September 2023CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM 19About DamianDamian Ng is Senior Vice President of Technology overseeing enterprise architecture, application modernization, operations, and application reliability across all Anywhere business units. In this role, Damian drives and executes the Anywhere technology strategy to accelerate open platform connectivity, simplicity, and productivity for real estate agents, consumers, partners, and developers. Damian is a frequent speaker at technology conferences and has more than twenty-five years of global experience in e-commerce, payments, fintech, and healthcare. His career path has included various engineering and architecture leadership roles, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies.Damian holds an M.S. from the University of Waterloo and a B.S. from the University of Toronto. He lives in St. Louis and enjoys family time and outdoor activities in the Missouri area. Transparency of Data and DecisionIn a perfect world, AI could be used to remove unconscious bias in real estate by providing objective and data-driven decision-making, which could then increase diverse home ownership. We are seeing the combined use of data, analytics, and AI to identify decision patterns, accelerate automation, and provide intelligence. However, tools optimized by AI are only as useful as the comprehensiveness of the data that powers them. Organizations maintain a responsibility to ensure their data usage and collection is holistic, secure, and free from discrimination. Improving transparency of the AI model through understanding how it actually makes recommendations will also build trust in AI. Recent research and advancement on Explainable AI, Model Visualization, and other technology, which focus on helping individuals understand and interpret how machines make decisions, will also continue to help AI adoption in real estate.More to comeToday, we can ask ChatGPT to draft (and re-generate many times) a listing of a house with two bedrooms, three baths and a basement. However, if you ask ChatGPT to write a listing with just the address, the result will be a lot less usable; where an experienced agent will be able to provide much richer context (or know exactly where to find that information). Given the advancement of technology and innovation, I strongly believe the real estate industry will continue to converge AI with other mature mechanisms such as API Integration and Robotic Process Automation to bring more efficiency and value to everyone in the ecosystem.As I shared earlier, technology can augment, but never replace human-to-human social interactions. We are seeing a focus on AI to enhance and empower human relationships as virtual and hybrid business environments expand.AI can potentially provide valuable insights into an agent's performance and potential growth, identifying trends and patterns across localities, helping real estate companies identify opportunities to develop agents' skills and abilities which can contribute to agent success
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