[EP 269] AI, Tech & Automation Trends: Opportunities in business broking & will it replace lawyers?

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Joanna:
Hi, and welcome to another episode of The Deal Room Podcast, brought to you by our commercial legal practice, Aspect Legal. Now today, we have another fascinating discussion live from the recent Australian Institute of Business Brokers national conference, we were lucky enough to grab a few moments with Aron and Matt from Aro Software, and get their thoughts on the latest trends in business for sale listing websites and marketing for business sales, including some of the latest approaches to communicating with buyers. We spoke with them about some of the ways brokers are incorporating AI and automation into their business practices. So for brokers listening in this discussion has some great ideas about what kinds of tools are available to help you streamline your systems, and attract buyers. And for business owners. There are some ideas about what you might look out for when choosing where you list your business, and the types of data you might be able to ask about to determine listing success. Oh, and they threw me a curveball and asked about AI replacing lawyers, something I’ve been asked about quite a few times. So listening, and here we go with the boys from Aro on AI. And my take on that spiky question.

Joanna:
We’ll kick it off by I just want to hear what you’re seeing in the market at the moment in your clients with brokers, what market trends? Yeah, on top?

Matt:
Yeah, so market trends that we’re seeing at the moment is obviously the adoption of AI. Yeah, writing their Steam descriptions. And really, they wanting to find out how they can actually use it a lot don’t actually know how to use AI to their advantage. So for example, for marketing, that’s something that we’re seeing a lot of brokers and real estate agents as well, similar space, looking for ways that they can actually use AI to market their business.

Joanna:
So and on what is that? Like? What’s an example of you know, using AI?

Matt:
So a lot of a lot of the I don’t, I’m not too fond of it, but they like to use it to write their ad copy and their resources, downloadable resources to this value add of which it can, it can be used as that it’s good. It’s a good base, that you shouldn’t solely rely on it. That’s how I feel about it. I definitely don’t think you should be running paid ads behind a copy. I don’t think that’s the right strategy. Just because it’s AI and it’s it’s not in the market. It’s not on the floor, they don’t understand what’s going on. But yeah, a lot of marketing agencies are starting to use it as a trend and a buzz word when they’re pre signing for brokers or brokerages or real estate agencies. So

Joanna:
fascinating. How does arrow fit into that into that AI puzzle?

Aron:
Yeah, well, like a lot of what we do is very much focused on automation. So I think this this, this rise in popularity of AI, and it’s becoming a buzzword has meant that a lot of brokers had to sort of start to catch up and start to get more technical and get more use used to and comfortable with the technology in their business. And even if it’s not going fully down the AI path, they’re starting to adopt technology a little bit more friendly. So we’re definitely finding that that that initial learning curve, that barrier to entry that we’ve you know, we’ve dealt with for a long time with brokers, when we try to help them get comfortable with tech is definitely becoming a little bit easier as the last sort of two years, as they become more comfortable with it just being discussed all day, every day. So there’s been big for us. Yeah, but automation for us is massive, like aI plays a role. It’ll play more of a role in terms of like automatic communication with your database to nurturing and putting content in front of them automatically using AI. And that’s a big part of what we do is it’s giving them the tools and facilities to send out emails and SMS campaigns and upload the listing automatically and all that kind of stuff.

Joanna:
Love it. Okay, and so do you then, with your websites, you have integrations that are AI driven?

Matt:
Not necessarily No, we don’t really have any AI integrations that I can think of. Not yet anyway, like there’s no chat bots yet that we integrate with. I mean, I’m sure they’re out there but

Joanna:
There is an idea. Yeah,

Matt:
We haven’t really seen a mass adoption yet in the in the broker space. Putting out on broker websites. You don’t really see it in the real estate space either. So no, we haven’t seen that yet.

Joanna:
Okay, well, what do you think is coming? What are you seeing the on the short term horizon for Aro and then AI but no, no, I meant for Aro.

Aron:
We’re just gonna continue to get more built for purpose for brokers just more and more tools for automatic communication, database nurturing.

Joanna:
But what does that mean? Like practically so when you say more tools in those areas, so what’s an example of the sort of tool,

Aron:
So email and SMS marketing, so direct marketing through your database, I’ve seen a big change in the last 12 months with Google on iOS cutting, like, third party cookies, which everyone would have heard of just because of security issues and things like that. And what that means is a lot more value than there ever has been on first party data in your database. So you can send email and SMS is to. So now big focus is trying to help brokers utilize that data better, so they can email and SMS them easy, easily from the database. So they can distributed listings, distribute value, add content, through our software, and setups like automatic nurturing. So a trail of maybe three or four emails and SMS is that go out to their database off the back of an inquiry on a listing, maybe they’ve got five other listings in the database that are similar to that listing that’s inquired on and the software can just automatically send that kind of content out and just distribute that to that database. So

Joanna:
that’s brilliant look. And we we I mean, we’re marketers, we enjoy marketing. And we, we, you know, we find some of these things you’re talking about absolutely invaluable. But it’s a lot of work, right? It’s a lot of work putting all of this together, obviously, your software is helping do some of that grunt work, they still have to draft the stuff. What proportion of your brokers do you think are actually properly utilizing this functionality?

Aron:
Maybe one in 20. But that’s what we’re trying to do more of is out of the box, just turn it on sort of thing. facility called, we call them just automation cards, and just these little petty things, you just flick a switch on, because they’re also built for purpose. We only do this they can go in there, and they can go share share similar listings to people that have inquired on on a particular business. And then it just goes, Okay, well, we’re gonna send that out automatically for you. It’ll set up like, like business alerts criteria. So looking at the type of business they’ve inquired on, so say they inquire on a salon for $250,000. And also, obviously, that prospective purchaser is interested in purchasing a salon within a certain price range. So we’ll put all that criteria and we’re like a little file, so that then any other, then whenever another listing comes into the database, that they list maybe three months down the track that meets that same criteria, we’ll just send it out for them automatically. So to your point, a lot of people just don’t have the time to settle that kind of stuff, to all the things in the software. So our big focus at the moment is building what we call these automation cards, so that I can just turn them on and just does it for them. And I think brokers are getting a lot more comfortable with that concept. And that’s what we were sort of touching on earlier because of this, all this buzz around AI, you know, this isn’t AI that we’re building here. It’s not machine learning what we’re doing. But I think everyone’s getting a lot more comfortable with technology doing these things for them automatically, because of this increase in everyone talking about.

Matt:
Yeah, absolutely. Talking about points, well, like brokers should know that they don’t need to know how to set these things out. Like they that’s not their job. Their job is listing and selling businesses, building relationships, and valuing a business. It’s not setting up all the tech behind their own business. That’s why they can leverage platforms like us that know what we’re doing, and they can lean on us. So we can set these things up automatically and set up alerts, the automations are behind it, the website, the site to it as well. So, yeah,

Joanna:
so do you collect any data or analyzing the data relating to campaigns that you broke? You know, things like, you know, what’s working in the market at the moment, what days what time?

Matt:
not necessarily we like to our clients data is their data, we don’t really have anything in place to measure that. That’s what we’re doing. That’s why we have these platforms that allow them to analyze their own data set and figure out what the best time is to send and, and what their target market is, is interacting as much so we don’t really we don’t have any rights.

Joanna:
But you then show them how you provide them the

Matt:
weekly reporting. Yeah, 100% with their data, they have full control over their data. They’ve got full analytics and times that they said how many people have been have who opened email and bounce rates and got unsubscribes and they’re most active times 24 hour performance.

Joanna:
Love it. Okay, AI Where do you think the opportunities are coming up in the future? I am Anything else technology based,

Aron:
just further implementation of tech businesses. It’s, it’s, it’s gonna take some time for him to get more and more comfortable. And I think as that starts to get more and more implemented in everyone’s businesses, there’s gonna be a lot of opportunities. There’s so much stuff that’s happening manually. And if we can continue to do what we do and build those tools, and everyone implements them, and we make it easy to implement, then that’s going to there’s going to be some massive opportunities that come out of that just to nurture your database and manage your clients far better than you ever have been. You got more free time will tell them to spend on the things that actually make you money and business negotiation process. I

Joanna:
love it. Okay, parting words.

Matt:
Parting words? Well how about I ask you a question. Oh, do you think AI will take over the lawyers job?

Joanna:
Oh I hate these questions. Hahhaha Do you know what I have some strong views on these strong views? It’s fascinating, because I’ve listened to, you know, as chat GPT came out everyone when the crowd went wild. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it’s, you know, I kept hearing that all spelled the end of lawyers. And I 100% disagree. I think what happens is it will create, and it is creating proliferation of content in the market content everywhere. Yeah. But the problem is half the content is crap. Brian, right. You know, because, and we I’m all for technology, we do a lot of testing, with chat and other ai ai. But I find that, you know, generally between 30 to 50%, of what comes out of it is actually incorrect. Sounds amazing. But it’s actually incorrect. So I think that opportunity is here, you know, number one, to help for efficiency. So there’s big opportunity if you can jump on board and learn how to utilize it in your own business to build efficiency in what you’re already doing. But I think it paves the way for even more reliance on thought leaders that are trusted, and credible, because I think it’d be harder for new people to come into the space. Because there’s so much content, people come back to users need to come back to who they know and trust will be giving them the right answers, because they will be so much around. That is crap. So I think it’s a huge opportunity. But I think the market will see through it very quickly. And ultimately, perhaps what it does is it reduces the amount of the sort of repetitive tasks for boys because we can automate it, but it will never take away the advice negotiation in sight. And a lot of our job is like driving deals as fast as her. And I think that still remains. That’s my thoughts.

Matt:
I definitely agree. Definitely come up against so I’m also talented marketing side. And I come up against marketing agencies that love using AI can we just use AI as it’s gotten further from the truth like, you can’t expect an AI bot to produce a high converting campaign that will start going to get you the numbers that are cam like someone who’s been in the field for 510 15 years and actually, like it’s a forever changing industry, forever changing market you always have to like what works, but work eight months ago may not work today. So housing I bought going to understand all those the metrics and understanding how to produce a higher ROI campaign and looking at all the dialectic, right but for analyzing data, but there has to be someone driving on you’re saying driving the fast deals like there’s gonna be someone driving the marketing campaign.

Joanna:
I guest opportunities are there in creating content, but then it’s still up to get users to test, measure, test use data, as you’ve been talking about, and then use that.

Aron:
It is just about a kickstart writing repetitive content, we get a very similar point of view. Because we’re in the digital marketing space, and when there isn’t a lot of repetition in parts of what we do we use it as a bit of a base to then build on top of so it’s absolutely a beneficial tool used to cut hours any day. If you’re doing those kinds of things. I think it just yeah, maybe he’s getting locked out a little bit too much for things that require that personal touch. And it’s a bit like the the advertising space online for us is like it when early stages. It was really easy to run an ad and and like with social media advertising on the Facebook ad network, you could run an ad you can get results, but now there’s so many ads, it’s so saturated, that the way you actually run it figure that is by literally making it not look like an ad, be part of what we’re doing. We’re trying to make it look like real content that the user can absorb. And it’s the same thing was this AI stuff is that a lot of the content it’s producing is it’s recognizably written by a bot, it just doesn’t have that personal touch to it. And I think, like you said, the people that know what they’re doing in a real skill set, are gonna stand out even more so because you’ve got a lot of these cowboys just leveraging I don’t actually know what they’re talking about.

Joanna:
Love it, guys. What a fascinating discussion. Well, thanks so much, once again, live from AIBB 2023. And so any fabric is listening in, find out more about Aro

Aron:
arosoftware.com Jump on there. And you got all the details on there

Joanna:
How about we add it in our show notes. Boys, thank you so much

Matt:
Thank you Jo.

Aron:
Thank you Jo.