Phil Stringer's AI Journey: From Real Estate COO to AI Strategist - Summit Preview

Full video transcript

What’s going on guys, Darby here, Gen AI University, joined today by Phil Stringer, who’s going to be presenting at the Scale with AI Summit with us on how you can leverage AI to become more efficient, more productive, and use AI to grow your business. Now, Phil and I have done a handful of projects over the last year together creating different tools and helping people understand how to leverage AI to its full potential. I wanted to give you guys an idea, a little bit from Phil himself, who he was, what got him into AI in the first place, and what he’s going to be covering at the summit here, just now, next week.

Phil, so glad to connect again, dude. So good to be here, so excited for the event, I can’t wait, it’s going to be awesome. But yeah, as far as a little bit of a background on me and how I got into this space — I was actually a chief operating officer of a real estate brokerage, and so I ran a team of 30 agents in North Carolina. I remember as AI became more prevalent, a lot of people got really interested in it because of the release of ChatGPT. I was like, man, there’s got to be ways that we can actually use this for real estate agents to sell more homes and save more time, right? Because everyone was just using it for Facebook posts, “let’s write a property description.” I’m like, that’s fine, but there’s got to be ways and strategies that we can use that other agents aren’t using to actually make more money. So that’s really where my deep dive came in. I have friends who are software engineers and developers, so I was able to just kick around some ideas and some strategy and some solutions on, hey, how do we make a real estate agent’s life better? It started in the real estate space because that’s the industry I was in, and then it expanded from there, because these strategies can be for any industry. That’s really the amazing part of it — if you need to make more money or save more time, then some of these strategies can help.

You’re able to communicate the use of AI and the practicality of it so well, and I don’t even know how many stages you’ve been speaking on over the past year — you were always on the move, always on a plane. But what I always notice after you give a speech is how much positivity on social media comes from the aha moments that you’re able to create by walking folks through different ways that they can save more time and make more money. Without giving away too many details, because we only have a couple minutes here, what are some outcomes someone can expect to learn from and implement from the session we’re going to be doing at the summit?

Yeah, I think the important part of all of this — and you touched on the communication side of it — is how can we communicate these things to where anyone can understand. That was my main goal. I was like, look, there’s a lot of things that a lot of smart, tech-savvy people can do, but a majority of your common industry person doesn’t really understand that. So can I take these things and make them so they can actually be understood by any normal person? It doesn’t matter if you’re 70 or 80 years old or 10 years old, can I create strategies that can be done simply? That’s what we’ve been able to do. Some of the things people can look at — I have an Academy with about 1,200 students currently, and we’ve tracked the time savings of these students across every industry. The average person saves 40 hours per month when they implement some of these strategies. That’s really the big thing, because when you boil this all down, I think the most important thing about AI is that you use it to save time, and then you use that time savings to do the things that matter — revenue-generating activities that grow your business. So this isn’t like a magic button where you click it and all of a sudden you make money, but it is something that saves you a ton of time, because you’re doing the same thing or even more than you were doing before, just in less time, and then if you use that time savings for the things that will change your business, that’s when you change your business.

That’s fantastic, and something I think is really practical in terms of what we do now with all this time as AI gets better and better at doing things. You’ve touched on how important it is to just be a good person and build the relationships that you want. Any thoughts on where you see the intersection of AI — as it automates more and more things — where’s your focus going for 2025, and what are the biggest levers people can pull right now that AI can help with?

Yeah, I think a lot of people have a lot of fear around AI because you watch Terminator and people don’t understand it, so there’s confusion. But to me, people are afraid it’s going to make their industry or process less human. A lot of people in the real estate space, they’re like, dude, I don’t want to implement AI, it makes it less human, and this is such a relational business. But honestly, Darby, what I’m seeing is you use AI to save time, so that you can actually use that time savings to be more human to your clients. So the agents who are actually using AI to save time end up being more human and it becomes more relational with their clients, because they’re not bombarded with all of these crazy tasks and writing emails and doing all of these things — they’ve got all that time back now, where they can actually apply it to reaching out and following up with clients and being more relational. So the way I see this thing working is: don’t look at it as making things less human, but use AI on all the mundane tasks so that you can get all that stuff done without spending all the time you used to spend on it, so that you’re freed up to go have a cup of coffee with your client, or whatever it may be.

Yeah, that’s great, and we’ve got a lot of stuff that’s actionable, practical, and can be put into action right away that you’re going to be demonstrating at the summit. So for those of you interested in saving more time, making more money, and building stronger relationships with your customers and clients, make sure that you register for the Scale with AI Summit at scalewithaisummit.com. You get a load of free resources, access to the replays, and a number of other bonus materials and deals that are exclusive to those who register for this free event, which is made free by our awesome sponsors, Gamma and Howdy. So make sure you go ahead and register, and hopefully we’ll see you on the summit live, checking out all the different speakers, and of course Phil Stringer, who’s going to be joining us on November 6th for the live event, and then you can also catch those replays.

Phil, thank you so much for your time here. I know you’re busy, you probably got another plane to catch, but I’ll be seeing you next week on the summit, and I can’t wait to check it out.

Can’t wait, man. Good to see you.