AI For Yacht Brokers: Q&A With Tech Expert Rob Petrosino
We sat down with Rob Petrosino of PeakActivity recently to get his take on how the yacht brokerage industry can benefit from machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Rob, who participated in a panel on “The Role of AI in the Brokerage World” Seminar in December 2024, is an FBI insider, digital innovation expert, distinguished keynote speaker, and authority on emerging technologies. With more than 10 years of leadership in digital transformation, he has guided Fortune 100 companies and defense organizations through the tech revolution, focusing on areas such as spatial computing, digital twins, generative AI, and machine learning. This is Part One of a series.
RP: When we think of the yachting industry, specifically when it comes to brokers, we’re going to have a lot happening in the AI space that is going to impact them.
The easy one is listings. With the new AI tools that are out, including automation tools, you’re going to see that process go extremely fast. The vessel information is going to be pulled together and automated by an AI tool to get that listing live near instantaneously, when it usually would take a couple days or a couple of hours. And the cool part is it’s going to be able to cross-reference your brand and how you talk about those vessels as an organization or as an individual broker and compare it to what’s really successful in the market.
Yacht and charter sales are all about the personal connections and selling a high-end service. How can AI enhance this client engagement without sacrificing that concierge-level experience?
RP: This goes down to, “AI is going to replace my people, and I’m going to lose that human touch aspect.” And it’s just not true. You should be thinking of AI as an add-on to the white glove service. It should help augment the human, not completely replace the human, especially in high-end and luxury goods. If I am in a relationship-driven business, I don’t want to remove that relationship and put in an AI chatbot. But I can augment that experience with an AI chatbot. I can enhance it with some levels of AI and automation so that the end user, whether it’s a potential buyer or a response.
The way you could do this is really simple. You take 100% of questions that come into an organization. If I can funnel out the bottom 20% that really don’t need a high-level human touch and send it to an AI bot, I just made that individual relationship manager more operationally efficient because I don’t have to answer those questions. When it comes to AI and high-end and luxury goods, it’s all about making sure that the human can manage the human relationship and AI can take away the operational portions. You shouldn’t just be relying on a chatbot to service your high-end customers.
How can yacht brokers and charter firms use machine learning to stay ahead of the market, optimize pricing, and streamline their deal flow?
RP: When we think of what’s happening in the market overall, as humans, we can only digest a certain level of data and understand it. If I read information about sales and vessels and different operational efficiencies and ports, etc., I would only be at consuming all of it, and the real key here is that it can analyze that vast set of data and give it back to you. So, looking at what’s selling, what’s not selling, where it’s selling, how it’s selling – All those pieces of information that are publicly available are equally important to what is internally available within the organization. AI can do a really good job of tying those together and giving you an analysis.
When we think about the other side of the coin, what indications are our clients giving us that they may be ready to buy or maybe ready to sell or make a change? If we know the steps someone goes through before purchasing, we can use AI to say, “Hey, here’s the path that we see most people following. Tell me where they are in that, for lack of a better term, funnel, and give me back leading indicators.”
So, those are two areas where AI will help the decision making.
It’s not going to completely flip it on its head in the next year, but as these new models reasoning AI models come out, it will be able to analyze that information and then give you back insights you may not have even seen yourself.
Can AI-driven insights help brokers qualify leads, target the right customers and close more deals?
RP: When we think about the analysis of potential leads, I kind of lean into some of the work that the FBI and government agencies do. It’s called open-source intelligence. What can I find out about this person who is out in the market right now that may let me know my customer better or validate that they are an actual buyer? There are a lot of AI tools that have come out in that world – specifically doing research on the buyers themselves and getting an accurate profile of them; scraping social media; looking at different tax records; looking at PR or press information, governmental information, so that the broker understands who that potential buyer is at a higher level.
That’s that first part – the validation side of it. Then we think about the other end of the spectrum: “Okay, they’re qualified, now how do I make sure that they have the right number of touch points to go from qualified to interested to purchasing?”
I can automate some of those processes, whether it’s text messages or emails or follow-ups. When a new vessel comes on the market and the information needs to be sent to a potential buyer who is interested in it, that could be an automated process with AI’s help. Or saying, “Hey, I know you’re interested in X vessel, but Y is available. Do you want to take a look at this one?” That doesn’t have to be a human interactive experience. You could drive that all through AI and it can make a really nice assessment, even showing variations between the two different options that are available so that the buyer feels more confident. Those are the types of things that really wind up being interesting and driving a lot of value. And what you’re going to see is that the humans are going to be able to work those top 10% a little bit harder, a little bit further, because that middle 50% could be serviced by AI. What’s really, really nice is I get the validation side, I get the servicing side, and I get the human and performance optimization.