Last year, Intel tracked a small group of AI power users in brokerages who employed the technology across a variety of tasks — and reported “significant” productivity gains in the process.
Now, the rest of the brokerage world is catching up.
The latest Intel Index survey results reveal that AI in recent months has been more broadly adopted for increasingly complex tasks that were once the domain of only the most cutting-edge users. Where some agents previously only used AI to generate text for property descriptions and social media, today they’re using it to edit images, process market data, and even in some cases manage leads in their client databases.
Using Intel’s interactive comparison tool, you can dive deep into how power users and the rest of the brokerage community are converging in their AI habits.
Check out the new tool, and Intel’s full analysis, in this week’s report.
The gap begins to close
Intel has tracked AI adoption in brokerages over time and in the past only a select few agents employed these tools for anything beyond simple text generation for property descriptions and social media posts.
That’s beginning to change.
Amid these shifts, the agents who say they’re getting the biggest productivity boosts from AI are especially likely compared to others to say they use it for analytical work, including market-data analysis and contract summarization.
They’re also still at the forefront with regard to image and text generation for social media marketing.
But the gap in all these areas is closing, and fast. And as these gaps narrow, more agents have leapt into the “power user” category, which has nearly doubled as a share of all agent respondents from August to April.
A small group of real estate agents is also starting to experiment with AI-assisted coding, one of the areas where AI has achieved greatest adoption in the broader economy.
- 13 percent of power users and 5 percent of non-power users surveyed in April told Intel they use AI to write code for custom apps or tools.
And even many of the power users who are getting the most from AI today have not yet embraced the more autonomous environments such as Claude Cowork, Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, or similar capabilities being rolled out by some of the major brokerages.
- Only 9 percent of respondents said they primarily used AI in an “agentic or integrated environment,” in which the model has direct access to their files or software and can take multi-step actions on their behalf.
- Instead, 75 percent said they use a standard chat interface in which they manually type or paste text and append files, and the model produces an output.
Assuming continued adoption and improvement in these so-called agentic environments, these are areas the Intel team expects to continue to monitor in future surveys.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey ran from April 22 through May 5, and received 435 responses. The entire Inman reader community was invited to participate, and a rotating, randomized selection of community members was prompted to participate by email. Users responded to a series of questions related to their self-identified corner of the real estate industry — including real estate agents, brokerage leaders, lenders and proptech entrepreneurs. Results reflect the opinions of the engaged Inman community, which may not always match those of the broader real estate industry. This survey is conducted monthly.
