New York, The Afternoon Of Wednesday, February 4: Patrick Kearns moderated a panel called “AI without the risk,” a title Kevin Hawkins of WAV Group pointed out was likely written by AI because its premise is absurd. There is all kinds of risk, and according to MoxiWorks’ Ashley Fidler, a good portion of it comes from “shadow AI.”

First, what a cool term. Shadow AI. Super ominous and cloak-and-daggery, like a bot around the corner under a fedora intending to relieve you of your latest CMA.

“Your last six months of list-to-sale price metrics or your life!”

What it actually refers to is agents’ collective use of stand-alone AI platforms, like ChatGPT and Claude, and how that use vacuums valuable data that could be benefitting the brokerage as a whole. She’s not against efforts to be better at work but was merely pointing out that brokers need to communicate use and risk standards to agents and staff if their goal is enterprise implementation of AI. MoxiWorks launched a new platform revamp last summer called RISE, and I’m sure shadow AI is something upon which the company needs to uncover during installs.

Hawkins, whose shirt prints create acoustic feedback, wrote a book on AI. It’s on Amazon. He agreed with Fidler, and said a big part of the risk stems from widespread use of the free versions of the popular platforms. They’re simply less reliable and unable to provide insight at scale.

Brokers need to think about this stuff. If you’re encouraging use of popular AI tools, provide financial support for paid tiers and encourage users to share how they’re using it.

Taylor Anderson then handled a group discussing profitability and AI, the provider of reality in which was Vanessa Bergmark, CEO of Red Oak Realty, a Bay-area indy.

She said it’s best used for the un-sexy stuff that can lead to holding on to more revenue. So much talk about AI on event panels at non-AI industry events is about its public-facing, surface level usage. “I asked it for a picture of me as a macaque drinking a margarita, and look!”

So much of real estate remains manual and split across multiple lines of business. CRM. Mortgage. Title. Insurance. Inspectors. It’s a LEGO kit that makes stakeholders search for a different missing piece each time, under deadline.

Later the T360 crew held a party in a basement bar. Once again, it was loud and the crabcakes were odd. My quest to find a quiet cellar establishment with good whiskey lined up like usual suspects in front a grimy mirror remains in jeopardy. At least this one was 30 steps from my (new) hotel.

I don’t like food made publicly available to large, drunk crowds held at just-above Board of Health-approved temperature. Is that a hair in the tzatziki? And everything is yellow.

I found an international deli up the street. I ordered an Italian sub and a Modelo. I mean, it is New York.