If you were anywhere near the tech conversations at Inman Connect New York, you heard about AI. That alone may not be a big surprise, but this year there was a shift in tone and a clear evolution in how the industry is thinking about artificial intelligence.
Across the expo floor and in conversations with proptech founders, one theme stood out: 2026 is shaping up to be the year AI grows up. No longer confined to writing listing descriptions or sending follow-up emails, AI is being reimagined as a true teammate in the real estate workflow.
This next wave centers on “agentic” AI — autonomous, goal-oriented artificial intelligence “agents.” Agentic platforms can execute multi-step processes, adapt to context and deliver outcomes with little to no manual prompting from the human real estate professionals who use them.
“The biggest thing that’s going to happen this year is the shift from traditional AI to AI that is more autonomous, that acts more independently,” said Dave Carter, vice president of marketing at Lofty, an AI-powered CRM and lead generation platform. “It can become a true partner to real estate agents, as opposed to just a tool that does something you tell it to.”
Carter and his team recently unveiled what they describe as the first Agentic Operating System (AOS) for real estate. It’s a system that doesn’t just respond to prompts, but proactively generates outcomes. “Tell the AI, ‘I want 10 new listing opportunities this week,’ and it goes out and figures out how to make that happen,” Carter explained. “It doesn’t just complete tasks. It owns goals.”
What is agentic AI, and why does it matter now?
While AI tools like ChatGPT are now common in real estate marketing, their core limitation has been their lack of interactivity. They’re still “one-shot” tools. You give a prompt, get a result, and repeat.
Agentic AI breaks that mold. It performs multi-step tasks, adapts based on environmental feedback, and remembers past interactions.
According to Ruchir Baronia, CEO and founder of Frontdesk, that’s what makes it truly intelligent. Baronia quit his high-paying job at Meta last year, moved from California to New York City, and began building Frontdesk.
“In previous software, it’s the same every single time. With agentic AI, it remembers you, acts based on the environment, and can act in different ways based on different scenarios,” Baronia told Inman at Connect.
Frontdesk AI, which was among the first companies to integrate ChatGPT into a phone-based receptionist system, now powers communications for thousands of brokerages, builders, and property managers. One of their clients, Samson Properties, fields over $10 billion in annual sales with help from a virtual AI workforce that routes leads, captures inquiries and even responds at 2 a.m.
“AI will be answering. It’ll be responding to texts, sending emails,” Baronia added. “The role of people will evolve to be more relationship-focused, such as closing deals, doing the non-repetitive work.”
While the potential of agentic AI is clear, many industry players admit that current AI implementations are still in their infancy. Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of RealAnalytica, points out that most AI integrations in real estate are still “very simple.”
“What we were thinking in terms of agentic was being able to do multi-step flows,” Daoudi explained to Inman. “It can not only send the email, but also recreate the listing flyer, send the follow-up message and make the recommendations. And it can do it all at once.”
At RealAnalytica, Daoudi’s team is building from the ground up to make that vision possible. Their goal is to allow agents to assign complex tasks — such as prepping for a listing appointment — with a single instruction, enabling AI to handle every step of the workflow intelligently and autonomously.
Daoudi also noted that while real estate is catching up, other industries, such as software engineering, have already embraced agentic systems, in which AI completes chains of reasoning and action with minimal guidance.
Fueling the AI machine
Of course, none of this would be possible without the underlying data infrastructure. Mike Bruni, a sales representative with First American Data and Analytics, emphasized that his company’s real estate data is the “bloodline of AI” across the industry.
“If you’re doing anything agentic, anything with machine learning, the power of that is data,” Bruni said. “We’re licensing access to our data for people who build these powerful engines. We’re the oil. Maybe we’re the battery.”
Bruni believes land investment, in particular, is ripe for disruption. “A lot of people are looking to buy land, but they don’t want to travel 100 or 200 miles just to look at a property. They’re more comfortable making those due diligence decisions online with available data,” he said. AI can streamline those decisions, making it easier for non-institutional investors to acquire land remotely and with confidence.
But it’s not just about raw data anymore. Bruni pointed to data visualization as a critical trend for 2026. “There’s a lot of information available to consumers right now, but they don’t know what to do with it,” he said. “You have to visualize it, put it in an easier-to-digest view, so your average consumer can become that savvy investor. You shouldn’t need to go to school for real estate law just to buy property.”
Ultimately, the rise of agentic AI isn’t just about reducing clicks or writing faster emails. It’s about freeing agents from the digital grunt work and empowering them to do what they do best—connect with clients and close deals.
“Agents don’t want to be stuck behind a laptop chewing on their cereal,” Carter of Lofty said. “They need to be up front, meeting clients, building relationships, selling houses. Our goal is to automate so much of the back end that they can spend all their time on the front end.”
Email Nick Pipitone