AI makes specialized knowledge more accessible, reducing its value while increasing the importance of judgment, communication, and other human skills at work.
Jobs are changing significantly in the face of AI. As I wrote about in “How to Know If Your Job Is Safe from AI — Part 1: What History Shows Us About Job Loss and Job Growth,” we can often use history to look for clues as to how things may change in the future. Real estate agents offer an example of a job category that changed recently and may foreshadow similar changes in other roles. Fundamentally, as knowledge became democratized, more of the real estate agent’s work became accessible to consumers.
My family moved more than most growing up. On a few of those moves, I recall flying to the new state and looking at houses with my parents. The real estate broker would drive us around and show us what was on the market. As we drove from one house to another, she would tell us about the neighborhood; sometimes we’d visit local schools to evaluate their quality.
Many homebuyers no longer need that level of service. Thanks to the internet, any prospective homebuyer can see what houses are on the market, filter them by any number of metrics, find the location, and see pictures. Buyers can also get neighborhood information ranging from the quality of the schools to the crime rate. Through web searches, they can see nearby amenities and access minutes from town meetings and local news stories to get a feel for the community.
Years ago, real estate agents had an information advantage over buyers. The internet leveled the playing field. So then what is the point of a real estate broker?
They still provide useful services. Good agents do understand the subtleties that buyers may not pick up from online data alone. Additionally, for many homeowners, buying a house is one of the biggest financial decisions they'll make, and it is highly stressful; having someone guide them through the process helps.
In theory, real estate agents provide other forms of value, but in practice they do not always provide that value particularly well or efficiently; consequently, some of those functions are likely to be automated or reduced. For example, they can handle negotiations. In reality, most have had zero negotiation training, and their incentives don’t always align with yours. I recommend that people learn to negotiate for themselves because it helps in many situations throughout life, and because there is a principal-agent problem with brokers (see “Don’t Let Recruiters Negotiate for You” to better understand it). Real estate agents can also coordinate across inspections, escrow, loans, and other steps; I suspect much of this will be automated away by AI agents in the next few years.
If that sounds like less value than agents used to provide, it is. The agents we worked with would literally spend a day or two driving us around to look at houses (and my parents were experienced at moving so made relatively quick decisions). That time commitment has largely gone away. Even the article “7 Reasons to Work With a REALTOR®” from the National Association of Realtors® does not offer a particularly compelling list, and some of its reasons are redundant; for example, reason one, “act as an expert guide,” and reason two, “offer objective information and options,” are largely the same. [Note: A “REALTOR®” is a real estate agent who is a dues-paying member of the National Association of REALTORS®.]
Because of information asymmetry, brokers were once essential to certain parts of the process. Many of the tasks that made real estate agents valuable can now be done without them. This makes their service less valuable to buyers than it was decades ago.
I’d argue this is one reason we’ll see commissions decline over the coming years. Yes, real estate agents may be paid less per sale, but because each sale now requires less work (they no longer have to spend days showing homes to prospective buyers as the agent did with my parents), they can do more sales in the same period. However, since the number of home sales in a year is relatively fixed (people won’t sell their homes more often just because of technological improvements), the number of agents needed will decrease. This is the capped demand-limited case discussed in “How to Know If Your Job Is Safe from AI — Part 2: The Economic Drivers of Your Job.”
Many white-collar workers built careers because they possessed specialized knowledge that others did not. I knew where to put the semicolon when coding. An accountant knew how to label a particular entry in the bookkeeping system. A marketer knew how to monitor and optimize an ad campaign. All this information is now available to anyone thanks to AI.
As with real estate agents, many information-dependent tasks will be automated. Some coordination work will disappear as well. What will remain is the human side of the job. The broker helping someone through a big purchase is not as easily replaceable by AI (although younger generations, which may trust AI more than they trust other people, could feel differently).
In technology, the fact that I know where to put the semicolon no longer has much value, because anyone can open an AI coding tool and get the same answer. Arguably, it may even perform better, since I’m rusty on languages I haven’t used in years, but AI doesn't have that problem. The value I provide now has to come from thinking more strategically than AI does, at least for however long that lasts, and from the interpersonal skills I offer.
As you think about your career, recognize that the domain knowledge you possess will be democratized and will consequently be of less value to an employer. What will matter most are the skills beyond domain knowledge. This includes strategic thinking, decision-making, problem framing, your network, interpersonal skills, leadership and management skills, ethics, communication, and meta-work.
For clarification, your network is the list of people you have access to, while interpersonal skills are your ability to relate to other people. The latter helps you build your network, but it is also essential for dealing with co-workers, customers, suppliers, and others who may or may not be in your network. Meta-work is a catch-all term that includes everything from office politics and understanding how things really get done to recognizing value chains and rethinking them to create or capture more value.
All of our jobs are changing, though some more than others. Real estate agents are one leading example; software developers are another (as discussed in “The Canary in the Code Mine: What Tech’s Job Slump Means for the Rest of Us”). By focusing on these broader skills, rather than domain knowledge alone, you can stay ahead of the change and continue to be relevant when the knowledge that mattered over the past few decades is no longer worth a premium, because AI can provide it far more cheaply.
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