What if your AI found the problems you didn’t know you had?

By Mark Burgess,

CEO Iceberg

Something happened recently that gave me a glimpse of where all of this is heading.

Uzair was analysing activity inside a multi-branch estate agency when it identified two patterns. 244 leads had taken more than 24 hours to be assigned to someone, while 98 leads had been closed as “Unable to contact” within 24 hours of arriving.

The numbers are interesting, but what interested me far more was that they didn’t know this was happening.

Nobody had deliberately decided to leave those leads sitting there. Management hadn't spotted the pattern and chosen to ignore it. It was simply happening somewhere inside a busy business.

And Uzair found it.

Every estate agency will have things happening beneath the surface that management doesn't know about. Leads sitting untouched, follow-ups happening too slowly, people being given up on too quickly, buyers becoming active again or opportunities quietly disappearing. It isn't necessarily because people aren't doing their jobs. There is simply too much happening across a modern estate agency for a human being to continuously monitor everything and this is where AI becomes much more interesting than a chatbot you ask questions or one that takes out of hours calls.

Most of the way we think about AI today begins with a human knowing what they want to know. We ask a question, AI gives us an answer.

But what if you don't know which question to ask?

Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I wonder if we're closing an unusual number of leads as unable to contact within their first 24 hours?”

Yet when AI has access to enough of what is happening across the business, it can begin to find patterns that deserve attention. Uzair is intended to become the conversational interface to Lifesycle's wider intelligence, allowing people to explore contacts, properties, stats, targets and opportunities and, increasingly, take action.

Right now, there is huge value in the system simply saying, “You might want to look at this.”

Management can investigate why leads aren't being assigned quickly enough or whether those people marked as unable to contact were genuinely chased. A problem that might otherwise have continued unnoticed suddenly becomes visible. But this made me think about the next stage.

Imagine Lifesycle understands how quickly your agency expects a lead to be handled, how you want that lead followed up, who should be responsible and what communication has already taken place and it spots that something isn't happening the way it should. Does it always need to tell a manager to investigate?

Or, where the action is predictable and the agency has given it permission, could it simply take care of it?

That is much closer to the direction of Singularity. The ambition is for Lifesycle to combine the agency's objectives, operating rules and context, understand what matters, handle lower-value work and bring humans into the moments where their judgement, relationships and experience create the most value.

One still depends on humans spotting everything. Someone needs to notice the unassigned lead, remember the follow-up, recognise the unusual pattern or realise that an opportunity has been missed.

The other has AI continuously digging through what is happening.

At first it spots the problem. Then it recommends what should happen. Over time, as the business develops confidence in it, AI can be trusted with more of the predictable work itself. The intended adoption path is visibility, confidence, trust, delegation and increasing autonomy.

Now let those two businesses compete for the same customers over the next few years.

The second agency doesn't need better estate agents to gain an advantage. It starts by simply missing less.

Fewer leads left sitting around. Fewer opportunities disappearing unnoticed. Fewer moments where somebody eventually asks, “How did nobody spot that?” And when something genuinely valuable appears, that is when the human steps in.

AI does the digging. Humans handle the gold.

Those 244 leads and 98 early closures stayed with me because they show just how much can be happening inside a business without anybody knowing.

Today, the exciting thing is that Uzair can help expose it.

Tomorrow, the bigger question is: