Compass Gets 15,000 Agents Using AI Assistant in Weeks

About 15,000 of Compass's 83,000 real estate agents generated more than 97,000 AI conversations within weeks of the brokerage's July debut of its new AI Assistant tool.

The company reports those figures as evidence that a deliberate, top-down adoption campaign is working. Compass held a demo day to launch AI Assistant, watched live by more than 10,000 agents. CEO Robert Reffkin, President of Growth Rory Golod, Chief Technology Officer Shay Artzi, and President Neda Navab all presented the tool, alongside agents who had used it during the pilot and feedback phase.

Since then, senior leaders have visited local offices to promote the assistant. Compass also trained corporate staff at regional offices to teach agents how to use the tool, which handles repetitive administrative tasks and nudges agents toward new sales opportunities.

"It takes a lot of work to get agents to actually adopt these tools," says Golod.

The push addresses a hard problem. Nine out of ten agents across the industry report using AI today or planning to do so, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), and more than two-thirds say AI saves them at least one hour of work each week. But the NAR also reports the median age of a real estate agent is 57, and Pew Research finds older Americans use AI chatbots less for work than younger employees.

Brokerages also carry a mixed technology track record. The industry was slow to embrace the internet and mobile apps, an opening that online marketplaces like Zillow and Redfin exploited as homebuyers moved to digital channels faster than agents did.

A second risk comes from AI itself. There are early signs of buyers and sellers experimenting with chatbots for do-it-yourself transactions to save on fees. A physical therapist assistant reported saving thousands using an AI platform for a home contract. A man in Florida says he used ChatGPT to close the sale of his home in five days for $100,000 more than real estate agents estimated the property would fetch. A technology reporter at the New York Times wrote earlier this year that he used AI almost entirely to sell a home in upstate New York.

Regulation is a third pressure point. In New York City, a proposal would require landlords, brokers, and online listing platforms to disclose when they have used AI to generate or digitally alter rental listing photos or videos.

Golod argues the technology cannot yet replicate what agents do in person: going into a seller's living room, seeing the property, and outlining a plan to sell it at the highest price with the least hassle.

"To actually sell a home properly and help a buyer buy a home properly, it requires incredible judgment, high EQ, and relationships," says Golod. "Those are just not things that AI has the capability of driving right now, and maybe not a very, very long time, if ever."

The tool itself has evolved with the underlying models. An earlier version, called Compass AI, mostly handled content creation, including marketing materials and social media posts. AI Assistant was built to act more like a human assistant and take real actions: proactively producing a list of prospective clients who may be ready to sell, drafting personalized outreach notes, and compiling lists of potential homes for buyers through a feature called Compass Collections. The tool is voice-enabled, so agents can dictate notes while driving between appointments.

"We moved in a similar path to the industry, moving from chat to agentic," says Artzi. "We saw the value is really in agentic, and so it took us a while, because you want the AI to be aware of all the platforms of tools."

AI Assistant connects 100 different real estate tools within a single platform. Compass designed it so agents only need to know how to prompt the assistant to take an action, without learning Compass-specific branding or software jargon.

"We're starting to see this amazing shift where more and more agents, who in the past used parts of the platform but not all of it, are now really starting to take full advantage," says Golod. "It's going to drive a lot more usage."

The bet for Compass is that deeper engagement with the platform makes its agents harder to displace, just as DIY transactions and chatbot-assisted sales begin to test what agents charge for.