An Uber-like experience while booking a flat

Real estate transactions mostly happen in traditional ways, led by agents and the transactions can take a few months. Compass, a New York based real estate technology company plans to change that with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). It is trying to create an Uber kind of platform model to connect agents, buyers and sellers and use data to enable transparent and quicker transactions. Lot of the product development is happening out of its centers in Hyderabad and elsewhere in India where it plans to hire more engineers. Joseph Sirosh, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Compass Inc believes many of the real estate transactions will be digitized over the next decade or so. Sirosh is passionate about AI, ML, and automation. He worked at Amazon and Microsoft before joining Compass in 2018. In an interview over Zoom, Sirosh discusses data, AI, ML, how real estate is changing with use of tech and more. Edited excerpts:In the last 15 years you've been working on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and automation. Where have we reached?In the early days, AI was strictly applied to numerical data. And one of the first successful applications of AI was in credit card fraud detection. In the last 10 years, AI has made incredible strides in speech recognition, which is why you see Alexa, Google Home, Siri get better. Today, Facebook, Google, everybody else uses AI in a big way in understanding your intent and giving you the right answer.How do you see AI, ML impacting our lives, by say 2030?You won't see AI differently, but as part of software. You are experiencing AI every time you use your phone, open Facebook, search on Google and so on. Every time you use Siri or Google Assistant, you're using AI. In the next 10 years, we will see AI being applied a lot to helping people be better at what they do. AI will become Augmented Intelligence – it will make us significantly more effective at the repetitive tasks we do. So it frees us up and gives time for more creative mind space.From working with disruptors like Amazon, Microsoft you joined Compass, which is into real estate. What motivated you to join Compass? How is Compass using AI & ML?The biggest opportunities in the world are to go to places where problems have not been solved. Real estate is an ancient industry. It has been around almost as long as human civilization has been around, and it has been bought and sold in traditional ways. At some point in our future, whether it is 10 years or 15 years from now, most experiences around real estate transactions and how they work are going to become digital.The transaction portion of real estate is incredibly complex. It is every person's biggest transaction in their lives, but it is not trusted. It takes several months to do a transaction, finding a home is hard, getting its history, developing trust in that transaction, making payments, making the transaction come together, all of that is really hard. And the world is like that. Vast majority of real estate transactions are done by agents. Imagine taking all of those functions of agents —marketing, search, documentation, loan processing, location, price, advisory functions etc – and making it completely digital, put it on cloud, served over an app on mobile.That will make it simpler for everybody. Our goal is to make real estate transactions simple and pleasant for everyone with the power of technology.You see that change in transactions in the US market or outside as well?I believe in all the major cities – particularly the higher value transactions, where there’s data available will be more digital. In 10 years, in big cities across the world, real estate transactions will become better with use of technology.What part of real estate is Compass trying to digitise?Just like Amazon got started in books you must have a starting point. The area we picked was to create a platform that simplifies the real estate agent's work. Because that's 90% of the work done by agents all over the world. If you make their work digital and, on a platform, then their clients are going to interact digitally.So, search, marketing, document processing, pricing all become better and sharper with AI. When you create a platform like that, real estate agents all across the country join that platform. Just like Uber. When Uber created a platform for ride hailing it signed up drivers in market after market to serve more clients and their revenue grew. Same way, we recruit every agent in the US into that platform. And as they come into the platform, more and more real estate transactions are done through the platform. And our revenue grows. So, our goal is to make that end-to-end transaction come together in 48 hours or just a few days. Today, it can take a few months to complete transactions.What's the focus of the development center in India?We have 150 engineers in Hyderabad. This headcount will increase to 400, in the next 12 to 18 months, in Hyderabad, Noida and Bangalore. In all we have about 1,000 people globally. The India teams are developing things like the Android app and the core pieces of the platform.The agents will come to the platform. Do you see a situation where the need for agents will actually reduce?Take a profession like law. There's a lot of paperwork. You can digitize a lot of things around a lawyers’ profession, making it easier and quicker to access information. But lawyers will be around. So, with the digital platform the real estate agent becomes a better advisor, because their work becomes platformized and it can be done faster, with better data, better pricing of homes, better marketing and all of those things. But being a good advisor for the buyer and the seller is a capability that will survive.Does Compass plan to offer its services in India?Eventually. Going international is something we are definitely very much looking into. We haven't decided when.

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