, it’s connected to the listing system. It’s all in one place.
But if you’re using another company’s tools, it’s not connected to your email, it’s not connected to your listing system, and so it ends up being really difficult and ultimately disappointing. So I haven’t seen another brokerage that’s been able to build technology that even comes close to the things that Compass has built. And I think that’s been kind of proven out in the market.
Get Inman’s Luxury Lens Newsletter delivered right to your inbox. A weekly deep dive into the biggest news in the world of high-end real estate delivered every Friday. Click here to subscribe.
