In an AI-driven industry, trust is your competitive advantage

According to a Cotality report from earlier this year, buyers were setting high bars for trusting AI in property-related decisions, being less likely to forgive the tool for mistakes than agents.

To succeed in the current environment, MRI Software’s director of strategic partnerships, Dr Sarah Bell, said businesses need to be accountable for AI-related decisions while continuing to demonstrate human expertise and building trust through relationships.

“The organisations and the proptechs that will thrive in the AI era aren’t necessarily those with the smartest models will be the ones that understand where trust truly lives,” she said at the Proptech Forum 2026.

Bell said many professionals falsely believed that trust in AI developed as systems became more advanced, but the effect was the opposite.

“The more capable AI becomes, the more questions people ask, the more capabilities it displays, the more uncertain people feel and seek to understand it,” she said.

Here’s how to build trust around AI:

Show accountability

As AI becomes more widespread, Bell said professionals need to demonstrate accountability for decisions based on the tool, particularly when they result in harmful or biased outcomes.

“Trust grows when a system clearly answers who owns a decision, who approves it, who can challenge it and who can override it,” she said.

“If an output is wrong, if a recommendation is harmful, if a decision creates bias, who is responsible?”

She also said business policies alone were not enough to establish trust, arguing that organisations needed to demonstrate they were actively upholding them.

“Governance defines the rules, but trust is owned when institutions visibly uphold those rules,” she said.

Bell also warned that professionals could not avoid responsibility by blaming an AI system, saying they needed to be prepared to accept liability for the decisions made using it.

“If you’re going to rely on an AI decision, you have to be prepared to take responsibility and hold strict legal liability for that,” she said.

Use human expertise

Despite the growing proficiency of AI systems, Bell said property professionals still needed to use human expertise to verify information and explain the logic behind decisions.

Bell said while any property professional could Google information on their phones, it didn’t necessarily mean they understood the entire context or were knowledgeable about a topic.

“If you help people understand how the system works, they will trust it. And then trust through judgement,” she said.

“High-trust systems don’t remove expertise; they focus it.”

However, Bell argued that human oversight of AI must involve genuine judgement, as opposed to simply approving or rejecting automated recommendations.

“The human has to have meaningful judgement; the system has to augment a human with authority, who has competency, has context and genuine discretion to disagree with the machine,” she said.

“If the human in the loop has only an ‘approved’ button to click and a ‘disapproved’ button to click, we’ve got problems with our system.”

Form interpersonal relationships

However, Bell said building trust in AI went beyond accountability and demonstrating human expertise, with businesses needing to continue building interpersonal relationships.

She said clients were more likely to trust a business when they believed it understood their needs and took their interests into consideration.

“People feel trust when they feel understood. It’s different from having a technically correct answer – understanding something means that you can realise that the decision can have a different impact for different people,” she said.

“A declined housing loan, a rejected insurance claim, a performance assessment, a housing decision these things all matter in somebody’s life, and humans all have varying degrees of vulnerability.”

While AI systems can be used to deliver property-related solutions and recommendations to clients, Bell said that genuine empathy was irreplaceable and had to come from humans.

“Trust shows up in the empathy and the care that is spoken through your marketing, delivered by your sales representatives and shows up in the culture within the teams of your organisations,” she said.

“That’s why people follow leaders and why we remain loyal to brands, because relationships generate interpersonal trust that models can’t replicate.”