Agencies that understand how to transform their AI usage beyond habits to a repeatable automated process would be the ones at the cutting edge, a leading expert has said.
Speaking at the recent REB Innovation Summit in Sydney, Prepared co-founder Seth Watts said that before reaching cutting-edge, businesses needed to start with the right foundation.
Before even starting to test AI, Watts said that agencies needed to ensure they were using compliant tools in line with current regulations and to set them up to achieve optimal results.
“I say this because AI is pretty useless if you can’t put real data from your business into it, and the only way to put real data from your business in without breaking the law is to have a business, team or enterprise subscription,” Watts said.
Watts said the real value of AI lay in how it was incorporated into everyday tasks.
He said that using the tool for simple day-to-day tasks, such as checking reports and writing basic emails, could provide an easy way to alleviate some of the stress agents face.
“Habits can be genuinely transformative for you.”
While it seems easy, Watts said that many professionals were seeing poor results, typically due to poor prompting.
“I call it ‘artificial stupidity’ because they are going into AI and they are getting crappy outcomes, because they are using it wrong.”
He said that to get the right results, professionals needed to tell the AI exactly how they needed it to act.
By combining the right prompt with the enhanced features of the AI tools, Watts said that agents could receive much clearer answers to their questions.
“If you do the prompt with extended rather than instant, it's going to be like dealing with a high school student versus dealing with the entire faculty of Harvard.”
For AI to become a legitimate advantage, Watts said it needed to go beyond habits and reshape how agents worked.
“Habits are really powerful, but they live in your computer, your login, and if you go on holiday, they stop because it requires you to do it.”
He said that many principals were guilty of mistaking an increase in AI usage for a genuine transformation within the business and that they needed to go one step further to get the most value from the tool.
While businesses could benefit from AI integrations, Watts said the biggest improvement came when they moved from using it as a habit to an established workflow.
To establish an AI workflow within the business, Watts said agents should review their own AI usage, identify what has worked for them, and determine how they could repeat the process on a larger scale.
“The difference between a habit and a workflow is whether or not it is replicable.”
“In order to get to a workflow, it needs to be consistent, and it needs to be automated.”
If the process involved oversight by a more experienced professional within the business, Watts said it was not considered a workflow.
Watts said a workflow needed to function even when key members of staff were away.
“If you can get AI-driven workflows within your business in 2026, you are going to be at the cutting edge of AI for the entire year, because nobody is doing this.”
“If you figure that out and go and do it, you will transform your business quickly.”
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