Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace: How Could AI Affect NoMi Businesses?

Local experts weigh in on AI applications in real estate and marketing

By Al Parker | Jan. 27, 2024

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing dramatically, with new uses popping up almost overnight, like morels after a spring rain. For some, AI takes the stress out of daily work tasks. For others, AI has actually taken their jobs.

Generative AI—that is artificial intelligence like ChatGPT that creates content—has been the latest game changer. Roughly 300 million jobs worldwide are expected to feel the benefits (and challenges) of the technology, and as many as 85 million jobs could be replaced by 2025.

How will AI affect our lives tomorrow, next year, or 10 years from now? Will it be a blessing or a curse for businesses and workers across the region? We asked a few local experts in the field for their thoughts.

A Win for Real Estate

Chris Linsell is a Traverse City-based realtor, content strategist, writer, real estate analyst, and self-described technology pundit who relies on AI every day.

“There are certain tasks that AI is very good at, even at this stage in its development,” says Linsell. “I use it daily to aid in my production of written content. It’s a part of the workflow—all content gets a pass through AI to check for spelling, grammar, punctuation, missing words, etc. AI isn’t writing my content for me, but it is making sure I’m not making any easy mistakes.”

Linsell believes AI is well suited at the present time for chores like data entry, simple communication, basic content generation, and objective question-answer interactions. In the real estate industry, a big chunk of a professional’s time is spent executing tasks, many of which are largely administrative, he explains.

“However, the true value of a real estate professional is rooted in their ability to serve their clients and build relationships with them,” Linsell says. “The rise of AI-powered tools will allow real estate professionals to spend dramatically less time executing tasks and dramatically more time focusing on their purpose—serving the real estate needs of their clients and the community at large.”

He continues, “For realtors whose value is rooted in purpose, this is going to allow them to flourish. For realtors whose value is rooted in their ability to execute tasks, well, they’re going to be in trouble.”

But does he think one day soon AI-powered tech will be handling home sales from end to end? Not so much.

“AI will not likely, at least not in our lifetimes, ever replace humans when the task requires specific, unique experience and insight,” Linsell predicts. “Remember, the current AI models work by aggregating all the experience and input across the internet in order to answer questions. Which works great when your questions are things like, ‘How much flour do I need to make a batch of 20 cookies,’ but terrible when the questions are things like ‘What kind of cookies should I bake for my sister who has expressed her preferences over the many years of knowing each other?’”

In the real estate world, AI has long had applications for agents, buyers and sellers alike—think of the Zestimate tool on Zillow, for example, which estimates a home’s value based on a number of factors. That’s the kind of AI Linsell expects to see significantly integrated into real estate technology in the next two years.

“Most notably, searching for a home will likely get a lot easier and more efficient,” he says, “since AI will allow searchers to identify preferences based on criteria like what’s in the listing photos. Additionally, I think we’ll see the tools real estate professionals are using to automate much of the administrative tasks. Gone will be the days where realtors will be trapped behind a computer all day.”

A Sticky Situation for Marketing

But what if you are someone whose job is all about being trapped behind a computer?

CNBC reports more than “one-third (37%) of business leaders say AI replaced workers in 2023,” and an article from Forbes listed media and marketing as two industries that are most impacted by AI. Indeed, copywriters and content creators have been cut loose left and right—for example, both CNET and Insider trimmed 10 percent their staff last spring—with some companies saying they’ll now rely on AI-generated content that is checked over by a real human.

Oneupweb, a full-service digital marketing agency based in Traverse City, is taking a more intentional approach to using the powerful technology.

“As an experienced team of digital marketers, we’re experimenting and evaluating how to use AI assistants while prioritizing human experience,” says Oneupweb’s Brand Manager Tessa Lighty.

Rather than leap blindly into the AI fray, the firm has developed an in-house manifesto on using AI responsibly. These are their eight guiding principles:

1. We believe artificial intelligence (AI) is a valuable, ever-changing tool we can use to expedite, streamline and multiply our efforts.
2. We understand the limiting and concerning aspects of AI and will consider those factors in our decisions.
3. We believe AI to be assistive but not autonomous; no final product will be 100% produced by AI.
4. Individual team members are accountable for decisions and actions produced by AI under their instruction.
5. Continued transparency, education and experimentation is critical to maintaining a proactive and productive approach to AI.
6. We believe humans are integral to producing creative, engaging, intelligent, human-centered content in all forms.
7. We will prioritize educating our teams, our clients and our industry on the responsible use of AI tools.
8. We believe AI is not, and never will be, a replacement for humanity.

On that last note, Lighty says, “I don’t necessarily think that we really feel threatened [by AI] at this point. In our agency, we haven’t found an AI that is able to replace a human.”

She says Oneupweb uses generative AI to create outlines, help with brainstorming, and build the base of an image that would then be “heavily tweaked” by a human staff member. (If you’ve ever seen the many-fingered hands produced by art bots, you’ll understand why.) Lighty points to improvements in image editing, like Photoshop’s Generative Fill, and tools like Grammarly as the place where AI and humans work best together.

“But we’re not having Grammarly write entire books for us—we’re simply using it to check our spelling,” she explains. “AI is really good for very black and white, cut and dry items. It’s really great for data analysis, things like that. It can help speed up processes. But at the end of the day, the stuff that is being created is better created by a human.”

There are other drawbacks, too, when using AI, which is part of the reason Oneupweb treads lightly. According to Lighty, there have been “a lot of changes” to AI within the last year and “there’s not a lot of regulation over it.” She points to litigation over how intellectual property is being used by AI when it comes to everything from image and text generation to Google responses to search questions.

“The world has changed forever because of it. There’s just no doubt about it,” Lighty says. But for the foreseeable future, Oneupweb plans to work with AI rather than let AI do the work.

She concludes, “A quote that sticks with us as an agency is that marketers will not be replaced by AI, but marketers who use AI will replace those who do not use it. So it’s all about learning how to use it, how to make it better.”