__________________________________________________________________________________________________ Moving Home
Everyone seems to be talking about artificial intelligence right now. That’ s usually a sign of a buzzword, and over my years in the employee relocation industry, I have seen plenty of buzzwords come and go. AI is different. After spending 26 years helping Fortune 500 companies and government agencies relocate their employees around the world, I believe we’ re witnessing something far more significant than another technology trend. We’ re watching the way consumers buy fundamentally change. For most of the internet’ s history, businesses have competed for one thing: customer attention. The goal was simple, get potential customers to your website before they landed on a competitor’ s. Companies invested heavily in search engine optimization to rank highly on Google or paid for advertising to secure visibility. Success was measured by website traffic, clicks, and completed contact forms. That strategy made perfect sense because the internet became the world’ s business directory, and search engines controlled how consumers navigated it. If you could attract a customer to your website first, you had an opportunity to earn their business.
Unfortunately, that isn’ t how consumers interact with technology anymore …
More consumers are going to AI Language models like Chat GPT or Gemini to get answers. When someone opens ChatGPT or Gemini they rarely begin with,‘ Show me companies’ Instead, they begin with a problem they need solved. They ask how much something will cost, where they should live, what neighborhood is safest, or how to move across the country without unexpected surprises. They don’ t get websites, they get answers. This is the agentic shift from‘ show me’ to‘ do it for me’.
The internet spent the last 25 years getting people to click. The next 25 years will be about helping people accomplish something. The shift from‘ show me’ to‘ do it for me’ is the biggest technology shift the real estate, and relocation industry will ever see.
Don’ t take my word for it. The writing is on the wall. Adobe recently reported that traffic from AI sources to US retail websites increased nearly 400 percent year over year. McKinsey has found that roughly half of consumers now use AI-powered search in some form during their buying journey. Even Google, whose business helped define the modern internet, isn’ t resisting the change, they are embracing it. AI-powered search experiences now reach more than a billion monthly users, and Google says those tools are generating billions of clicks every week. This isn’ t Google versus AI. Google is becoming AI.
Moving is actually a perfect use case for AI. The moving industry is one of very few industry’ s that was never disrupted by technology. Retail has Amazon, Travel has Expedia and Finance has Stripe. Sure, there are tools that movers use but fundamentally moving never digitized. To get new customers, like other industries, movers relied on the internet. Consumers were asked to complete long forms, submit their contact information and wait for several companies to call them back. Estimates were manual and required meeting face to face with each mover.
Today’ s consumers don’ t want to wait three days for someone to schedule an in-home estimate. They don’ t want to explain the contents of their home to three different companies. They don’ t want to wonder whether the final invoice will match the estimate they received. They expect technology to remove those steps. Consumers want efficiency, they want transparency and in many cases, they don’ t want to share their contact info.
In response to this shift, we created a free website and app called‘ Agoyu’.
modernhb. com 13