How should a broker supervise agents using AI?

State licensing rules make a broker responsible for the licensed activity conducted under the brokerage, and that duty was written for a world of people. It survives the change of instrument without amendment: advertising must comply, representations to consumers are attributable, records must be retained, and unlicensed persons may not perform activities requiring a licence. A tool cannot hold a licence, so any licensed activity it performs is happening under one that a person holds — and inside a brokerage that person is usually the broker.

Which makes the supervision policy a list of activities rather than a list of products. Brokerages that wrote tool-approval lists discovered they were unenforceable within a quarter, because agents adopt tools faster than a list can be maintained and the list said nothing about what the tool was used for. A policy naming the activities — advertising copy that is published, communications that make representations about a property or a transaction, anything that produces a document going into a file, anything touching client funds or confidential information — remains correct as the products change.

Advertising is where this concentrates and where the enforcement history already sits. State advertising rules typically require the brokerage to be identified, prohibit misleading claims, and govern how a licensee's name and team branding may appear. Generated listing copy, generated social posts and generated agent bios all pass through those rules and none of them notices. A brokerage that reviews published advertising has covered the largest category by volume of what a licensee's tool actually produces.

The second concentration is the file. Transaction documents, disclosures, correspondence and the record of who advised what and when are retained under state rules and are what a complaint is investigated against. A tool that drafts a disclosure, summarises an inspection report or composes a message about a defect has produced something the file will contain, and the supervision question is whether a licensee read it before it went. That is a smaller and more answerable question than whether the tool is reliable.

There is a category brokers often miss entirely because it is not about output at all. Where an agent uses a personal account with a general-purpose tool, the brokerage's client information is now in a place the brokerage cannot search, produce, retain or delete. That defeats records obligations, complicates any later dispute, and is invisible from the brokerage's side. Establishing which accounts agents actually use is duller than writing a policy and finds more.

Finally, supervision that means something has to be evidenced. The version that works is narrow: a written statement of which activities may involve a tool and on what condition, a requirement that published output was reviewed by the licensee whose name is on it, and a periodic look at a sample of what was actually published. A brokerage that can produce those three things has supervised. A brokerage with a policy nobody has read has a document.