A buyer client of mine — analytical, does his homework, exactly the kind of person our model attracts — was competing for a home and ran the entire scenario through an AI tool before we talked. He arrived with a generated strategy brief and a reasonable question: is this right?
Credit where due: most of it was. The core read — that a clean cash offer at full ask with a free rent-back checks every box a certainty-minded seller cares about — was sound. If the AI had stopped there, I'd have had little to add.
It didn't stop there. The script called for signaling to the listing side that my client had other properties he was eyeing — a pressure move, straight out of a negotiation playbook. And in this situation, it was precisely backwards. This seller's stated priority was certainty. The entire value of my client's offer was that he was the sure thing. Telling the other side he had one foot out the door wouldn't have created leverage — it would have spent the only leverage he had.
The AI couldn't know that, because the AI wasn't on the phone with the listing agent. It hadn't read the seller's priorities, didn't know the agent on the other side, and couldn't weigh how a theatrical deadline call would land with this particular human on this particular day.
Then the field expanded to four offers, and the pressure to escalate arrived on schedule. We held the position instead — full ask, clean terms, no chasing — because my client had said from the start he wanted no part of a bidding war, and discipline you abandon under pressure was never discipline.
My client didn't win that home. It sold for well over what the comps supported — a number we could only have matched by abandoning the two things he'd been clear about from the start: his ceiling and his criteria. He kept looking, and the home he eventually bought fit what he actually wanted better than the one he lost. We lost a bidding war we were right to lose. That isn't the strategy failing. That is the strategy.
I think AI tools are genuinely useful in a transaction — I'd rather have an informed client than not, and I use these tools daily myself. But a strategy brief is a framework. Knowing which single move in the framework would have detonated the deal — that's the job. At any tier, that's what you're actually hiring.