Twenty twenty-five was a banner year for artificial intelligence, with companies across real estate, retail, and other major industries widening and deepening their usage of the technology.
That evolution, for consumers, ushered in a mix of elation and trepidation. Yes, AI can help push human intelligence further, enabling medical professionals to pinpoint the earliest stages of the deadliest diseases.
On the other hand, there’s concern that AI is eroding human connections, with OpenAI issuing warnings to users about using ChatGPT for mental health advice or other personal insights.
“I get that,” Zillow VP of Product Cameron Swiggett said of the mix of emotions about AI’s place in the world.
However, Swiggett — whose team spearheaded the creation of SkyTour, Showcase Listings and several other AI-powered tools the portal giant rolled out last year — is still bullish about the technology, saying that what innovators need to focus on is creating a balanced, ethically sound experience for agents and consumers.
“What we need to do as an industry is find ways to elevate the agent in a way that we empower them with technology, so that they can do things like delegate, automate and use technology to gain insights in order to take the next action, so that they have the time to go do the human stuff,” he recently told Inman. “And there is also a really important responsibility that we have with AI.”
What follows is a version of Inman’s conversation with Swiggett that has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Inman: How was 2025 for you at Zillow? It was a big year for releasing new products and pushing the envelope in AI.
Swiggett: In 2025, you saw a true shift. You saw AI-powered agents and teams really start to take the lead and lean into all this emerging technology.
There’s a bunch of new proptech companies in the AI space that are developing technology, and Zillow, obviously, from my perspective, developed a ton of great new things, and it really moved agents’ efficiency deeper into the funnel. It’s less about listing copy now, and it’s more about ultimately automating and delegating some of their workflows.
A good example of this is the [customer relationship management] platform FollowUp Boss that Zillow owns. If you and I were having this conversation right now on the phone, using a FollowUp Boss phone number as an agent and client, we could have a good back-and-forth dynamic where I learn more about you and what you’re interested in, and we set up a plan to look at homes.
I’m able to have this human connection with you, but in the background, AI is transcribing, summarizing and taking all the appropriate notes, so when I hang up, it’s all automatically in my CRM, and it gives me recommendations on what I can do next.
It’s that kind of stuff that reduces cognitive load and allows the agent to be that much more efficient, doing what they do best: the human interaction part of real estate. I think we’re going to see more of that in 2026. It’s about focusing on the things that matter, right?
Looking back at 2023 and 2024, the average person’s AI use was limited to large language models, like ChatGPT. And companies responded to that with AI-powered chatbots and assistants. But in 2025, there was a gargantuan jump in how people approached AI. What do you think was the catalyst for this leap forward?
I think one, if you just look at the sheer amount of investment dollars that have gone into AI. I mean, you see the headlines about OpenAI and all those companies [getting] hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in investments.
So I think that the baseline technology of a lot of this has gotten better. I think that there’s been a hockey stick growth in usage across the board in real estate, of course, but also in all the other major sectors.
People are just getting more familiar with it, and then I think for us specifically, it just felt like we had this huge unlock where the hard-earned work, blood, sweat and tears, and financial investments that we’ve made started to really click. And it clicked across a couple of areas. So in 2025, we shipped a few things.
We shipped something called SkyTour, which is an AI-powered fly-around interaction model. We launched Showcase Listing, which is our flagship premium listing product. We launched virtual staging, which is also AI-powered.
And so what I started to see, and I think the market started to see as well, are these [AI-powered tools] becoming more and more popular. Two hundred and fifty million people come to Zillow per month, and they see these features on more and more listings, and they’re like, ‘Wait a second — why don’t I have that on my listing? How do I even get that on my listing?’
I think that’s created a bit of a snowball effect.
So, the other side of this, which I’ve brought up in just about every interview I’ve had about AI over the past few weeks, is the growing sense of overwhelm with a rapidly digitizing world. I mean, even Popeye’s now has an AI-powered drive-thru experience.
I believe New York Magazine published a feature last week about Gen Zers trading in their smartphones for old-school flip phones. They’re buying digital cameras, MP3 players, etc. And I get it. I’ve even thought about ditching my iPhone for a few months.
How are you understanding this trend? And what does it mean for Zillow and companies like Zillow that have put so much into AI?
I get that. I believe the reason why people do that is the underlying fear of what this technology is purported to be able to do, right? And you’ve seen the same headlines I’ve seen, which is, like, whatever tech CEO comes out onstage and says, there’s going to be no office jobs in 2030 and, like, we’re all gonna have AI-powered machines running everything, right?
And people, especially millennials, are like, ‘I gotta work for 30 more years. What do you mean? There’s gonna be no jobs, right?’ I think there’s this existential dread that kind of creeps up, and I feel it even myself at times.
And bringing it back to real estate, real estate will change, has changed and will continue to change. And the successful agents and teams have done in 2025 and will do in 2026 is find the right balance. And that is so key.
Like the Popeye’s example you’re talking about, people know when they’re talking to AI, know when they’re talking to a non-human, and it feels wrong at times. And what they want to be able to do is they want to have that human interaction.
And if you are making the most important financial decision of your life, if you’re about to fork over every single dollar that you’ve ever earned in something that you’re going to likely live in for the next 30 years, you do not want to talk to a computer throughout the entire process to get that done.
We have the data, we have the anecdotes. We know that to be true.
Even with all this new AI-powered technology and the automation that’s occurring, people are actually raising their hands more than they have in the past and saying they want a human. They want an agent to help them on that journey.
Ninety-three percent of sellers said they require an agent to represent their home. And over 85 percent of buyers said they definitely want an agent representing them on the buy side. This is growing. This is not decreasing with technology.
Going forward, successful agents will find that the highest ROI activity is the human stuff. And those who try to automate everything with AI aren’t gonna be successful. It’s about finding the right balance. What we need to do as an industry is find ways to elevate the agent in a way that we empower them with technology, so that they can do things like delegate, automate and use technology to gain insights in order to take the next action, so that they have the time to go do the human stuff.
Email Marian McPherson