As the housing market stalls, Zillow's CEO sees AI as "an ingredient rather than a threat" that can both help the company protect its turf and reinvent how people search for homes. This will not be a banner year for the real estate app Zillow. "We describe the home market as bouncing along the bottom," CEO Jeremy Wacksman said in our conversation this week. Last year was dismal for the real estate market, and he expects things to improve only marginally in 2026. "The way to think about it is that there were 4.1 million existing homes sold last year--a normal market is 5.5 to 6 million," Wacksman says.

The American dream used to involve purchasing a home. As huge corporations buy up residential stock and wages lay stagnant, the new American dream is to scroll through Zillow and salivate at what could have been, if only we had been born into one of those families with money. To that end, Zillow just upped its AI game to make it easier to find a dream home that you'll never be able to afford. The popular real estate marketplace integrated some AI tools into its search feature last year, but it just released a fairly substantial software update that brings in more options. Users can now use natural language to find homes or rentals based on commute times or how far they are from schools or other points of interest.

February 16th started like any typical Friday night. My husband and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead. We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were overhead -- shining lights all over our property, and a recording echoed, "Police. As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed members of the Phoenix SWAT Team with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, "Yeah, there's a jammer right here." I leaned over the patio and asked, "What's going on?" A SWAT member said, "Ma'am, A South American gang is targeting homes to steal from.

Dukaan CEO and founder Suumit Shah explains why he laid of 90% of his customer support staff after saying AI outperformed them. The real estate market might feel the shifts and impacts of artificial intelligence (AI). But when it comes to making perhaps the most significant purchase of one's life, homebuyers will want that human touch, experts told Fox News Digital. "I don't think it's going to replace how we necessarily do business and automate it, but I think it's going to enhance the amount of data that we have available," Pierre Debbas, co-managing partner of Rommer Debbas LLP, said. He argued it will allow Realtors to "provide the consumer with more accurate information and maybe a broader scope of data in making their decisions when buying a home." AI has already reshaped a number of industries, including the very industry that created it, leading to rapidly decreasing work opportunities and doomsday prophecies of no more tech jobs in five years.

Think of artificial intelligence as a useful tool to help a company take small steps forward, rather than something to supplant people. If you’re an enterprise looking for ways to come through a recession stronger while beating out competitors in the process, open source isn’t the answer. Neither is cloud. It’s true that both can be helpful. Both are ingredients in how enterprises should rethink their traditional approaches to IT. But neither will do much to distinguish you. Why? Because everyone else is already using open source and cloud, too. There was a time when being first to embrace the…

You can find the code and data for this article at this link. It's all hosted on Deepnote, a new kind of data notebook designed for collaboration. Deepnote has become my home in the cloud for all of my data science work. Thank you to Deepnote for sponsoring this week's

If you're an enterprise looking for ways to come through a recession stronger while beating out competitors in the process, open source isn't the answer. It's true that both can be helpful. Both are ingredients in how enterprises should rethink their traditional approaches to IT. But neither will do much to distinguish you. Because everyone else is already using open source and cloud, too.

This newsletter will take you about 4 minutes to read. How do most organizations begin their Artificial Intelligence (AI) journey? Let's look at how leaders of some large enterprises planned their foray into AI. And here's an example that I witnessed first-hand. What do all of these initiatives have in common? In addition to the massive sunk costs suffered by these projects, they led to the organization's disillusionment with advanced analytics.

In this contributed article, Anupam Datta, Co-Founder, President, and Chief Scientist of TruEra, discusses Zillow and what went wrong with the AI models. For AI and ML models to perform for profitable outcomes, especially for high stakes models like Zillow’s, it is crucial to have serious AI governance supported by tools for monitoring and debugging, which includes having qualified humans-in-the-loop to adjust to major market shifts that can arise during unexpected events.

Regulation marched along in the EU, Asia, and the U.S., and we saw companies like Zillow hobbled by AI model quality snafus. Based on my recent discussions with dozens of Fortune 500 data science teams, I expect to see a continued spotlight on AI model quality in 2023. Here are six areas I'm keeping an eye on. Similar to software development 20 years ago, it wasn't until testing and monitoring became common that enterprise software use really took off. AI is at a similar inflection point.