Inside AI – Episode 9 with Meagan Fowler: Why an AI Leader Is Still an AI Skeptic
By Kevin Hawkins
What happens when someone helping build AI for the real estate industry admits she still doesn’t completely trust it?
That’s what makes my latest Inside AI guest, Meagan Fowler, Chief Operating Officer of Voiceflip, so interesting. She’s spent more than 15 years in technology, co-founded a software company, helped bring new technology into real estate and now works with MLSs and associations deploying AI-powered member support. You might expect someone with that background to be among AI’s biggest cheerleaders.
Not Meagan. She came into the AI revolution as a skeptic, worried about what happens when people start relying on technology to do their thinking for them. Today, she uses AI every day, helps organizations deploy it and understands its capabilities far better than most. Yet she hasn’t abandoned her skepticism. She’s simply become what she calls an “educated AI skeptic.” And that distinction makes for one of the more refreshing AI conversations I’ve had.
When a fourth grader knows something his mom doesn’t
Meagan’s journey into AI skepticism didn’t begin in a corporate boardroom or at a technology conference. It started at her son’s elementary school open house.
She was reading his fourth grade book report when something immediately struck her. She knew her son hadn’t written it. When she asked him about it, he explained that his teacher had given students access to an AI assistant.
That was a wake-up call. Not because Meagan is anti-technology. Far from it. She was teaching herself HTML as a teenager and has spent much of her professional life building, selling and introducing new software.
Her concern was something much bigger: What happens to critical thinking, writing skills and judgment when children learn to rely on AI before they learn how to do the work themselves?
It’s a question that should concern more than parents. Real estate brokerages, MLSs, associations and technology vendors are facing their own versions of the same dilemma. How do we embrace AI’s enormous benefits without losing the skills that make people valuable in the first place?
An educated skeptic may be AI’s best customer
One of my favorite moments came when Meagan explained how her relationship with AI has evolved.
“I still am an AI skeptic, but I’m an educated AI skeptic,” she told me. “I know that using AI doesn’t mean that my judgment goes away.”
That second sentence is something I wish every real estate agent, broker and technology executive would post on their computer.
I’ve been teaching agents that AI is an extraordinary tool, but it is still a tool. Used well, it can make us more productive, more creative and better prepared. Used poorly, it can make us sound like everyone else, produce convincing misinformation and create a false sense of confidence.
Meagan has found a way to make AI part of her daily routine without letting it take over her thinking. In fact, one of the more entertaining parts of our discussion was how she uses AI as a sounding board, including conversations that apparently have her husband giving her the occasional sideways glance.
But the real lesson isn’t about how often she uses it. It’s about what she expects from it, and there’s an important difference between asking AI to think with you and letting AI think for you.
When the smartest AI answer is “I don’t know”
This is where our conversation gets especially interesting for MLS and association leaders.
Voiceflip’s AI assistant, Ardi, is designed to make an organization’s own knowledge more accessible to its members. Think MLS rules, policies, training materials, software instructions and all those questions that traditionally go to member support departments.
That sounds straightforward until you consider how complicated institutional knowledge can be. Information gets updated. Policies change. Documents can conflict. Sometimes the answer simply isn’t there.
Meagan explained why Voiceflip deliberately takes a more restrictive approach than many general-purpose AI tools. Rather than allowing Ardi to reach into the broader internet for answers, it works from information provided by the organization.
More importantly, when the information isn’t available or conflicts, Ardi is designed to acknowledge that it doesn’t know.
I love that approach, because one of AI’s biggest problems isn’t that it sometimes gets things wrong. It’s that it can deliver those wrong answers with remarkable confidence.
As Meagan put it during our conversation, “Eloquence does not equal correctness.”
That may be one of the most important lessons any organization deploying AI needs to understand. And it leads to a fascinating discussion about how MLSs and associations can discover problems with their own information when they begin preparing it for AI.
Would you give an intern the keys to your business?
We also spent time talking about one of my favorite AI safety topics: How much control should we give artificial intelligence?
Meagan offered an analogy that every business owner can appreciate.
“I’m going to treat AI a little bit like I would treat an intern,” she said.
That’s a terrific way to think about AI access and permissions. You wouldn’t hire an intern on Monday morning and immediately give that person unrestricted access to your customers, financial accounts, contracts, confidential documents and every software system in your business.
Yet we’re increasingly seeing AI tools that want exactly that kind of access.
Meagan’s approach is much closer to what I teach: Start with limited access, understand the risks and make sure you know what can happen if something goes wrong. The more responsibility you give AI, the more important it becomes to have human oversight.
She also makes an important distinction between generative AI and agentic AI, explaining why Voiceflip has deliberately chosen not to rush into autonomous actions.
I won’t spoil that part of the conversation, but her reasoning deserves the attention of every technology company racing to add AI agents to its products.
Can AI make real estate more human?
Near the end of every Inside AI interview, I like to explore a question that goes beyond the technology itself: As AI becomes more capable, what happens to the people who use it?
Meagan believes real estate will remain a relationship business, even as more of the routine work becomes automated. She sees opportunities for technology vendors to collaborate more closely and for AI to reduce some of the complexity agents deal with every day.
But she also offers a perspective on what AI cannot replace, particularly when people are making emotional decisions involving something as important as their home.
That’s where her skepticism and optimism come together.
I’ve argued for years that AI won’t replace real estate agents, but agents leveraging AI will have an enormous advantage over those who don’t. What I found especially interesting about Meagan’s perspective is that she doesn’t necessarily see the greatest benefit as simply getting more work done.
What if the real opportunity is to get the work done better and faster, and then have more time for the people and experiences that matter?
There’s a lot more to unpack in this conversation, especially for MLS leaders, brokerages and AI technology companies trying to determine where artificial intelligence fits in their future.
Watch Episode 9 of Inside AI with The REAL AI Guy for my full conversation with Meagan Fowler, COO of Voiceflip. We cover everything from her unlikely path into real estate technology to AI guardrails, data reliability, the future of member support and why keeping humans in control may be the smartest AI strategy of all.
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Kevin Hawkins, a partner with WAV Group, is editor and co-founder of REAL AI, real estate’s No. 1 weekly AI newsletter and companion podcast, and his Inside AI with The REAL AI Guy video interview series. Kevin has written more about AI than anyone in real estate and is the Amazon bestselling author of the newly updated edition of The REAL AI Guide for Real Estate Agents. Known throughout the industry as The REAL AI Guy, in the last 18 months, he has taught thousands of real estate agents in the U.S. and Canada how to use AI in the best and safest ways.
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