Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a part of our everyday lives, and for some Propertymark members, it is creating an interesting mix of new opportunities and unanticipated pressures.
While many customer communications are usually quick to address and are often resolved via direct conversation, there are a growing number of enquiries now assisted by AI which have the potential to cause a dilemma for property agents who need the human capacity and legal knowledge to respond to them.
Greg Tsuman, a past president of ARLA Propertymark, has noticed that many AI programmes can generate a well-worded complaint that previously would have taken them a long time to compile. “With the rise of AI, we have seen a spike in complex and intricate complaints. We are now having to spend time and effort addressing multipart points and complaints that are sometimes without grounds. AI tends to be very much user-biased – it can tell you what you want to hear, and it can lead people into a potential false sense of awareness where the complaint might be without true merit.”
Tsuman then outlined how his company deals with AI-generated complaints: “We have got a complaints procedure designed for the AI world. The first point would be for the relevant office to deal with the complaint and then it would get passed on to the department head, and finally the compliance team.
“We have now started using AI to help summarise and analyse the substance of potential correspondence because if you are looking at a document that spans several pages of A4, that quickly becomes a very time-intensive task. We don’t use AI to respond to complaints, but we use it to do the heavy lifting so that we can see the wood from the trees. We then rely on human expertise to make a response.”
Moving forward, he feels it should potentially be mandatory under The Property Ombudsman’s rules for any complainant to disclose if AI was used to construct the correspondence.
“AI shouldn’t prevent any complaint from going ahead because it may have assisted in making the communication clearer for the respondent to review. The aim would be to prevent potential spurious complaints that might be seen as a ‘scattergun’ approach, where tenants might potentially end up including details which aren’t correct or are taken out of context,” he added.
Ben Stokes, president-elect of ARLA Propertymark and a lettings director, has also noticed a spike in AI-generated complaints, often merging knowledge from the internet about previously proposed government bills, such as the Renters’ Reform Bill, and therefore pointing users towards information that is no longer accurate.
Ben added: “It can be difficult to navigate AI complaints that someone has not written, especially when the legal stance is not correct. We check them carefully and respond in a way that points tenants in the right direction. The biggest thing we are finding is that AI tools are empowering people to complain about things and blow small situations out of proportion.”
