AI Annual Accelerant
- Mal McCallion
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
May 2025 now feels like the sort of “AI era” we talk about with a fond smile: you typed something into ChatGPT, it produced something vaguely usable and then the grown-up work began. You edited. You checked. You rewrote. You worried about whether it had made up a school, a station, or an entire conservation area.
Fast forward to May 2026 and the shift isn’t just that the models have gotten better - it’s that the behaviour has changed. The old mode was conversational: prompt in, answer out. Today’s mode is operational: give it an objective, let it run a process, and receive something you can approve. That distinction matters a great deal to estate agents, because your job is basically a long chain of small processes: qualify, book, chase, describe, market, update, reassure, repeat.
The headlines - Claude Opus 4.8, released three days ago. running large code migrations, Gemini 3.5 Flash slashing cost and latency, ChatGPT's Codex pushing “Goal Mode” into proper, reviewable pull requests - are not “tech theatre”. They’re the early warning signals that autonomy is arriving in neat, commercial packaging. The models are starting to do what we said they would do, but to this point never truly managed: they take an end goal and quietly swallow the admin.
And once you see AI as workflow rather than wordplay, the estate agency implications stop being gimmicks and start being structural.
Phone answering is the easiest example. Last year, “AI voice” was still mostly a party trick: unnatural pauses, weird intonation, brittle handoffs. Now, the baseline is: answer 24/7, qualify, book and summarise the call in your CRM. Yes, plenty of people still say they prefer humans (and they often do, when the subject is sensitive). But most inbound business calls aren’t sensitive; they’re repetitive. The winning agencies won’t be those with the fanciest AI receptionist - they’ll be the ones that have had built the best handover from AI to human, with context that’s actually useful.
Marketing follows the same arc. People still think “AI marketing” means a few generic posts and an uncanny market update. The serious play is automated, hyper-local content that compounds: video, short-form, long-form, landing pages, email nurture and the unglamorous bit - consistent, daily publishing. The traditional, paid-for portals have always benefited from your inconsistency. AI removes that excuse.
Which brings us to Rightmove, because in our industry it usually does. Rightmove thrives when agents are dependent: dependent on the portal for visibility, dependent on it for demand capture, dependent on it because everything else takes too long. But AI is an accelerant for the one thing portals can’t commoditise: *the agency’s own capability*. If your website can answer questions at 2am, book viewings, explain the area, and surface *your* freshest stock - then the portal starts to look less like a bridge and more like a tax.
The scary bit isn’t the capability; it’s the cadence. When meaningful upgrades ship in weeks, “we’ll look at AI next year” becomes a commercial self-harm plan. Next year arrives half a dozen times before you’ve finished your autumn pipeline review.
This is the real story of May 2025 vs May 2026: not smarter chat, but faster leverage. And the agencies that treat it like leverage - rather than novelty - will quietly widen the gap while everyone else is still folding their arms in the back row.
Join me at one of 40 locations across Great Britain over the next 40 days to learn about practical AI and how it can provide your business wth profit, profile and productivity.
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