Instead of receiving phone calls or short messages, which the Propertymark members say are quick to address and often resolved through a conversation, they are receiving lengthy, complex and intricate complaints that are sometimes without grounds.
User-bias
Greg Tsuman, a past president of ARLA Propertymark, said: “AI tends to be very much user-biased – it can tell you what you want to hear, and it can lead people into a potential false sense of awareness where the complaint might be without true merit.”
He added: “We have got a complaints procedure designed for the AI world. The first point would be for the relevant office to deal with the complaint and then it would get passed on to the department head, and finally the compliance team.
“We have now started using AI to help summarise and analyse the substance of potential correspondence because if you are looking at a document that spans several pages of A4, that quickly becomes a very time-intensive task. We don’t use AI to respond to complaints, but we use it to do the heavy lifting so that we can see the wood from the trees. We then rely on human expertise to make a response.”
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Inaccurate information
Ben Stokes, president-elect of ARLA and a lettings director, has also noticed a spike in AI-generated complaints.
AI is being used to merge knowledge from the internet about previously proposed government bills, says Stokes, such as the Conservative government’s Renters’ Reform Bill, which points users towards information that is no longer accurate.
“It can be difficult to navigate AI complaints that someone has not written, especially when the legal stance is not correct,” Stokes added. “We check them carefully and respond in a way that points tenants in the right direction. The biggest thing we are finding is that AI tools are empowering people to complain about things and blow small situations out of proportion.”
Tsuman wants an inclusion in The Property Ombudsman’s rules for any complainant to disclose if AI was used to construct the correspondence.
“AI shouldn’t prevent any complaint from going ahead because it may have assisted in making the communication clearer for the respondent to review,” he said. “The aim would be to prevent potential spurious complaints that might be seen as a ‘scattergun’ approach, where tenants might potentially end up including details which aren’t correct or are taken out of context.”
