Updated 20 September 2026: first published on Elite Agent in April 2025. The article has been refreshed as an AI basics guide to explaining your AI workflow clearly to clients.
“This AI-written property description is so generic,” you might think when reading another agent’s listing. Later the same day, you use AI to draft your own copy, and it feels quite different.
You know the facts you supplied, the edits you made and the judgement behind the result. The person reading it cannot necessarily see that work.
For an agent learning AI basics, explaining one actual workflow is a useful exercise. It helps you answer a reasonable client question: “What part of this are you doing, and what part is the tool doing?”
Why might clients see AI use differently?
A 2024 paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing reported nine studies involving 4,498 participants. People tended to credit themselves with a larger contribution to AI-assisted work than they credited others with making. They also tended to describe their own use as inspiration and others’ use as outsourcing.
The research provides a useful perspective, but it is not a survey of Australian buyers and sellers. The real estate examples here are my application of the finding. It does not mean every client distrusts AI or that an AI-written listing is necessarily better.
How should I explain my AI use to a client?
Start with the work you actually do. Pick one task, such as drafting a property description, and write down four things:
- What the tool helps produce.
- What information you provide.
- What you check and change yourself.
- Who takes responsibility for the finished work.
If you cannot explain a step, investigate it before describing the workflow to a client. Be equally clear about whether personal information is involved and where the client can raise a concern.
A largely automated process should not be described as “a little inspiration”. Your explanation needs to reflect the extent of the tool’s contribution.
Try a prompt to make your explanation clearer
Help me explain one actual use of AI in my real estate work to a client.
Task and tool contribution: [DETAILS]
Information I provide: [DETAILS]
My human checks and edits: [DETAILS]
Person responsible for the result: [ROLE]
Relevant client choices or questions: [CONFIRMED DETAILS]
Ask me about missing steps before drafting. Do not invent experience, capabilities, privacy protections, permissions, results or checks I have not described.
Draft a plain-English explanation of up to 80 words. Be accurate about how much of the work is automated. Explain the task, inputs and human review, and invite questions without promising a particular outcome.
Separately list anything I need to confirm with my agency before using the explanation. Do not turn uncertainty into reassuring claims.What could that sound like in practice?
Adapt these examples only if they describe your actual process:
“AI helps me draft different ways to explain the property’s features. I provide the property facts, check the draft against them and review the copy before it is published.”
“I use AI to help organise market information I’ve selected. I check the figures, dates and comparables before discussing them with you.”
A broader answer could be: “Yes, I use AI for this specific task. I can talk you through the information involved and the checks I make. What would you like to know about the process?”
These explanations are more useful than saying the tool analyses hundreds of properties or guarantees better marketing when that is not what your workflow does.
Make sure the explanation matches the service
Read your draft with the colleague responsible for the process. Check that the review steps happen in practice and that any description of data handling is accurate. If a client asks something you cannot answer, find out rather than improvising reassurance.
Keep the explanation up to date when the workflow changes. The point is to make your contribution understandable while leaving room for an honest conversation about the tool’s role.
Your local knowledge, relationships and professional judgement are easiest to appreciate when people can see how you use them in the work they receive.
The original version appeared in Samantha McLean’s AI Powered Agents newsletter. Read the refreshed source article on AI Powered Real Estate by Samantha McLean on Substack.