There is a new class of professional emerging in real estate, and almost nobody is naming them yet.
I am going to name them. They are the operator class. Agents, brokers, transaction coordinators, and team leads who are not waiting for the perfect AI product to arrive in their inbox. They are building their own AI workflows, right now, from off-the-shelf tools that already exist. They are stitching together frontier AI models, voice tools, scheduling agents, and document processors into custom operating systems that run their day. They are the early operators of the AI era of real estate, and they are quietly pulling ahead of every agent who is still waiting for permission to start.
This is not speculation. The pattern has been documented at scale across every knowledge industry, and it is now starting to show up in real estate.
Microsoft's WorkLab research in 2024 was the first major study to identify what they called the AI power user. The definition is precise. A power user is somebody who uses generative AI daily or several times a week, treats AI as a versatile collaborator, embeds AI across diverse workflows rather than confining it to a single task, experiments and adapts continuously, and reimagines workflows rather than simply automating existing tasks. Microsoft found that 90 percent or more of power users reported that AI makes their work feel more manageable, increases their creativity, and boosts their motivation. Power users are not simply doing more work. They are doing different work, in a different way, with a different relationship to the tools.
Betterworks released its 2025 State of Performance Enablement Report, drawing on insights from more than 2,100 employees and leaders across the United States and the United Kingdom. The findings sharpen the picture. Nearly 8 in 10 highly engaged employees, often the AI-savvy ones, are actively seeking new opportunities. Sixty-five percent of AI-resistant employees plan to stay where they are. The talent divide is no longer between high performers and low performers. It is between operators who have absorbed AI into how they think and work, and operators who have not.
G2's 2025 Buyer Behavior Report adds another data point. Fifty percent of enterprise software buyers switched vendors last year specifically in pursuit of better AI capabilities. More than 60 percent now prefer AI-native platforms over building things in-house. The market has voted. The professionals who can run AI-native workflows are the ones the rest of the industry is rebuilding around.
Real estate is not exempt from this shift. Real estate is on the same curve as every other industry, and the operator class in our industry is taking the same shape it has taken everywhere else.
What the new operator class looks like in real estate
Here is what the new operator class looks like in real estate, based on what I have been observing in conversations with agents across multiple markets.
They do not buy a single AI product and call it done. They run a stack. The stack typically includes a frontier model for general-purpose work, a specialized tool for transaction documentation, a voice tool for capturing notes between client meetings, a CRM with AI capability for lead and follow-up management, and a custom prompt library they have built and refined over months of trial and error. None of that stack was sold to them as a package. They assembled it themselves.
They treat the workflow as the product. The agent is the architect. The AI is the labor. The workflow is the thing they keep refining, week after week, watching what works and replacing what does not. They are not loyal to any particular tool. They are loyal to the outcome the tool produces.
They run small experiments constantly. A new prompt. A new tool. A new combination of tools. Most experiments do not pan out. The ones that do get integrated into the workflow and become permanent. The ones that do not get discarded without ceremony. There is no sunk cost on a tool that did not deliver. There is also no fear of trying the next one.
They protect their time aggressively. The whole point of the workflow is to reclaim hours that used to be eaten by administrative friction. The operator class is not building these workflows to do more transactions. They are building them to do the same transactions in less time, with more attention to the parts of the work that actually require their judgment.
They learn in public. They post about what is working. They share prompts. They tag colleagues who would benefit from a tool they discovered. They are part of an emerging network of practitioners who are figuring out the playbook in real time, in front of each other, faster than any traditional training program could ever assemble.
They are not technical. This is the part that surprises people most. The new operator class is not made up of agents with computer science backgrounds. Most of them could not write a line of code. What they have is something more valuable. They have the willingness to try things, the curiosity to keep iterating, and the operator mindset that already runs their business. The technical sophistication of the underlying tools is now low enough that operator instinct is the only meaningful prerequisite.
The conversations the rest of the industry is still having
Most of the industry has not noticed any of this is happening. The conversations in brokerage offices and at industry events are still framed around whether AI will arrive, when it will arrive, what it will do, and whether agents should be worried about it. Those conversations are five years late. The agents who are pulling ahead are not having those conversations anymore. They are running their stack, refining their workflow, and quietly compounding capability that the rest of the industry will not be able to match by the time it figures out what is happening.
The PwC 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer found that the skills required for AI-exposed jobs are changing 66 percent faster than for non-AI-exposed jobs, more than 2.5 times faster than the year before. Translation. Job descriptions are being rewritten in real time. The operator class is rewriting their own job description right now. The operators who are not in this group are watching their job descriptions get rewritten for them by competitors who are six months ahead.
What this means and what it does not mean
I want to be clear about what this means and what it does not mean.
It does not mean every agent needs to become a technologist. The new operator class does not look like a coding bootcamp graduate. It looks like a 20-year veteran agent who has decided to pair her market expertise with three or four AI tools she has learned to use over the last eight months. The technical bar is low. The willingness bar is what matters.
It does not mean the small teams or the solo agents are at a disadvantage. In fact, the opposite. Solo agents and small teams are often the fastest to adopt because they do not have to wait for a brokerage technology committee to approve a vendor. They make the call themselves and execute the same week.
It does not mean the early operators are gambling. The tools they are using are stable, well-documented, and used by millions of professionals across every industry. The risk profile of building a workflow on these tools is lower than the risk of not building one and watching the gap widen every quarter.
What it does mean is this. The agents who are going to define the next decade of real estate are already being formed right now, and they are forming in this exact pattern. They are not announcing themselves. They are not asking for validation. They are running their stack, refining their workflow, and operating at a level the rest of the industry has not seen yet.
What brokers and agents should do this week
If you are a broker reading this, the most strategic thing you can do is identify the operators on your team who are already in this group and make their workflow visible to the rest of your agents. Not as a mandate. As a model. Brokers who try to push AI adoption from the top down are seeing modest results. Brokers who are surfacing the operators who are already winning with AI and letting the rest of the team learn from them are seeing dramatically better results.
If you are an agent reading this and you recognize yourself in the description, keep going. Share what is working. Document your prompts. Help the agents around you who are still waiting for the moment to feel right. The willingness gap is the variable that determines who pulls ahead and who falls behind, and that gap can be closed by example faster than it can be closed by argument.
If you are an agent reading this and you do not recognize yourself in the description, the next move is straightforward. Pick one workflow. Pick one tool. Run one experiment this week. See what happens. Then run another one. The operator class is not gated. Anybody can join. The cost of admission is the willingness to start before you feel ready.
The operator class is not a label that real estate gives itself. It is a description of a pattern that is already playing out in every market, in every brokerage, in every team that has agents using AI to redesign their day. The pattern was first documented at scale in 2024. By 2026, it is no longer emerging. It is established. The remaining question is only how wide the gap gets between the operators who are in it and the ones who are not.
The gap is widening every quarter. It is going to keep widening. The professionals who close it are the ones who decide, this week, that they are tired of waiting and they are going to build the workflow themselves. The tools are here. The patterns are documented. The early operators are publicly sharing what works. There is no remaining excuse to be on the sidelines.
This is the real story of AI in real estate. Not whether it is coming. Not whether it will replace agents. Not whether the perfect product will arrive. The story is that a new class of operator is forming right now, and they are going to define our industry's next chapter while the rest of the industry is still debating whether the chapter has started.
The chapter has started. The operators are already in it. The only question left is who joins them.
Judd Hoffman is CEO and Co-Founder of Ethica AI, building AI-powered tools for real estate transaction workflows.