Moving at the speed of trust.
Someone said that to me today and it stopped me cold. I walked with it for a while. The more you trust something, the faster you move. That is how it works in every corner of life. You move fast with the people who have earned your trust. You move slow with the ones who have not. You move fast in the neighborhoods you know. You move slow in the ones you do not. You move fast with tools you understand. You move slow with tools you do not. Trust is not a feeling. It is a throttle.
Then my mind went to technology. Then it went to AI. And the pattern held.
The only way we are actually going to trust AI is to immerse ourselves in it. Not read about it. Not watch someone else use it. Not listen to a panel of experts argue about whether it is going to save us or ruin us. Use it ourselves, on real problems, in our real work, until we see what it does and what it does not do. Trust is not built by marketing. It is not built by thought leadership. It is built by experience.
The data backs this up
The Fall 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Flash Poll on AI found that across five major markets, trust in AI ranged from 87 percent in China and 67 percent in Brazil down to 39 percent in Germany, 36 percent in the UK, and 32 percent in the United States. We are sitting near the bottom of the developed world on AI trust. And the same poll found something even more important underneath that headline. Hands-on experience is the single fastest route to trust. The more people used AI, the more they trusted it. In four of the five markets, employees who said AI had helped them find solutions at work were far more likely to express trust in it than those who said it had no impact. The trust gap ranged from 26 to 46 percentage points. That is not a small effect. That is a trust landslide driven entirely by doing the work.
The same poll found something else that should land hard. Among people who reject AI, only 18 percent reported actually having a bad experience with it. Most distrust is not built on evidence. It is built on imagination. We are afraid of a thing we have not used.
That is the whole problem.
And it is the whole opportunity
If most of the resistance in your industry is rooted in imagination rather than experience, then the fastest way to pull ahead is to stop imagining and start using. The people imagining stay scared. The people using stop being scared. It is that simple.
I see this play out in real estate every week. I talk to agents who tell me AI is coming for their job. I talk to agents who tell me AI is going to transform their day. The difference between those two agents almost always traces back to one variable. The ones who are worried have not used it. The ones who are excited have. Same industry. Same market. Same products available. Different relationship to the tool, because one group has immersed themselves in it and the other has not.
The agents who have used it do not think AI is magic. They think it is useful. They know exactly what it gets wrong. They know exactly what it gets right. They do not overestimate it and they do not underestimate it. They have a calibrated view, and the only way to get a calibrated view is to spend time with the thing. The agents who have not used it swing between two poles. Either they think AI is going to replace them entirely, or they think it is a gimmick. Neither view is accurate. Both are symptoms of imagination filling in for experience.
Where the industry actually is
The National Association of Realtors 2025 Technology Survey shows where the industry actually is. 20 percent of agents use AI tools daily. 22 percent use them weekly. 27 percent use them a few times a month. And 32 percent have not used AI in their business at all. So roughly two out of three agents are already using AI at some cadence. That number was a fraction of what it is now two years ago. The shift is happening. It is happening through hands-on use, not through whitepapers.
Here is what that tells me. The agents who are using AI weekly are not more brilliant than the ones who are not. They did not attend a conference that made the lightbulb go off. They are not early adopters by personality type. They opened a tool. They tried it on a real task. They saw it do one thing well. And that one experience gave them the confidence to try a second thing. That is trust compounding. That is the speed of trust accelerating because the trust is being earned with every use.
The compounding curve
The first time you use AI to draft something and it comes back usable, you trust it a little. The second time, you trust it more. The tenth time, you are not thinking about trust anymore. You are thinking about what else you can hand to it. That is what immersion looks like. That is what the curve looks like. And nobody gets on that curve by reading about it.
The agents who are still sitting out are not behind because they are unintelligent. They are behind because they have not put their hands on the tool. They are reading about AI. They are hearing about AI in the break room. They are watching AI get talked about on television. None of that builds trust. All of that builds noise. There is a difference between being informed about AI and being experienced with AI, and only one of those actually changes what you can do tomorrow morning.
This applies to every industry
This applies to every industry, not just real estate. The only way you actually build a relationship with a new tool is to use it. You will hit rough edges. You will hit moments where it does something wrong. You will also hit moments where it does something you did not think was possible. All of that is the work of trust building. You cannot skip it. You cannot read your way into it. You cannot outsource it to a consultant. You have to sit down, try something, see what happens, and try again.
There is a version of the next five years where the professionals who immerse themselves in AI pull so far ahead of the ones who do not that the gap becomes uncatchable. The Edelman data already shows the early edges of it. People who have had positive experiences with AI trust it more. People who trust it more adopt it faster. People who adopt it faster get better at using it. People who get better at using it generate more positive experiences. That loop does not slow down. It accelerates. Every week someone spends using AI is a week someone else is losing.
And the gap does not feel uncatchable from the inside. It feels like a small decision not to try something today. Then a small decision not to try it tomorrow. Then a quarter goes by. Then a year. Then someone at the same desk two offices down is operating at a different level and nobody can remember exactly when that happened. That is how these things work. Trust gaps compound quietly until they show up as performance gaps, and by then the decision not to try the tool was made a hundred times ago.
Stop reading about AI. Go use it.
I am not telling anyone to trust AI blindly. Blind trust is a terrible idea in every context. I am telling people to trust the process of building trust the right way. Use the tool. See what it can do. See what it cannot. Develop a real sense of its limits and its strengths. That is not a feeling you can read into. That is a feeling you have to earn. You earn it the way you earn trust with a new hire, a new neighborhood, a new relationship. You show up. You pay attention. You let experience do the teaching.
Moving at the speed of trust is not a slogan. It is a description of how humans have always worked and how we are going to work with AI too. The faster you trust it, the faster you move. The only way to trust it is to use it. That is the whole playbook. There is no shortcut, there is no workaround, and there is no substitute for the hours you put in with your hands on the tool.
Stop reading about AI. Go use it.
Judd Hoffman is CEO and Co-Founder of Ethica AI, building AI-powered tools for real estate transaction workflows.