The Demo That Looked Ridiculous a Decade Ago Is Just Called Generative AI Now
A decade ago, I stood on a stage in front of twelve hundred of our top brokers and did a demo that a lot of the room thought was ridiculous.
We put a real Amazon Alexa next to me. On the big screen, a mocked-up device view; her voice over the sound system. And I asked her the question I actually wanted answered before a client meeting:
"I've got thirty minutes before I meet with John Smith. Tell me everything our company does with him or his company, and anything he does with our competitors. Add any recent news or significant org changes at his company. Make sure I know how profitable they are or if they are facing any investor drama. And show me everyone connected to John Smith who's also connected to me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram." (If I recall correctly, I actually used the name of a very big property owner in New York for the example instead of John Smith.)
The reaction was polite skepticism. Nice story. Maybe in ten years.
Here's why I believed it: the data already existed. All of it. LinkedIn, the business press, EDGAR filings, Yahoo Finance, and the CRM we'd spent millions building. The problem was never the data — it was that answering one human question meant a person manually pulling threads from six systems that had no idea the others existed.
I'd made our CEO a promise early on: I'd never be the tech exec who shows up every year pitching an eight-figure, two-year project. So instead of building a massive data warehouse, we started with the question. What are the ten questions that, answered instantly, would grow revenue and delight clients? Get those right, and the data models follow.
Fast forward to today, and the demo that sounded like science fiction is just a Tuesday afternoon.
I'll be honest — I think AI is overhyped in places, and there's a hard road ahead before anyone justifies today's valuations. But I do chuckle a little at how quickly "ridiculous" became "ordinary."
The lesson held up better than the technology: start with the real human question. Refuse to get distracted by the machinery. That's still the whole game.
This story rings true with me. The number of systems that I pulled together like this that seemed so out of this world than and too difficult for anyone to grasp are just normal now.
I was in that room!
I can't wait to check this out! Imagine a world today without digital assistants taking the work nobody wants to do off our plates