Alto has launched six AI-powered “skills” designed to complete routine estate agency tasks from start to finish, with firms also able to build their own automated workflows without writing code.
The CRM provider says the technology marks a shift from AI tools that assist agents with individual stages of a task towards systems capable of carrying out the underlying work before handing it back to an agent for approval.
Available from 2 September, the first six skills cover appraisals, property matching, listing descriptions, sales progression, business intelligence and customer communications.
Crucially, agencies can customise how each operates, including the criteria and thresholds it uses and the tone of communications it produces. They can also combine existing skills or create new ones by describing the required workflow in plain English.
FROM RECORD TO EXECUTION
The technology forms part of Alto Intelligence, which launched earlier this year, and draws on information held within an agency’s existing CRM.
Riccardo Iannucci-Dawson (main picture, inset), Chief Executive Officer of Alto, says: “Every CRM in this market is launching AI features right now. A feature helps an agent to complete a job. A skill actually does the job.
“Alto has spent 20 years as a system of record, holding an agency’s data. What we’re building now is a system of execution, which does the work.”
For sales progression, for example, the technology can assess an agency’s pipeline, rank transactions according to the risk of problems and draft communications to solicitors, while flagging cases where an agent should intervene personally.
Its property matching tool can assess applicants and send a single curated update when suitable properties launch or prices change, while the appraisal tool prepares reports and identifies comparable properties ahead of valuations.
AGENCIES BUILD THEIR OWN AI
Alto says allowing individual businesses to create their own skills could ultimately prove more significant than the initial suite of tools because agencies can automate processes around their particular operating model.
More than 6,000 agents currently use the platform.
Nicholas Lamb, Managing Director of Webbs Estate Agents, which received early access, estimates the appraisal and listing tools alone could save his business around 40 staff hours each week.
He says: “It means I can take someone off typing up details and put them into the parts of the business that win us instructions.”
Iannucci-Dawson adds: “Software has spent 20 years asking those agencies to work the way it works. This is the other way round.”
