Empire State of Mind
Empire State of Mind
Revolutionizing Home Inspections: Sterling and Lance on AI's Transformative Role in the Industry
Could AI be the game-changer that the home inspection industry has been waiting for? Join us as we unpack the innovative ways AI is transforming this essential service, with special insights from Sterling and Lance of Inspector Call Center (ICC). Listen to their fascinating stories about overcoming regional pronunciation hurdles and the importance of bespoke training, plus a recap of Sterling's eye-opening session at the IEB Unite Conference 2024. Discover how ICC's cutting-edge approach ensures calls are handled with unmatched efficiency and professionalism, benefiting companies like Duke City Inspections.
Imagine an AI system suggesting Teslas at a Ford dealership—yes, it happened! In this entertaining yet educational segment, we tackle the challenges and opportunities of integrating AI into customer interactions. From quirky mishaps to real-time coaching and quality assurance, we cover how AI can transcribe and analyze customer calls for actionable insights. Get inspired by the potential of AI in brainstorming and ideation, and learn how these tools can supercharge your productivity and innovation pipeline.
In our final segment, we shift focus to the irreplaceable value of authentic human interactions in real estate. We discuss how personal initiative and genuine connections can trump corporate scripts, ultimately boosting customer retention. We also delve into the ethical and legal complexities of AI-generated content, touching on the rise of deep fakes and the implications for marketing. Finally, explore AI's growing role in home inspections, from photo recognition to code compliance checks, and imagine a future where inspection software leverages AI to ensure unparalleled accuracy and efficiency. Don't miss this comprehensive discussion on the future of AI in home inspections and beyond!
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Contact Matt -
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On today's episode, we're going to talk about AI and its role in the inspector's workflow.
Speaker 2:We believe the purpose of owning a business is funding your perfect life. Welcome to the next generation of growth and opportunity in the inspection industry. This is the Empire State of Mind. Empire State of Mind is the Empire State of Mind. Empire State of Mind Helping build companies with faster growth, higher profits and more time freedom. Finally, a podcast for the home inspection industry and beyond. This is the Empire State of Mind and this is your host, matt Williams. Matt Williams.
Speaker 1:Well, welcome to the show. I am so glad that you have tuned in to today's episode. It is fantastic. I can't wait to get into this. But today I actually have a couple of friends of mine, sterling and Lance, from Inspector Call Center. How are you guys doing today?
Speaker 3:Good man, how are you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing pretty good.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, Absolutely. This is a lot of fun. I know that Sterling and I we have had a podcast episode before. Lance, I don't think this is your first time on our show. Is that right? Yes, sir. That's fantastic. Now, sterling, I know that you own Inspector Call Center. Is that correct, correct? Yeah, and Lance, what do you do for the company?
Speaker 3:So I am an ADM, an account development manager. I'm the lead on about 10 plus companies. I'm the point of contact. Duke city is one of mine as well. So, right, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Duke city inspections is my inspection company, so we we do use ICC for our phone call or our calling solution. We do have an operations director that grabbed some of the calls but, I'll be honest, like a big chunk of them are being covered by ICC and I love your guys' service. You guys do such a great job with everything that we do and I get compliments from people, realtors and other people who call in and use us and they'll say, yeah, your office staff is outstanding and I'm just like thank you. I personally hired every single one of them.
Speaker 4:Glad to hear that.
Speaker 1:When they can pronounce the right street name. This is true, yeah, we were just discussing that. So I live in New Mexico, which is a little bit cleaner than old Mexico, and the street names, however, have a lot of like Spanish influence, and so there's one that's called Juan Tabo, and it's like J-U-A-N, like Juan, and then a separate word T-A-B-O Tabo, juan Tabo. T-a-b-o Taboe, juan Taboe.
Speaker 1:And but Juan Taboe, One of the, yeah, one of the gentlemen on the other side of the phone, who's from the Midwest, wasn't quite sure how to pronounce Juan Taboe, and it was really funny. It's like Ju-on-tay-boe and it's like, yeah, you're close enough. Yeah, every kind of chuckles and move on. So, but I bet, as weird things that are pronounced in strange ways that nobody else would get, and you know, oh, you're. You don't. Actually, you're not from here, are you? Oh, that's cute. Yeah, do you guys have one? Where do you guys? Where do you guys live? Do you guys think, can you guys think of anything like that in your area?
Speaker 3:So I'm from West Virginia and it the big thing there is it, people pronounce. Sometimes it's Kanawha or the Kanawha, so that's one of them. Now the state over from from West Virginia. Don't even get me started. There's so many names of cities there. That is Stanton or Staunton.
Speaker 1:Spelled Stanton, but we call it Staunton, like Nevada or Nevada, right, we're just talking about that, I think. Was it where? Was it Iowa or something? It was a city called Nevada and it was spelled Nevada and it's like no Madrid or something like that. So we have a Madrid in New Mexico, but Madrid is same spelling, but they'll pronounce it different ways. And then you know oh, you're from here, you're not. How do you handle that with a call center, Because you're answering calls from all across the country.
Speaker 4:It is actually a challenge. I guess in an ideal world we have people that are all around a certain area Equally. We look for the very best people across the whole country and so we think that sort of the character, drive and motivation of people trump most things and we try and train as best as possible. But there are some spellings or pronunciations that do get tricky sometimes depending on where people live.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I bet that's.
Speaker 3:That's got to be an interesting hurdle one of our new england companies, he he made sure that he said here's a list of, of of some of the weird pronunciations and things like that here is how to pronounce and we gave it.
Speaker 4:Oh, so that is helpful yeah that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I could. I could see that. Maybe I should put together a list like that. I like that idea. Yeah, everything we have is primarily like a Spanish influence. So if you know Spanish, then you're just fine, but if you don't know Spanish, then well, you know, good luck.
Speaker 1:Yeah absolutely Good luck. So, sterling, you just did a breakout session here. We're actually at the IEB Unite Conference 2024. You just finished a breakout session talking about artificial intelligence in the inspection world and you guys are using it in some of the ways, some of the things you guys are doing in your company and you're seeing it how other companies are using it. What's your take on this with AI in the inspection place?
Speaker 4:I guess I don't think that most people marry the two together. You think of inspection companies or inspectors as probably about as far off or away from AI. People think of Google or sort of the tech companies, but we think that AI kind of goes throughout. We did a session today just on using ChatGPT correctly. So in our team we have everyone in the company trained on how to use ChatGPT specifically. We do a huge amount of training, but we also want people to be self-directed and for us, chatgpt is an incredible resource that people can learn and grow from, so they train themselves on how to improve their sales techniques, et cetera.
Speaker 4:And what we're showing today some of the inspectors is how you can create your own customized GPT that has pre-programmed in everything about your company, your mission, your values, what you're trying to do with the business, the market that you're in, the kind of realtors that you interact with. And then, once you've pre-programmed that, you can use it to do pretty much any of the stuff that some people use AI for, or at least chat GBT, which is producing content, writing blog articles, redesigning a website, et cetera. But I think it's gotten to the point now. If you program it correctly, it can be very, very powerful. So we have a lot of our new hires coming on board. We have our traditional training program, but we also create customized training bots for them which have been pre-programmed, and they act as a coach, basically, and so we'll give them instructions and then we'll test someone's knowledge on the home inspection space. They'll run through stuff and give them multiple choice questions, see if they get it right.
Speaker 3:If they do, then they make the questions more complicated and it's pretty cool and Sterling's been good about just pushing us to hey, it's an open landscape. I mean, just push ideas off of it. Rebuttals what are some rebuttals? That I can get someone on the calendar? Or rewriting an email template to make it more efficient, to make it short, sweet to the point, with all the information that's needed? Just little things like that. Ai is just awesome.
Speaker 4:It's just crazy not to use it. I think it's a free tool, essentially. That's out there. Even though you're in the home inspection space, you're running a business at the end of the day, and so I think, personally brainstorming with it on whatever's front of mind, which is spend five minutes saying, hey, this is my top agent, give me five ways that I can impress this person. He'll come up with a bunch of ideas and then give me 10 other ideas and it'll keep pushing you.
Speaker 4:but everyone can improve by helping their top inspectors, or be like hey, how do I re-engage realtors who haven't used this for a period of time, or but finding your top broker. I mean like, hey, give me 10, 10 ways that I can impress this broker.
Speaker 1:It'll come up with a bunch of ideas, especially if you program it before and give us some extra context so that, like so that top broker that you're trying to get in with, if you're really a top broker in your market, there's probably enough content with them about who they are as a person on the internet that the AI can track that down.
Speaker 4:You can upload everything they've written about, you can give them the LinkedIn, you can show their Keller Williams profile and you put all that in there. So you know who's a person who likes dogs, knows all these other different things, and it'll give you kind of lots of ideas to do, and not all the ideas are necessarily good, but if you find a really good idea, it takes you five minutes of brainstorming back and forward of how do you build a better relationship with your realtors wow, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:I'd never thought about that. That's really good. Yeah, because I don't think ai could. I mean, at least we're not close enough for ai to replace the actual guy in the field doing the inspection. Even if there is an AI bot, you're still going to have to have a guy or somebody out in the field with an iPad inputting or collecting data. So, no matter what, even if it's AI-assisted, I think you're still going to have to have a guy in the field who's going to climb the ladder and get up on the roof and look at the. You know what I mean. There there's going to be like. I don't think it'll eliminate mankind In that role, it will just enhance it.
Speaker 4:I think it's a great equalizer in some ways. I think it's every industry that people who use AI will do well. The ones who don't will disappear eventually. I think the inspectors that don't use AI are going to struggle at some point I think you're probably right.
Speaker 1:I remember looking back with the dot-com thing in the 90s. I don't want to have a website, I don't need a website. This yellow page ad works just fine. People will call me if they want me to come out and do work. They don't need to have that web presence. Those companies don't exist. You have to have a web presence, and not only that, you have to have a really good web presence. Now, um, you can't just have, you know, an old, like build it yourself diy website anymore. Like you know it. You got to have something that looks good and is professional. So I think that that's probably going to happen. I remember in the beginning when, like google and um, you know what were some of the other ones net, net vision, netscape, oretscape or something.
Speaker 4:AltaVista was one.
Speaker 1:AltaVista was one, yeah, like Yahoo that's actually still around, but there's a few others like AOL was huge, you know. But to use Google, people use like there's prompts you can use in Google to help your responses right, Like you can write better questions into the Google search bar to get better answers. And that's exactly the case with AI the better you can write your, your inputs, the better your responses are going to be coming out of it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, half the time. What? I advise people is actually brainstorm with ChatGPT first and then ask it to give you the best prompt for new ChatGPT. So use it, gather some data and then ask it to be like give me now a really good prompt to solve this problem and they'll write the prompt for you and then you put that prompt in a new chat Much better than you coming up with your own.
Speaker 1:That's very true. It takes me a while to come up with a good prompt, yeah, so where else could you use this besides like so you guys are using it with emails and marketing and stuff like that. Does it help with like operations department, like people like answering calls? Is it fast enough to respond to somebody answering a call?
Speaker 4:It isn't. So I mean there's AI bots. They're pretty good. I mean they sound like humans. The issue, certainly from our standpoint, or I think with AI in general, is the corner cases. So it can probably run pretty good on a standard flow, but as soon as you get someone that deviates from it, it gets stuck and then you just lost that person or created a horrific experience where if it gives you the wrong Answer to realtor right or like it just says something that's completely off base on the and you have no way of knowing it. Basically, there's a example of car dealership that had implemented in AI kind of phone system Coming with it's a Ford dealership or something when they realized about a month in that it was recommending people they should go and get Teslas because they were talking like, do you care about efficiency? He's like yeah, well, tesla does a very good job.
Speaker 1:Oh, that is hilarious, oh yeah.
Speaker 4:So it started like pushing customers away to Tesla from Ford it makes sense if you hadn't thought through it. And suddenly it's asking like hey, you care about fuel efficiency, you care about this and Tesla's the best option for you, sir Right.
Speaker 3:In the breakout session.
Speaker 3:One of the prompts that Sterling showed was just like show an inspector inspecting a house or just for a marketing thing, and it generated the picture with a massive drone over the home and you can go in and you can highlight that area of the drone and say make it 10 times smaller.
Speaker 3:And then it generated the photo in and you can highlight that area of the drone and say make it, make it 10 times smaller. And then generated the photo, looked awesome and uh, it's just just little things like that. And then the other one was the script for a uh like a commercial, for a marketing, like an ad for, for, uh, instagram, okay, and basically it gave you the whole script um, what what the realtor said, what, uh, what you, what, uh, you the inspector, and just kind of what you can go off of and you can edit it too. That second paragraph in there. Change that up, make it a little more, dumb it down a little bit, if need be, to make it sound less robotic or whatever the case may be Interesting it is getting, even though it's not.
Speaker 4:I mean, we believe that humans are better at conveying value than AI, and at least sort of building rapport and essentially selling or sales is inherently sort of about helping other people, and we think humans have an advantage in that regard. But we need to train people as best as possible. It is getting pretty good where there's some software that exists now where it'll kind of coach you in real time alongside the call, and that's pretty good because it's still the human speaking, but you're getting an assistant in real time on there. And then the other piece that we're starting to look at is from both a quality assurance and then an insights perspective, because we do several hundred thousand phone calls per year and all of those are obviously recorded and so we have a huge amount of data on all of these calls. We do sampling of from a quality assurance standpoint, but we can't afford to listen to every single call, whereas ai can, or ai can transcribe every single call.
Speaker 4:And then we can train it and we're working on how do we train it to pick up calls that could have been improved on or where someone potentially didn't use the right rebuttals or did something that was out of line basically.
Speaker 4:So I think AI is going to help us with that and what we're hoping is in six months' time or a year's time, we'll actually be able to sort of look at customer insights as well, because it's actually hard for us, when we have lots of people answering lots of calls, to be like what is the consumer asking right now? What is a home buyer asking, what questions do they have right now? It's anecdotal, so we ask people to be like hey, if you're hearing strange questions, etc. We try and play it back to to companies, but it's not analytical across all of the calls, whereas with ai we will be able to sort of look at you know hundreds of thousands of minutes of calls, basically, and say what are, what are the consumers asking?
Speaker 4:yeah others are calling in what are the most common questions, and hopefully that's something helpful that we can play back to our inspectors. I mean, hey, here's what people are asking. Use this in your marketing collateral or your blog posts or your SEO, whatever it is basically.
Speaker 3:You were also using the voice actor. You said you were bouncing ideas off of it in the car and it would talk right back to you and give you ideas. I don't like that. Give me a new one, Give me something different. And you said in the car you'll just be bouncing ideas off of it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think everyone should be using it or it's sort of suicidal to not operate with it and it's moving at such an incredible pace. But the voice component allows you to actually interface with it a lot quicker. So I'll use it often for brainstorming of hey, we're going to meet with this person, what do you think could be helpful for them, how do I present ourselves and make this a win result for them, and I'll give you some ideas so you can brainstorm.
Speaker 1:I find a lot quicker with a voice so you, you voice, talk to it and it voice talks back to you. Yeah, back and forth. And what program is doing that?
Speaker 4:it's with chat gpt as well it's in chat okay it's a yeah, an app on your phone, basically, but it's um, you can talk to it.
Speaker 4:It's kind of kind of like the movie her a little bit of uh, you can have a back and forth conversation with it, but it's um. It allows you to be less prescriptive with your prompts and do more brainstorming. So it's not the same as, like, hey, I need to write the perfect copy or I need to create a really, really good content website. It's much better for how do I? I'm thinking of organizing a lunch and learn for our biggest brokerage house what kind of topics do you think will be most helpful for them to help brainstorm with me? And then don't kind of bounce back and forth with you, mckay, I don't like this.
Speaker 4:So I like point number three. So I think, kind of talking with it, just a different, different um relationship. And then there's another piece which I I personally find for learning. It's really cool. Where you can, it'll kind of come up with knowledge on the fly in some ways of hey, I really want to learn about this, whatever topic or and we were in the sales space, and so I kind of went through uh, I asked it at some point what are the 10 best sales books of all of history?
Speaker 4:um, it kind of gave me a list of the 10 best sales books of all history and it's kind of good at this stuff and I asked it to um, look at the five recurring themes from all of those books. So, out of all the 10 best sales books of all history, what are five themes that kind of go through all of them. Wow, again it gave me five and then I asked if what, what's a recurring theme across all of those are the most powerful kind of message and pushing it on me and what's the golden rule of sales? And do you know what it was? No help others really that's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all this technology, and then you're back at the end you're like, yeah, duh, yeah it, duh it's very, very motivating. It dives so deep and then it comes right back to like just help others and you're like, well that's. But at the same time I think we kind of knew that. But yeah, yeah, but it was.
Speaker 4:I think it's actually the most accurate thing. You could say, like what? That the golden rule of sales is not help others. I think that's more of an example of how you can learn with ChatGPT that is that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:Do you use ChatGPT?
Speaker 4:to help write scripts for your staff that are on the phone, that like for upselling and stuff, or we, we, um, we've used it for some scripts. Most people we try and not have them follow a robotic script, so we do have scripts basically for new people coming on board. But we incentivize people. All of our staff get paid 100 commission so they um they. They only get paid if they schedule them the inspection basically that's pretty motivating they're very motivated inherently on it.
Speaker 4:But we we have a basic script and then we have people go and shadow all of our top performers and then we have them kind of on it. But we have a basic script and then we have people go and shadow all of our top performers and then we have them kind of modify their script. But we don't want robots. Basically, we want the right, motivated people and we want them to be listening to the conversation, not forcing a certain script. So instead it'll be like hey, here's key things that you want to bring up.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 4:But we do have people who as saying, like this wasn't an instruction, but okay, I'm going to play around with myself, hey, I had this situation come up. Well, my rebuttal would be for us, it's much better if people take their own initiative, versus us trying to say, hey, here's a corporate script that we want everyone to use, or how you should be responding to these.
Speaker 3:Right. Well, one of the things, one of the answers that shot out at me was obviously make a conversation out of it too, especially for the real estate agents as well. Like they, they don't want to call in and just hear it, hear a robot, hear someone, one thing to the next and make it a conversation that, at the end of the day, too, helps the company, because I mean a real estate agent calls in, look at a book of home inspection and it's just not good customer service, probably not going to come back to the company. But if I mean, if you're having a conversation, you're a person congratulating them on the new housing purchase, they're going to come back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true. I do think that's true. I think, if it's too robotic and too stiff, people want that relationship. I think we're all in the people business ultimately, and so we're not in the AI business. So I think AI can be a good tool that helps us, but I think it helps us need to be better people at being better people with other people.
Speaker 4:I think it's just a lot of low-hanging fruit. As Lance was saying, part of his job on overseeing certain accounts is we want to try and help all of our inspectors grow Equally.
Speaker 4:there's some people who've been around for a while who may not have revised their quote templates or the automated emails that go out as a sort of you know hey, is your inspection coming? Or your thank you emails that go out through Spectoral ISN. We've just rebuilt a bunch of those for our clients using ChatGPT and it's much better than we're not marketers per se, but our inspectors should be doing it, or that's their job technically, but we've got some downtime and want to use it and be as helpful as possible, basically, so we've used it for content creation on behalf of our clients. Oh, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe you guys need to look at my emails.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we have to take a deep dive and see what ChatGPT comes up with Right?
Speaker 1:absolutely, I have not even considered that. Because you write the same emails it's like hey, thanks for letting us do your inspection, do you have any questions? And we want every customer to have that email of like hey, we're here to answer questions, but maybe there's a better way to phrase it a better way to put brainstorming on?
Speaker 4:like it's not seemingly obvious, but why not ask chat gpt? Be like give me five strategies for re-engaging realtors who have not seen for the last six months. Right, it's um, it's gonna have better ideas than we have off the fly. Or like we'll have some ideas. It'll give you 10 ideas, of which four or five are really really good, and it gives you those in three minutes and it's free you gotta love that, absolutely gotta love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I haven't really used chat gpt that much and we're gonna get you hooked on it I use it to cook a recipe. I was like I need to cook lasagna and it like, gave me a recipe and I did it, but I feel like I am not tapping the full potential of ai, but just asking me how to cook a dish.
Speaker 4:So I think until it's uh, you gotta ask it a few personal weird questions, then it becomes useful. I trust him more than my doctor in the sense of not that you shouldn't go to doctors, but I'm going to ask anti-PD's opinion on something because your doctor's kind of cycling through hundreds of patients and it's like, all right, I'm going through this, but um, like I have this rash and I'm not sure what it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, gotcha, okay. I was asking you what did you do? Got it, yeah, how do you? Right, okay, I Right, okay, I got this weird fungus growing between my toes. Tell me about it. It smells, never mind, but like, yeah, right, so you can send medical questions. Kind of funny. I don't know if I trust it to do that.
Speaker 4:Well, it gives you extra data. I think that's the thing it's not saying. Take it as gospel. I think, it's just, it's unbiased on most topics and sadly, I think most people, including friends, spouses, family members are still going to be biased. They want to help you, but they've got their personal perspectives and so asking it like, hey, what do you think about this? It'll give you pros and cons, but it's pretty neutral, although it is biased in some ways. If you ask it, israel, palestine, has got a side and if you ask it about the COVID virus.
Speaker 4:It tells you the Wuhan lab leak is a scam.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, but there is some credibility potentially to that right and the Israel like right, exactly, Israel-Palestine thing. Right, that's very charged. I don't know if I would, yeah, it's actually biased.
Speaker 4:In some ways it's a little scary, yeah, yeah, it's got opinions on it which be pretty neutral, but on politics, you ask Trump versus Biden and it's got a favorite.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's interesting. So you've got to be careful with it, I imagine. Yeah, that is pretty fascinating, especially when you're looking at Russia versus Ukraine.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it shouldn't have an opinion in theory, but it's got an opinion In theory, right, you should have some sort of unbiased let's just.
Speaker 1:Here's the facts.
Speaker 4:It's biased on politics. Here's why.
Speaker 1:Russia did this. Here's why Ukraine's done this. Here's the history behind it. Here's why it's led up to this. There's just literal facts in the case, but it will have a side.
Speaker 4:Wow.
Speaker 3:But it doesn't on the medical side, I think it'll give you a neutral view, or is?
Speaker 1:it neutral.
Speaker 4:Maybe some Is it recommending certain pharmaceutical products because maybe it's like it's upselling you on whatever the medical commercials are, and it's like, oh, do you have this, you need that.
Speaker 1:And then the whole thing is a giant disclaimer for all the side effects. But yeah, maybe AI will start promoting certain medicines and you're like, oh, it's neutral no, it's not.
Speaker 4:Big pharma's got his hands on AI now too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe AI will start promoting certain medicines and you're like, oh, it's neutral. No, it's not. Big pharma's got its hands on AI now too. Yeah, that's wild. I have not thought about applying it to that.
Speaker 4:What are some of the other things you guys use AI for? I mean, we're still learning as much as anything, but it's fascinating.
Speaker 1:What about stock trading? I've seen people talking about this. They use AI to do stock Not necessarily you doing it. I don't know if you do it, but I've heard people using AI for stock trading. Is that a thing?
Speaker 4:I'd be cautious with that. I think there's hedge funds that have billions and billions of dollars and all the data and they have a chat GPT, times 10,000 powerful tool that's going through all real data and then my last company was selling access to experts.
Speaker 4:We charge a thousand dollars an hour to speak to an expert and pay the experts um a portion of that, basically, and these were hedge funds trying to learn about everything and they can. That's who you're competing against, basically. So, unfortunately, playing in the stock market game, unless you have some insights, a little dangerous, and chat gpu will help you, but I don't think he'll give you a real edge Right okay.
Speaker 3:I can tell you what to not use it for.
Speaker 2:Hey, that works.
Speaker 3:I'm an assistant coach back at my hometown baseball team there and our head coach he is also the SID Sports Information Director and I was like plug that box score of that softball game, plug it into ChatGPT and give it a summary of the game and see how it goes. And just the wording it used you could tell it wasn't baseball, it was a softball game. It wasn't using the right softball lingo and I was like, all right, I'll try to plug this in there, paste in an article and say, try to aim it towards this type of lingo, the correct lingo that the listeners are going to understand. And it still just didn't quite capture it the way it should have. But that was for softball and maybe other sports.
Speaker 4:There's a skill in using it.
Speaker 4:It's a strange. It's got so much data in it that if you don't, there's two pieces of using it. One is a context that you give it, which is hey, I'm Duke City, inspections based in New Mexico and like facts that can be extra useful. And then there's how you ask the prompts, which is, if you ask it a general question, it's got to go through its entire body of knowledge and it doesn't know if it's a legal question, it always trying to guess what it is. But it's got legal knowledge, medical knowledge, every book in history, et cetera.
Speaker 4:So if you say, ask about softball stuff, it's looking through everything versus if you tell it act as a highly knowledgeable softball or baseball coach that has all the most recent information on this and then you ask your question. Or if you ask, chanchey B, write up a an employment contract for one of your inspectors and you just say, write me an employment contract for my inspectors, the response you'll get is kind of a? C. If you say, act as a legal specialists with deep knowledge on the home inspection space and then ask the same question, you get different answers you get a response that's 50 or 100 times better.
Speaker 3:Wow, I'll tell you one of the good questions that one of the inspectors brought up in the meeting. You generated that image and he said first off, is this legal and also, can it be copyrighted? And we don't know.
Speaker 1:That's a good question. So right, because if you type it in and ChatGPT punches it out as an image and you take that image and you go put it in your marketing material, do you have to pay royalties on that?
Speaker 4:It's made up content, so it's technically yours.
Speaker 1:Right, but do I own it?
Speaker 4:I think the big risk that people are talking about is more deep fakes, and so I think it's moving where there's so much artificial content. Now Most of the stuff on Google now, or Google search results, have dramatically decreased in value, I've found, over the last few years. Because of AI, because there's all these new, it's easy to bash out content, but it's not quite as rich, basically, as it was before, and so just more and more now it's going to be. 90-plus percent of content generated is artificial.
Speaker 4:So it's all artificial by default, I think. I think it's going to move more the other way of like, hey, this is a real picture and you've got to sign and authorize it. Basically wow.
Speaker 1:Well, even now within google, when you google something, google pops up ai results. I've seen that yet right, so it pops up automatically. It's it's already harnessing ai into its search engine to help give better or different results.
Speaker 4:Yeah, although it's getting some bad. I said how to make a pizza so that the topping doesn't slide off when you put it upside down, basically, and I found an article on Reddit where someone, as a joke, said you should put some kind of super glue on it. Put that out, that's really funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it doesn't know. And it sounds like, yeah, glue it, glue it. Yeah, that makes doesn't know. It sounds like, yeah, glue it, glue it. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's so crazy. That's interesting to see that and see it starting to come into even into our industry, being able to use it for, you know, marketing, sales, some operations stuff. You know your emails, all your communications, all that kind of stuff can be ran through. So I have an app on my phone and I I can hit the improve button and it'll chat gpt basically latches on and in my text messages or emails, wherever sometimes I text something out, it's like that doesn't sound right.
Speaker 4:I hit the improve button, chat gpt reviews it and re-edits it and I'm like that sounds better and I hit and stand on that one I wouldn't be surprised if in two years, there's some startup sort of focusing on the home inspection space where the the photo capture stuff you can do now is really good as well. So you can take a photo of you know, a hvac unit and they'll tell you what the unit is and things like that, so you'll actually be able to take photos of it and it'll start populating your reports for you and actually be at some point pretty good. Or someone will have to program some customization for the home inspection space. But I think a lot of how you sort of go and pick out certain things and not the human eye can't pick certain ones out, but you can just take photos of it and it'll start giving you a prompt do you think it's this or this? And then I think it's going to make the report production a lot easier.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I was thinking about this, right. So let's take just a water heater, for example. You go up and take a picture of the water heater and then you go and take is a 2018 water heater or 2020 water heater and um? But according to um code in your area, these connections are 2018 code standards, not 2020 code standards, and so this isn't installed properly. And so then out in the field, a guy doesn't have to like you know, even know how to memorize all that, it just automatically knows.
Speaker 1:Well, gee, this isn't in 20, because then I say in 2019, you know the expansion tank needed to be located here and the gas drip leg needed to be located there, and it's not located in the right places, based on the year of production of the unit versus the year of code and kind of cross-reference those things. So you know, oh, this, you know it's. Whereas if you have a 2019 water heater installed to 2019 standards, it's like, yeah, you know, like obviously nobody's going to call that out. But if you have a 2024 water heater and it's hooked up like in 20, you know 19 standards.
Speaker 4:Well, the codes have changed and but, as an inspector in the field, the burden too great for us to know all the code everywhere of everything that's ever happened but I think now I mean it's the technology is such a thing that now within a month you could build yourself a tool where you'd have to do a bunch of research and pull all the regulations, changes et cetera for your site. But if you uploaded all those into a custom GPT take photos, it'll actually give you pretty much perfect answers. But I think a year or two from now someone will integrate all that and be like hey, it just shows up in my report, it pre-populates something. I'm seeing this, you know I like it, I don't like it. It changes text a little bit.
Speaker 1:It'd be fascinating if one of the report writing softwares will integrate that and what that'll look like. It's not if somebody's going to.
Speaker 4:It's going to happen. Within two years it'll be there.
Speaker 1:So one of the bigger. There's several really larger, you know inspection writing software companies out there and some of them that really pride themselves on being kind of on the forefront of technology. So interesting to see if one of those would integrate a like an AI tool, like an assistant built into it.
Speaker 4:I'm sure they will. I think there's room for new companies and existing ones to improve theirs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and there might be another person to come on the scene, right, you never know, that's absolutely possible. I mean, I know, like Spectora came on the scene not that long ago and they grabbed a whole ton of market share, strictly because their report writing stuff was cutting edge compared to everything else that was out there. And Spectora doing what they did, you see all the other major players revamped their software and like, oh, we need to level it up. It just takes one person to show up on the scene with some new technology or just a new way of doing things and like, oh, that makes sense, and then pretty soon everybody's doing something similar.
Speaker 1:I I can't wait. I'm sure very soon we're gonna have ai in our report writing to help us write better reports and more accurate reports. You know, and yeah, and so that's something that I look forward to seeing, that actually, I think it'll maybe lower liability. That would be really good for all of us, because liability is very high in this industry, one of the highest liabilities out there, and so to lower liability would be good. Create better, more accurate results for us would be good, and why, not Save time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, save some time, right? How long does a report take to complete once the inspection's over?
Speaker 1:There's variables. So if you, if the house doesn't have a lot of defects, it takes less time. If the house has, if the defects they have are pretty normal, standard stuff we see every day, that takes less time. You get to a house that's a dumpster fire, that just needs a lot of work. Or you know, like there's those houses that have like infinity defects, you're just like I'm going to be here for days. You know, we call them affectionately, call them a two-stepper. I'm going to take two steps and find another problem, take two more steps, another problem, and so you know, so we call them a two-stepper. And so take a two-step house and that thing, man, that's going to take you a lot longer.
Speaker 1:So let's say it's like a three-bedroom, two-bath, maybe it's 2,000 square feet and it's relatively new and relatively clean. That is less than two hours on site and for our guys and everybody's a little different, but so it's less than two hours on site, probably another 20 minutes of editing on the report. But you know, so it's less than two hours on site, probably another 20 minutes of editing on the report. So maybe altogether an entire process might take two hours, two hours and 15 minutes or so for a standard three to 2000 square foot house, but you get one that's older, that has a lot more defects, a lot more problems. Well, that might take three hours, so you know, so that we kind of like standard window that we would think of as on our side of it.
Speaker 1:But if you have AI on there, you know, maybe that helps shorten it up a little bit, and shortening up is one thing, but increasing accuracy is more, and I would wonder if it would be able to. So some houses have been inspected three, four, five times by different companies doing different things. I wonder if AI could eventually collaborate that data. So then, when the like the sixth inspector is going through this house because deals keep falling apart, that report would almost write itself. It's like well, we know what the last five inspections did. It's like hey, look out for the roof, don't step there. I wonder if it would have that, that'd be kind of cool. It's got to, it could get there eventually, especially if like a player, like if. I wonder if that's even legal or possible for yeah, everyone sharing the data.
Speaker 4:That's a hard thing Right.
Speaker 1:The data sharing right, that would be hard. And yeah, within a system like what if my competition is using Spectora and they go through and then I come through and we're still using Spectora, that data crossover probably shouldn't happen. But that's one of the things that makes inspection companies so valuable, I think, is that the data we have we have so much detailed data on a house that people would really love to have. Yeah, well, it's a portrait's play, that's true, right, yeah, they're able to collaborate stuff, and they're here today with a couple of their brands and people and that's something that you know. I think that's part of their strategy and what they're doing.
Speaker 4:And, yeah, If there's a house that's got a water heater on the top floor, insurance costs are going to be way higher because risk of fraud happening basically. So they'll use data from the reports to price the insurance differently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's rough right, like that's. I mean it's good for the insurance, I guess, because they can mitigate their risk a little better. But you know, as the homeowner, you're like dang it man. Did you need to know that? Did you need to? That's funny. Well, ai in the inspection place, it's coming, it's happening, it's already here. People are already using it. If you had any websites, do you just use ChatGPT or do you have any other websites that you'd recommend that help people run ChatGPT any better?
Speaker 4:I mean there's several other models. I think ChatGPT's done. They've got one of the more powerful models, but they've also got probably the easiest user interface to use. So I think you want to start with that one, okay, but then they can get quite complicated. The new thing now is essentially creating multiple bots working with one another, and that you can't really do in ChatGPT. There's some other ones allowing you to do that, but you'll have a researcher bot which goes online and finds out stuff. You can have a summarizer bot that will do something. You can have a marketing bot that specializes in this, and then there's a coordination one and the coordinator.
Speaker 4:You can ask the question and it knows to. I'm going to go to the researcher bot to go and find out the latest trends of what realtors are looking for. Another one that's going to be really good at writing content, another one that's good at creating emails, etc. And they can work together. Basically so that you need to generally get outside of chat GPT, but I think chat GPT is the best one you should use.
Speaker 1:basically, Got it. Okay, well, this has been fun. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, sterling or Lance, how do they do that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think wwwinspectorcallcentercom or LVANOY L-V-A-N-O-Y at inspectorcallcentercom. That's correct, yes, or scox at inspectorcallcentercom.
Speaker 1:Okay, that sounds fantastic. Well, guys, thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, thanks, man, thanks for having us.
Speaker 2:You've been listening to Empire State of Mind. For the home inspection industry and beyond. Our passion is to elevate the home inspection industry with mindset, strategy and tools. We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to like, rate and review. For more, follow on Instagram at IEB Coaching and don't forget to hit the website at wwwiebcoachingcom. Learn about IEB at no cost and have all your questions answered on our open call once a month on the third week of the month. We hope to see you there and we'll see you next time on the Empire State of Mind.
