Navigating AI Hype: Real Benefits for Multifamily Operators

So today we have something cool. So I was coming into the office listening to CNBC and I heard some compelling discussions around AI and so, Lauren, you're here to help me move through that.

So in our team meeting, we talked a little bit about how to bring like, when you're inspired out in the world, you hear something, how to use AI to help you create something from it, and so in this case, we just used it to create an article, and the reason for that is because we know that the ideal client that we want to spend time with, that multifamily owner and operator cares about probably things that are happening on CNBC, so I would make the assumption that they also heard the same interview I heard, and so all I'm doing is entering the conversation that they're already having in their mind and bring it back to multifamily. And what came from that is understanding this hype around AI. And they brought on somebody that had sort of an opposing view, which I think is really great and healthy. Yeah, because I was like, oh, this is interesting, I want to see what he says.

Yeah, and it was interesting when he was talking. I immediately thought where is this going to go? And then it realized I got a lot of validation. I'm like, okay, we're doing the right things, we're modeling this the right way, and I think that's something we can bring to other multifamily owners and operators on how to move and navigate through that. So that was the purpose, and now we're hanging out and having a podcast.

Absolutely, and I didn't hear the same message this morning. So you came in all fired up and I was like, okay, well, fill us in, Let us know what happened. And you're like well yeah, let's actually just fill everybody in and we'll write an article about it today. So what do you mean when you say understanding the hype of AI?

So when I say hype, there's a lot of attention around it because obviously this is the big shift we're all going through, regardless if you think it's valuable or not, it's happening Right and it's happening in greater exponential shifts than the internet.

So, the internet. We built a lot of our applications on the PC before the internet was like PC and then we went to sort of, I guess, internet and then we went to mobile and then we went to cloud. So AI is built on all of those things, so it's just exponentially faster. And with ChatGPT, really development and community things started to raise.

So the conversation that I heard this morning was around the parallels to hype and like what happened in even the dot-com era, which was a lot of companies ramped up and there was a lot of hype right and a lot of companies got hurt in that process.

You know, they didn't have gps, they didn't have people, weren't paying for credit cards online, there was a lot of trust issues. We didn't have cloud as much, and so there was good things that came about, but maybe wrong timing and so a lot of people got hurt, I think, in that process. But there was some kind of parallels being drawn to a hype there. And so when I mention hype, I'm talking about like the Gartner hype cycle, which really illustrates what happens in these types of movements, and we're at the peak, probably, of this in the hype cycle and probably even coming down and in this trough of disillusionment, which is what it's called. There's a lot of skepticism, there's a lot of is this going to work? You know, until things sort of normalize and become standard, like cloud. Most software today is cloud-based.

Right, it's just second nature.

There was a time when that went through that process. Where's my data? How's it going to be?

used and all that kind of stuff. Is it safe yeah?

So that's what I mean by hype, right?

I think what I could best answer that question with is in his response he was indicating you know, for so many years we had Google dominating search right, and a big tech company is dominating a lot of these movements, and so with AI, it really sort of democratized this pursuit of having a chance to be a category leader again.

And so you have open source, you have meta, you have Google open AI, you have all these the NVIDIAs, the chips, the data centers, all these things that billions and billions of dollars are being funneled into this. And that was where the hype was coming from. It's like where are we going with this? And his conversation was more about how those tech companies are sort of out in pursuit of gathering all the world's information and putting it into a model so they can have this competitive model. And this is where it got exciting for me, because then it was like well, that's not the best way forward. The best way forward is more narrow, more industry, more custom, more unique company private data, unique AI as specific to the problem and the business that they want to solve for.

And then you said light bulb, I'm doing that Light bulb yeah, and that's when I came running in and I went to my AI. Yeah, and I prompted that. I think I did it in the meeting you did what was that like for you to go through, that like to see? Like, first of all, I'm like, let me just say something. I kept going and going yeah you're like oh my gosh yeah, and so essentially you should we read the thing? I mean yeah, I don't have access to it.

Yeah, I mean. So, essentially, what happened is you came in and you know, we say this all the time. We're like let's use our product, let's be the best users of our product, right? So then you went into the AI and you were basically like here's my brain dump. You were still fired up from hearing it, which is so great, because I feel like this happens to people a lot, where they're like I just heard something amazing, I want to get it on paper, I want to write about it, I want to blog about it, and then a few days go by and they're just not as. It's not as fresh, they're not as amped, and it turns kind of stale, right. So you were, you prompted your AI and you just said here was my takeaway from what I heard this morning Write me an article, write me a post, write me this, write me that and it did.

It did it all live and it did it all fast and it was great and it's something compelling. And this is what's interesting is that I feel like a lot of people are, say, blogging for the sake of blogging these days, just to get something out, to generate SEO, to optimize their SEO. All of that. What you did was a blog that someone actually would want to read, which I feel like a lot of people using a certain you know, gpt or whatever it is. They're getting a blog and they're having to either revise it or it might not be like a compelling article. This was right. We were like, wow, and you've even said it. You were like I wouldn't erase a word. This would have come out of my mouth and I think that's what the future of ai looks like. So how did it get there?

I think that's what our audience will want to know yeah, so I think we should put a link to that article, and we've on, there's not been one. Oh, the only word that we needed to change was a capitalized nectar flow, because it was at the beginning of the sentence, right, right, so, logically, the large language. This would be how you would write. You'd capitalize the first letter of a sentence. Yeah, so we need to go back in and train it and say, hey, listen, even in instances where Nectar Flow is the first word of a sentence, it's our brand name and we want it to always appear in low-level characters. Yeah, do that, right, and so that will happen once. Yeah, and so that will happen once.

But that's the human element you always talk about. You know AI still needs people. It needs people. It's not always perfect, but man is it close, it's getting closer and closer.

I think that you know in our model we believe, as you know, people begin and end the process. I was able to tune into content that I knew the people that we serve to support care about and bring that back right, so it made my ability to bring that back much more valuable right right and much quicker, and to the point where I then also have control to determine once it does its job.

That does it look, is it in the right voice, does it have the right links, all that stuff. So that's what I really liked about this process. The other piece of it to your question is well, how did all that happen? So what we're doing is we're using large language models that are very good at summarizing, very good at character creation and generating images and text and things like that.

We're pairing it with what we know to be true about Nectar Flow, what we know to be true about the customers that they serve, what we know to be true about the persona that we want to spend time with, and then, in this case, it sort of already knows that it knows our company values, it knows those things, it knows the website links, it has that information because we've been able to provide it in an environment that is secure and safe, right, and it's not exposing it to public data. In addition to that and this is where the people part is I come in with a unique prompt to direct it, which is what it's almost as if I got to the office and went to my professional writer, my professional SEO person, my professional graphic designer, my professional copywriter that comes up with titles and quotes and then gosh, I know I'm missing stuff in here. Social media.

Oh yeah.

And it knows how to write for LinkedIn and it knows how to write for X and it knows how to write for Facebook and an email marketer right that can put the link from the article that it made in the email, so then you or the team can make that more visible quicker.

You trained it to pull a quote.

It pulled a quote. So, for example, in the workflow it first writes the article and everything starts there, and then it wrote that article from its base knowledge of, obviously, what Nectar Flow knows to be true and what it serves and who it serves, and then it used the directive that I gave it after I listened to CNBC. So there's no way it would have known that, because there's an invisible AI right now and the invisible AI is not everybody has spoken into a microphone or written things, which means there's a lot of magic left to be discovered in the world, because not everybody has created things. That has been content Exactly.

So I listened to an interview this morning on CNBC on the radio. I took that prompted it and now it's now in an article. So that article is going to serve real time today. This was relevant today yeah so if I sent that email out, it would ring true. If somebody was like man, I was just this seems like really relevant topic.

You're in my head like I've heard this before which is what's valuable about ai today is it's the community leaders, yeah, that know like everything is going to be this new thing. It's the community leaders that know like everything is going to be this new thing. It's the power of bringing people together and untapping that. So every leader listening right now has that when they go to a conference, there's something that they're listening to that is relevant to their company, their goals, their investment objectives and their people. That's the magic Right. What does Lauren's great experience right and applied in context to this thing right? So it writes the article. Then there we create a title from the article. So we have the title. So we're like create a title from what it just wrote and then we create a slug which is Really simple to be like anything after the forward slash and the dot com or whatever, and that's strategically that or structured that way so that search engines draw higher relevancy in ranking that article above others because of the keywords from the article that also match the URL.

Right.

Right, right, and then we so we create a title, create a slug, and then we have our AI then say hey, by the way, look at this article that you created and tell me how long it would take to read it. So now we're outputting it's going to take five minutes. So now we have structured data that we can then incorporate it into the blog post that says it's going to take five minutes to read this article. We used our AI to determine that after it wrote it. And then we come up with a quote because you asked me about hey, I need a quote, and I was having lunch and I threw out a quote to you and I'm like this would be interesting.

So now we're going to write it. It's going to come up with a quote relative to a quote that exists on the internet, that is site and sourced from a real person and verified, and then tied back to being relevant about what's happening in the article, right. So now the social media team has something to post and promote that ties into all this, and then we take it to our. In this case, we're publishing to Webflow, so we're moving all this into the draft mode, into the right pages, to where the image is in there, all that, and then we get a status on the front end that says, okay, here's the article, here's all the stuff, but we're generating the social media right now. Just stand by.

Yeah.

And then it goes to LinkedIn and it writes how we've trained it, like how it needs to write in that format from the copywriter Yep, it's got a hook, it's got all the things. Instagram, yeah, facebook, all that Short form on Twitter, x. Can I say X anymore I think it's still okay.

And then an email that has the link to the web that it created with the slug that it created. So now we can message and nurture our audience. They can get them on social media. And then it created these podcast notes and we are following a podcast talking about the article we made. So we not every customer would have a podcast, but we created a podcast producer that said from this article right, it knows, all this stuff creates some podcast show notes. We gave it some examples. Now we have a podcast segment.

Yeah, and it tells you exactly how to structure it. That would be a great listen, which is pretty crazy. So I need to break this down again, just so, because you went to MIT, you're highly methodical. You understand the backend For a front end user. What this actually means is you had one idea that was fresh on your mind from something you heard period, which is what everybody's like.

Fired up gets fired up. They're like I have to make content around this, but it takes them a whole week to produce every element that would would feed the content right, what you're saying. So, and I've even seen you go as far as to literally make a slack to yourself. That ties into this AI where you could say heard a great thing today, here's what it was and then it writes all this content for you around that one thought. It's like having one of those little pocket memos and just saying an idea, and then, all of a sudden, you've got a blog, you've got social posts, you've got a podcast episode. You have every piece of content you could possibly think of to make because you had one thought and one idea, which is just wild.

Yes, and you know what's actually happening. There is custom experts or agents. So historically, top level leaders and CEOs limited time, but they knew that the more they were present with their team they could lead, create greater impact for their company and be more strategic in relationships, all that stuff. And so you know, for 30, 40 years, 50 years, 100 years I don't know how long we've recognized that there's value in having, like an admin assistant or an executive assistant or somebody handling the things that someone else can handle. Yeah, the things that someone else can handle.

Yeah.

So now, what I just demonstrated to you is that, without paying 12 people, I was able to create an agent for copywriting, create an agent for social media marketing, create an agent for graphic design, create an agent for article writing right yeah, and what that means to the people that are listening and they're employed, is that they now can have access to a team of people that can help them do their job better, so they can lean into those moments, like I leaned into listening to the article or the radio interview, like I leaned into listening to the article or the radio interview.

So that's what I don't think people have realized. That can be unleashed is these custom agents specifically for the roles and the tasks that need to get done. And CEOs today have to be just excited because now imagine going into your employees and being able to equip them all with someone to help them yeah move this quick well, and that's exactly right.

And and here's you know someone might hear what you just said and be like, okay, so you, you basically have a now have a copywriter, a social media expert, etc. Etc. But the truth is I'm a marketer. You know I should be the first one, you know, shaking in my boots right now because I've seen how all of this can be automated. But if I'm being completely honest, I've lived all those roles social media like. There are a lot of.

Those tasks are incredibly tedious and I wouldn't say are ones that most people even enjoy doing. Like you know, I don't think a lot of blog writers are waking, unless unless that is your profession and it's a fashion blog. I think there's a lot of respect there. But if it's something where write me a blog daily to increase my SEO so that I'm the first thing that comes up on Google, no one's going to be excited about that blog, right? They're just going to do it.

And especially when we talk about the world of multifamily, there are so many hats that people have to wear already. So what you really should be doing when you're thinking about AI is if I had my own assistant to do the mundane tasks that I can't stand in my job. Here's what I would outsource, and that's like a great place to start, and that really is where it is starting is those low hanging fruit elements scanning documents and compiling them into a spreadsheet and pulling certain bits out of them. Those types of tasks will and should be automated, and the AI I mean, think about due diligence.

Imagine being able to drop a lease file into a folder and have our agent specifically train it on what that company wants to pull out, if it's lease terms, lease expiration dates, security, deposit data on rent price or market lease, all that stuff. And so there's just numerous applications and I think that's really where the custom stuff is. The custom agent is like, well, what's really unique to you and how does that work? Unique to you, and and and you know how does that work? Yeah, um, so, uh, you know, looking at my notes here I'm I just I already talked about the, the um, the solutions tailored for unique business, and that. That's kind of the workflow that played out.

You mentioned writing a blog. The reality is, the person with the idea wasn't maybe the person writing the blog, or if it's outsourced, because employee turnover is such that they're not doing that because it's hard work, not consistent, shifting in their responsibilities. But now you give people, like you mentioned, the Slack message or a simple way to be able to direct something in such a way that it's inspired by the people doing the work, instead of an outsourced consultant looking to post recipes or generic vanilla stuff that isn't readable, or it is readable, but it's like it got it done. But like does someone really want to engage with this?

Yeah, it's written the way I would want it to be written. Yeah absolutely yeah, and it did like you said, that what it's what it came up with and handed to you, was almost verbatim in your voice, which was pretty amazing. Like if you had written that yourself, it would have been pretty darn close to exactly what.

I hate writing. I'd rather talk and say can you transcribe that? But um, I don't ever have to worry about where the commas are and all that stuff, absolutely.

But I think about the power that this gives a content creator. Really, if you think about someone who is scared right now, who's, like I said, a marketer like me, I look at this and I say the ability to wake up, have a brilliant thought in my head and just prompt something to create all of that content for me, so that all I have to be doing is coming up with the brilliant ideas and then reviewing everything that it gives me. I mean, I think that's a huge win really for efficiency, for so many purposes, you know.

Yeah, one of the greatest copywriters on the planet used to, you know, write copy for compelling brands, but one of the things he would do is he would ride buses and spend time where people were. So, you know, you've got like the New York Madison Avenue ad agencies and all the ads that we've seen historically over time. And but what? The reason why he was one of the top writers, I guess, to move brands forward, was because he understood the hearts, the pains, the desires of the people that were reading and consuming these things.

Yeah.

And the only way to do that is getting close as you can to the customer.

Yeah, Right so because I'm chairing the innovation count multi-fam innovation council, I mean and the only way to do that is getting close as you can to the customer Right. So because I'm chairing the Multifamily Innovation Council, I mean, clearly I'm hearing this every week. I'm hearing things like priorities and challenges, all that stuff, and so when I'm tuning into a CNBC article or podcast or news segment, I'm really close. I have my ear close to what our audience wants to have solved and wants to do, and so if I can just take something from that and inspire AI, it can't get that in any other place and that's where people make the difference.

Absolutely.

So I would not 1000%.

Things are going to change 1000% and you heard and we won't talk about it right now, but you heard our plan to unlock and make a lot of people do really well in this industry and beyond, I think, those that get out in front of it and look at AI as like language or you know an operating principle that if you want to be a great, valuable employee, if you can walk into an organization and provide it faster, better responses, better work, supreme intelligence and you have this sort of team behind you, then you're going to be able to do your job better and you're less distracted and fearful of like what's going to happen and how's this going to shake down, and you're not in reaction mode, you're like you're in tackle mode, you're in attack mode and that company would benefit from that activity.

So to me, I believe people will still want to be around other people. It's the companies and the people that bring people together and do more interesting things and unlock the true sort of self of what people are. You know, like you've said a couple times, you're a marketer and stuff, and I think over the next year and a half we're going to figure out who we think we are. Yeah, I might be more than that.

Well, I've never really been an entrepreneur. Until I've watched you, I'm like maybe I am interested in investing, Maybe I am interested in being an entrepreneur myself. I've never even thought of that as an option for myself and I would say most people probably haven't, you know a lot of the things that we do with AI, and even just first principles thinking can be simplified.

You know, um, but at the end, of the day, uh, that your role isn't going to change, then you're going to be blindsided. I think, yeah, anymore. And I did some research around all the companies like McKinsey and IBM and Accenture and these companies that are going to market, and when I did this research, I think I made a video and I showed you in our Slack channel. I could never hire anybody that could get that kind of information, that fast, research it, source it, summarize it for me and tee it up like that. There's just not a human in the world that I would ever.

Or I just say, well, I'm going to talk to Sarah, Sarah's in marketing and I ask Sarah, hey, Sarah, what is this and that? And then so then it's like Google or maybe they use AI. You know what I mean. So I think that when we can put aside this idea that our knowledge is the power and that it's now a game changer, it's because everybody's got the knowledge. So now it's like who am I as a leader and what can I get done that drives more revenue for the company or creates that great experience for that customer? Like it's the, it's the action takers that are going to win. Yeah, I think.

And you said something really smart earlier and I wrote it down and I'm gonna botch it now. But you said something along the lines of the future is people who are doing something, essentially measuring it and then coming up with the right outcomes or the right route from there. And so I think thinking of it that way, where you know that that is the future. If somebody can literally run tests now against, if you're making content daily like this, that comes from a great idea. My job now is to say, well, did that perform? Is live streaming to Instagram doing anything? Is you know? That's now me, that's my role now what's working, what's not, what's hitting, what's not? And you are able to test and run and, like you said, everybody's saying this right now, Don't be afraid to fail, Fall. You know.

And run and, like you said, everybody's saying this right now, don't be afraid to fail, fall you know, fall flat on your face and see what happens, and because we have the power to do that. This isn't like our one piece of content a week that we've worked enslaved over anymore. This is like throw it out the wall and see what sticks, and that is what everybody who is successful is doing.

Yeah, and I don't know how long we've been on the podcast, but I walked into your office, I'm like you want to go on a podcast and I'm like I don't know.

And so that's, this is a result of that, right and and um, you know you mentioned the thing that I said about where do people fit into the process, and that was the.

You know, that's where the you set the vision, you set the strategies right, we set the goals, we measure the goals and you lead with people through this process. And leadership is so powerful today because everybody's feeling a little anxious about this stuff. So if you can be that leader that understands these things and you can confidently communicate like it's going to be okay, let's go, come with me, like let's do this, and it creates a scenario where people have more, they feel more control over their outcomes versus like what's going to happen, right, they're just kind of waiting for the reaction mode where at that Stanford research where we talked about the org chart being really the most fundamental revolutionary technology over the last 200 years, and that's because people in organizations can only take on so much capacity. I mean, if you're in a meeting from one to two, you're in that meeting. You can't be in another meeting from one to two.

Yeah yeah, so we have to have, in greater scales, more people to do those. And you just think about that org chart With AI. It demolishes that whole organizational structure in that way because it can cross those sort of buckets of people right and that's where.

But what it can't do, uh, or it shouldn't do, which is measure? I mean, it can, it can create information and stats and data and stuff like that, but it's going to be for the person, the human being, to go like is this impacting? Impacting the business? Yeah, you know? Yeah, which is? I think it's an exciting time.

I think it's exciting too, because I really think about how many people I know and when I ask them you know, are you incredibly happy in your day-to-day tasks and what you're doing, and or are you feeling challenged?

Are you feeling like you're able to take ownership of any decision that's being made in your job? And really, I think this change is going to force that to happen. It's going to force people to automate the tasks that are holding them back, that are becoming redundant and not growing them as individuals or as experts in their field, and I think that what it's going to do is it's going to allow space for people to have to discover who they are and what their specialties are and, like you said, I might not be a marketer, it's just what I've known, and maybe when some of that is automated, I step back and I say, wow, I want to start dabbling in this, I want to start dabbling in that, and so I think it's actually a cool, unique time where people can explore different elements of what they do and what they love and, yeah, you know, I completely agree with you and, as you mentioned that I I wrote down the word variance because one of my biggest challenges is I'm curious about these things.

I'm also building things. I have software engineers, developers, on payroll. I'm talking to smart people about this stuff. I'm also in the room with some of the brightest minds in AI in the world and I want to bring that back to our innovation council so then we can make that more valuable. That's the pursuit of that. But in doing so, I just have this excitement over what's possible, because the challenges that are before us can be solved with technology.

Right, and the exciting part for the people is it's not enough to have the technology or the, the, the system, because, uh and and this is dr west westerman, he mentioned this uh in our uh at mit which is companies are technology moves fast because technology can be programmed. Companies move slowly because people are involved, right, so you got fears, you got process, you got delays, you got stories, all that stuff. That's where the opportunity is in the leadership piece. But I make the assumption that everybody else has also been on that journey and done that work. So where somebody is today, as I get excited and I talk about oh, this is all possible. They don't have access to NectarFlowcom yet, right. They don't have access to their own custom agent, they haven't built it, so they don't understand what's actually happening behind the curtains and so they don't have the context to even know that, oh, I could solve this problem with AI.

That's not a problem today, because the way that we've structured this is we and this was the McKinsey and the IBM and the Accenture and these KPMGs, all these big consulting companies is you're not going to want to spend $20 million or $2 million a year with a consultant to then tell you about how to spend money with certain consultants. So we at nectar flow can be that outside innovation arm that can say, hey, here's where you are, that's where you start, yeah, you begin here and it's unique to you and what you want to accomplish for your reasons, not ours, yeah, and and move them through a learning environment and an experience environment and supporting them with technology, software developers, business orchestrators, those that have gone before them that understand like, oh, this problem can be solved this way, right, have you thought about this? That, I think, is where the opportunity is and that can be unleashed within a company too, absolutely, so there could be a leader in a company going. I want to be that for my company.

Yeah, right, and there are, I'm sure, there are. There are I mean there have to be.

Right, and so we hope to bring a lot of those things together for those individuals to work on a platform, work faster, but also have this depth of team and range of services and opportunities to to do the things that that matter financially for an organization, cause it's and it's not enough to just be like, oh, this is cute and we want to do this. It's like, look, there are people there are companies going out of business right now. Right, there are, there are people losing jobs because they haven't taken certain things seriously. And now it's like this is your wake-up call to say this is an opportunity where you can be a different leader and, guess what, everybody's at the same level playing field right now. It's not like, oh, I got 20 years in finance.

Right.

And they've done the like you are at a massive opportunity. I don't care if you're a leasing agent or a general manager or CEO. Like it's a real opportunity.

Yeah, everyone's exploring it and I mean we probably need to wrap it up here. But what is interesting too, that I learned coming in knowing virtually nothing outside of what the general public probably did about AI, is that it's not only AI. It's AI plus automations, plus, you know, and it's almost like each element was missing the other. So we had a lot of automation tools out there. We had a lot of automations built that were doing good work, but that AI element into the automation plus an integration, it's like there's the magic right. So I think that's the piece that people need to understand is that it's a combination of a lot of things. Some of it already exists. There's a lot of automation already happening, but adding that AI element into that and then adding integration into that, that's where the magic really happens.

Yeah, I mean, I'll just, that's a bow tie. I mean that's a great thing, because you can do each one of these things and one may bring more value than the other. But when you put them, all want me to play over there and I'm on iCloud and Apple and they want me to play there it's like you can be anywhere you want to be.

As long as you know how to connect it all Exactly, yeah.

Cool.

Well, this was a great conversation, yeah.

Well, thanks for doing it and, yeah, we'll follow some more about what's next. We do have a webinar series coming up, oh yeah, so let's, we'll put a link in the description on how to access that. But what we intend to do is have an opportunity to let people sort of learn in public, explore some of these possibilities, and every week will be different. Right now we're we're going to do it every Wednesday, but they can register for the upcoming one and then we'll probably from that, develop what we talk about in the next one and really, at scale, get in front of some people to help support them you know, answering questions, that type of stuff. And then, of course, if people want to do a demo or get involved, they want to bring thoughtful, strategic AI affordably into their business. I would say just nectarflowcom, book a demo. I think there's a way. There's a button like talk to an automation expert or click on that, and then you can spend time with us, and we'd love to work with companies that are trying to make their business better.

Sounds great. I love it.

All right, for that we are out. That was an episode inspired by AI and executed by us, so we'll see you in the next one.