Eight things AI can't replace

I have a very simple question for all of you: what won't change in the next ten years?

Sit with that for a second, because I promise you, it's not the question you've been asking. The question you've been asking, the one every appraiser in every Facebook group is asking right now, is "what's going to change." What's AI currently doing and going to do to my business. What's the next AVM going to look like. Is the technology coming for my license. What's the big 3.6 change going to do to my business? Those are the questions everybody's obsessed with, and I'm going to tell you right up front; they're the wrong questions to some degree.

Yes, they are important questions to be asking, but they're not the only questions to be asking. While everyone is focusing on what is changing, very few are honing in on what won't change. If you're a student of history like I am, sometimes the most insightful answers to questions about the future lie in studying what persists in addition to what has changed.

By the way, the guy who asked those other questions I mentioned in the intro is none other than Jeff Bezos, and he's built a few businesses you might have heard of. Somebody once asked him what's going to change in the next ten years, and he stopped them and said that's not the interesting question. The interesting question is what's not going to change. Because when you know what's permanent, that's what you build your whole business around. His answer, by the way, was almost embarrassingly simple. He said people will always want lower prices and faster delivery. That's it. That's the whole insight. And he built one of the largest companies on the planet on top of that one boring, obvious sentence.

Now here's why I'm bringing this up today. Everybody in our industry right now is white-knuckling it through every headline about artificial intelligence. Every new valuation tool, every automated review product, every "the appraiser is going the way of the buggy" post gets shared into every group chat within about six minutes of getting published. And I understand the anxiety. I really do. But I want to spend this episode doing something different than adding to the panic. I want to hand you a list. Eight things about your business, your clients, and this profession that I don't believe are changing in the next ten years, no matter how fast the technology moves. I call them the Constants. And friends, if you build your business on these eight things instead of chasing every shiny piece of software that comes down the pike, you're going to be just fine. Better than fine. You're going to be positioned while everybody else is still panicking.

Before I give you the list, I want to name something, because I think most of you are living inside of it right now without realizing it.

You are playing defense against a moving target. Every single day, there's a new AI tool, a new valuation model, a new claim about accuracy, a new form that’s not really a form, and you're out there trying to track all of it, trying to stay one step ahead, trying to figure out if this is the year it finally comes for you. That's an exhausting way to run a business, and, happy to say, you will never win that game. The technology is always going to be faster than your ability to track it. Always. That's not a criticism of you, that's just math. Software updates monthly. You and I don’t.

So, if you're spending your energy trying to out-predict the next update, you are fighting on ground the enemy chose, not ground you chose. And friends, I don't care what arena, business, or industry you're in, you never want to fight on ground somebody else picked for you. Sun Tzu taught us in The Art of War how to strategically win when the battleground is not in your favor.

Here's the shift I want you to make today. Stop playing defense against what's changing and start playing offense on what's permanent. Those are two completely different postures. One has you reactive, anxious, and always a step behind. The other has you responsive, building, deliberately and intentionally, on ground that isn't moving.

Let's start with the foundation, because everything else on this list sits on top of it.

Constant number one: People trust people more than they trust systems, especially when money or property is on the line.

Think about the biggest, scariest financial decisions in a person's life. Buying a house. Getting a loan. Fighting a tax assessment. In every single one of those moments, a human being wants another human being standing across from them, not a screen spitting out a number with no face attached to it. That's not me just being an old boomer, that's just how people are wired when the stakes go up. The higher the stakes, the more a person wants a human they can look in the eye. The more the stakes go up, the more human beings want another human being to take them by the hand and walk them confidently through the challenges. AI doesn't change that deep wiring. It can't. It's not a software problem, it's a people problem, and people haven't changed nearly as fast as the technology around them has, nor will they anytime soon.

Constant number two: The system is built on compliance and regulations and will always want someone independent to sign off on value, not because AI can't estimate a number, but because someone has to be liable for it.

Now listen carefully to this one, because I think a lot of you are missing the actual argument here. Nobody's claiming AI can't produce a number. It already can and has been able to for decades. Automated valuation models have existed for years and they're getting better. That was never the real question. The real question is who's accountable when that number turns out to be wrong. When a loan goes bad, when a court case turns on a value, somebody has to be able to point to a licensed, accountable human being and say, you signed this, you're responsible.

A piece of software can't carry liability. It can't be deposed. It can't lose its license. Until that legal architecture and the regulatory framework built on it changes, and friends, I promise you, that architecture moves slower than a Sunday church potluck, somebody with a license and a signature is going to be required in that chain. That's not opinion, that's how our entire lending and legal system is built.

Constant number three: Judgment under ambiguity will always be an issue.

Here's where I want you to really lean in, because this is the one that should give you the most confidence about your future. AI is extraordinary at pattern matching. That's all it is at this point, and I'll fight anyone on this topic. Not because I'm smarter than somebody who works in that field, but precisely because that’s what those very people tell us. AI at this point is an extremely fast pattern matching machine that matches patterns based on what it's trained on, that's it. Feed it a thousand transactions that look like the one in front of it, and it'll spit out a number fast and often accurate. But you know as well as I do that plenty of your assignments don't look like the thousand before them. The comps disagree. The market's moving in a direction the data hasn't caught up to yet. Something about the property just doesn't fit the model. That's exactly the moment your client needs a human being who can sit with the ambiguity and make a call, and it's exactly the place the technology is weakest. Machines are built to handle what they've already seen. Your value as a professional lives increasingly more in the moments they haven't seen before.

Alright, so we've established why trust and judgment aren't going anywhere. Now let's talk about where to actually put your energy, because knowing a truth and building a business on it are two different things.

Constant number four: Complexity creates specialists.

Here's some good news that most appraisers are too anxious to see clearly right now. As the automated tools eat up the simple, cookie-cutter, straightforward assignments, two paths open up in front of you. Path one, you race everybody else to the bottom competing for the shrinking pool of easy work. Path two, you become the person who handles what the automation can't touch. Complex properties. Litigation support. Estate work. Unusual markets, unusual situations, unusual properties that don't fit neatly into anybody's model.

Friends, the appraiser who leans into complexity isn't fighting the technology. They're using it to clear the competition out from underneath them. Every appraiser who quits or gets squeezed out doing the easy stuff is one less competitor standing between you and the harder, better-paying work you could be doing instead.

Side note on the so-called, 'easy stuff'. I see some know-it -all appraisers in the forums saying that all the cookie cutter assignments are already gone, having been removed from the system by appraisal waivers. I've been saying for 10+ years now to stop listening to the know-it-all assholes in some of these forums. The vast majority of them are simply blowhards that didn’t know how to build a solid business based on timeless principles, so they project onto the world all of their own failings as if what has happened to them, because of them, will also be happening to you.

I've built 3 appraisal companies, in addition to the other businesses and industries I've created wealth in, and I still own and run one of those appraisal companies. While a large portion of our business is in the private side of the appraisal business, we also have a lending division that does a ton of business, most of which I can still easily classify as 'cookie cutter'.

No, all of the easy stuff has not been gobbled up by waivers. Has some of it? Of course! That’s exactly what the waiver is designed for and that’s not a bad thing. It may be for you and your business, but not every home or transaction needs an appraisal on it. The technology has simply caught up to that fact. But it's not all gone and there are thousands of appraisers around the country who can attest to that fact. Stop listening to the goobers telling you to close down shop and go fishing just because they suck at business.

Constant number five: Communities are all unique and different from one another, and the value of knowing the neighborhood does not get replaced by more data, it gets more valuable as the data gets noisier.

A national model may be able to tell you the average. It cannot tell you that the house on the corner backs up to a busy road that nobody driving by would notice on a map. It cannot tell you that one street in an otherwise fine neighborhood carries a reputation the data will never capture. That kind of knowledge isn't some soft, feel-good skill you list on a resume. It's called information asymmetry, plain and simple. You know something the model doesn't, and in any market, anywhere, information the other guy doesn't have is worth money.

Will the AI eventually be able to know some of that stuff too? Probably, but it's not there yet and it gets the important stuff completely wrong all the time. If you aren’t using AI in any meaningful way, you wouldn’t know that. We do use it and we see just how bad it really is at things beyond writing fast code, coming up with content and ideation, and making crappy images. Bottom line, AI is really good at the things its good at, and it is completely unreliable at the things it's not, which far outnumber the things it is good at right now.

Constant number six: Relationships compound.

I want you to think about this in terms of two completely different businesses. Business one is entirely dependent on AMC assignments; faceless orders coming through a portal from people who don't know your name and don't care to. Business two has spent fifteen years building direct relationships with lenders, attorneys, agents, and estate planners who call you by name because they trust you specifically. That second business has something no algorithm, no update, no faster piece of software can shortcut. Trust built over hundreds of real interactions doesn't reset because a new tool showed up. It only becomes more valuable, because fewer and fewer people are willing to put in the years it takes to build it. Everybody wants the shortcut. Almost nobody wants to do the compounding work. That's exactly why the compounding work still pays off.

By the way, we talk about this all the time in the appraiser increase academy private Facebook community, which you can try out completely free for a whole month. It's called the increase academy for a good reason: we focus on increase in almost every area of your life and business, not just how to get another order into your inbox. Check it out if you want to grow, not only your business, but your wealth, your investments, your health, your relationships, your tech, and your opportunities. It's one of the most unique communities for appraisers precisely BECAUSE it's not just about your appraisal business. Check it out at www.coachblaine.com/freemonth and see for yourself.

Friends, I want you to feel the urgency underneath these next two constants, because this is where the whole episode turns from comforting to actionable.

Constant number seven: The cheaper it gets to fake something, the more valuable a verified, trusted human becomes.

Think about what's happening right now, today, all around you. It is getting almost free to generate fake content, fake reviews, fake voices, fake expertise dressed up to look real. And friends, when fakery gets cheap, trust becomes even more valuable. It becomes the scarce, premium asset in the whole market. A lot of appraisers hear about AI and think the trend is running against them. I'm telling you, you've got the direction backwards. The rarer real, accountable, trustworthy humans become in any marketplace, the more that trust is worth. But here's the catch, trust doesn't just show up because you've been licensed for twenty years. You have to actively build it and actively signal it. Sitting quietly doing good work and hoping people notice isn't a strategy anymore, if it ever was.

Constant number eight: someone will always need to explain why a number is what it is.

This one right here reframes everything you think you're selling. You are not selling a number. You never were. Clients, lenders, courts, they don't just want an output dropped in their lap, they want to understand the reasoning behind it so they can actually trust the conclusion. A piece of software can generate a value. It cannot sit across the table from a nervous first-time buyer, or a couple divorcing, or a family trying to settle dad's estate and explain, in plain language a scared human being can actually understand, why the number is what it is. That explanation, that translation from technical to human, that's the real service. The number was always just the byproduct. You thought your appraisal was the product, but you’ve been the product this whole time.

If your entire business model is built on doing the simple, commoditized, anybody-could-do-it version of this work, AI didn't create your problem. It simply exposed one that was already sitting there. That business was fragile long before any of this technology showed up. It was fragile the day you built it around volume instead of value, around being interchangeable instead of being irreplaceable. AI didn't break anything that was actually strong.

I'm not up here telling you to be anti-technology. I say in the Increase Academy all the time that I am not anti-AI, I'm just an AI realist. I use these tools every single week to make my own life and business better. This isn't about rejecting AI. It's about being honest with yourself about what you were actually building this whole time. Were you building a business rooted in trust, judgment, relationships, and explanation, the things on this list that don't move? Or were you building a business rooted entirely on being fast and cheap at a task a machine was always eventually going to do faster and cheaper than you?

And that's not a rhetorical question, friends. I want you to actually answer it for yourself before we close this out. If you built a business that the machines could eventually do better and faster, then yes, you are going to be exposed. But, if you built a business based on principles, axioms, and values that never change, then the technology, the AI, simply becomes a helpful tool to amplify those principles.

So, here's what I want you to do this week. I want you to take these eight and run your business through them like an audit. I did a whole podcast back in February called, 'Your AI Bullshit Detector' where I gave you an auditing tool called the AMPLIFY framework to run all your AI tools through to help decide which ones were useful and which ones were just a waste of time. I want you to use the principles we've talked about in this episode as something of a template for your life and business.

Trust. Liability and accountability. Judgment in ambiguous situations. Specialization in complexity. Local knowledge. Compounding relationships. Verified trust in a world of fakes. The explanation behind the number.

Go down that list and ask yourself, honestly, which of these is my business actually built on right now, and which of these have I been ignoring completely? Because I promise you, most of you reading this or listening to this have got one or two of these working for you by accident and the other six sitting there completely untouched. That's not a business built on purpose. That's a business built on whatever happened to work.

Pick just one this week. If you've been living entirely off AMC orders with zero direct relationships, go make one phone call to a referral source you've been meaning to reconnect with. If you've been chasing every easy, cookie-cutter assignment because it's comfortable, go raise your hand for the next complex assignment that crosses your desk instead of passing it off. If you've never once explained your reasoning to a client beyond handing them a PDF, do it on your very next assignment; pick up the phone, or better yet, do a quick video walking them through the why. Small, deliberate action, aimed at one of these eight things. That's how you build on ground that doesn't move. And, by the way, this works for every business. This isn’t just for appraisers. When something is built on principles and values, it works everywhere forever.

Everybody in this industry right now is asking what's going to change. I want you asking a different question. What won't change, and am I building on it?

Build on the Constants, friends, not the trends. Everything you build on a trend gets rebuilt cheaper and faster by somebody else next year. Nothing you build on trust, judgment, relationships, and explanation ever gets rebuilt out from under you, because those things were never about the technology in the first place. They were always about you.

If you want help figuring out exactly which of these eight your business needs most right now, that's precisely the kind of work we do inside the Appraiser Increase Academy. Head to CoachBlaine.com/freemonth and come see what it looks like to build a business on purpose and on something that actually lasts.

Until next time, friends, do more, be more, live more, give more. I'm out.