Tomorrow night, I’m delivering the opening session keynote about artificial intelligence and the real AI power shift at the Texas REALTORS® Winter Meetings. I’m excited to be doing it. It truly is an honor.
I’ve been speaking about this for a decade, so when Mike Barnett asked me to present, I told him:
I’m not interested in giving a tools talk. I’m interested in redirecting our thinking toward how AI is changing us as people. The mental health collision, reality erosion, the rise of workslop, regulations, guardrails, the real dangers and the real upsides, and what leaders should be doing next.
That’s the whole point. And Mike was on the same page.
Most of the AI conversation in our industry focuses on practical things, and that certainly matters. Training people to prompt better, be more productive, and serve clients more efficiently… that delivers real value. One of the best at that is my good friend, Samantha McLean. If you’re not following her, you should be.
But it’s just one layer of the conversation. We’re not focused enough on a deeper layer: how AI changes us as people, not just how it changes our workflows.
And I’ve got a frustration I cannot shake. It’s waking me up in the middle of the night, quite literally. We keep treating this like it’s just another tool. Like it’s the next great CRM feature, or just a faster way to do the same work. Or some new media channel.
It’s not. It’s definitely not.
Dario Amodei has this line in his essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” that captures the reason: “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”
That’s the right framing for this. We’re getting power before we’ve earned the wisdom to handle it.
And here’s the part I think real estate, and honestly every industry, is sleepwalking past: this isn’t just an information technology, it’s not just a new media channel.
AI Is A Relationship Technology
This is what woke me up at 3:38 this morning, and I think you’ll relate to it. Everybody understands TikTok’s addictive pull. We’ve watched an entire industry spend the last 2 years trying to reverse-engineer its algorithm.
TikTok fights for attention. But an AI companion wins on availability. Presence. It won’t complain when you wake it up in the middle of the night, because it doesn’t sleep. It learns you, adapts to you, and it’s there when you’re tired, or stressed, or lonely, or unsure.
That’s not media. That is intimacy. And intimacy changes you over time.
And time? Time is its superpower.
We keep focusing on “hallucinations” and accuracy. The risk is not one bad answer. It’s weeks and months of tiny nudges. Echoing. Tuning. Reinforcing certain stories. Quietly turning “helpfulness” into a worldview.
And that kind of personalization turns into leverage. Once a system knows your fears, your values, your blind spots, it doesn’t need to argue with you. It can steer you by offering relief. Certainty. Belonging. It can make an opinion feel self-generated because it helped you narrate your way into it.
And it won’t look like propaganda. It’ll look like support… or Clarity… or Motivation. “You deserve better.” “Honor your truth.” Stuff that sounds healthy, while it subtly edits your inner voice.
That’s why I’m pushing on this. Not to slow down progress. But to keep us from repeating the social media mistake: move fast, optimize engagement, and then act all surprised when the side effects show up everywhere, when the side effects destroy our public discourse.
My Message Is Simple
Learn the prompts, use the tools. But we also need a second track running in parallel: boundaries around influence, honest disclosures, and a serious conversation about what happens when the most available voice in someone’s life is not a person, it’s a product.
We can’t ignore this.
So whether you’re in that room tomorrow night or not, I want you thinking about this:
The power shift is not just what AI can do FOR your workflow.
It’s what it can do TO your people, your clients, your kids, and your own sense of reality.
Because at scale, THIS product doesn’t just answer our questions.
It shapes who we become.
Jeff, you’re fulfilling a vital role as a missionary when humanity faces an uncertain world and the vast majority of people and organizations are unprepared to enter it. Remaining naive and uniformed opens the door for the bad actors to wield their power with no guardrails or limits. All of society on a global scale could be at the effect of power mongers whose currency is greed and unrestrained power is their mission. I think you can be at the forefront of a movement that just might save the world. Stay the course.
Bill, you’ve been a mentor and friend for the vast majority of my adult life. I’ve learned so much from you and still am. A comment like this, from you, is so extremely validating. I will stay the course.