Chatbots take care of a significant portion of customers' needs in today's ultra-fast and competitive real estate market. When implemented on the website for any given company, these AI bots can answer prospect questions quickly and efficiently, help them search for properties to buy or rent with ease, and solve anything that may happen while browsing through listings. The best chatbots offer significant advantages to both the business owner and potential prospects: it reduces operational time spent by employees, which allows more deals to be closed faster. Chatbots have been growing in popularity and for a good reason. With the rise of social media, people want information now, and they want it in an easy-to-digest form.

The ongoing adoption of AI and automation technologies will transform the way people work and cause a disruption, particularly in industries like real estate, finance and banking. Since the start of the industrial revolution, the world has seen skills shift in a way that has resulted in ever-changing jobs and newer skills required to keep pace with emerging technologies. According to McKinsey, these technologies "will bring numerous benefits in the form of higher productivity, GDP growth, improved corporate performance, and new prosperity, but they will also change the skills required of human workers." The real estate sector is in a great position to leverage AI and automation technologies to increase productivity, reduce costs and minimize errors. The number of workers who are engaged in manual tasks that only require basic cognitive skills will likely decline.

As the amount of data grows, AI could be used to classify and store documents and even proactively alert when a new appraisal is due or a property explodes in popularity, for example. Machine-learning enabled search could help people quickly analyze the massive amount of search data that exists by pre-processing and tagging useful meta-data for all property-related documents in a company's repository. How can companies keep up? According to the Altus Group report, two of the biggest challenges facing firms in collecting or utilizing more data to drive decision-making are a lack of internal capability and lack of appetite from the company to invest in the required technology. To solve for these challenges, consider a PwC report's digital transformation strategies for real estate organizations, which include these four steps:

Many consider real estate to be one of the last markets requiring the dying art of human interaction. However, that may change drastically in the coming years. Real estate companies are looking to streamline efficiency and results and thus look toward artificial intelligence for the answers. Soon, like the traveling salesmen of old, even Realtors themselves may become obsolete. Let's take a look at four ways artificial intelligence already affects real estate practices.

Washington, D.C.--Technology has found a new place in the customer service sector of the real estate industry, but the winning formula does not exclude the human touch. Experts are instead emphasizing how a mix of professional agents and bots or artificial intelligence can increase a company's productivity and efficiency. Zvi Band, CEO at CRM company Contactually, discusses the best uses for technology in real estate businesses. CPE: What role should technology play in a real estate company's relationship to its customers? Zvi Band: At the end of the day, real estate is still an intimate transaction that requires high touch.