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Ahead of Inman Connect New York, EXp Chief Marketing Officer Wendy Forsythe dished on AI, building a strong company culture amid chaos and how to reset after a difficult year.

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Twenty-twenty-five was an unrelenting rollercoaster, with regulatory and market shifts thrashing the industry up and down, right and left. Some white-knuckled their way through the dips, while others leaned forward, relishing the opportunities that only arise during chaos.

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Wendy Forsythe | Credit: LinkedIn

No matter where you sat on the ride in 2025, eXp Chief Marketing Officer Wendy Forsythe said, it’s time to take the lessons of the year and use them to become bigger, better and more focused.

“This year is about resetting, refocusing on your business and moving forward,” she told Inman. “It is just such a great time to reset when we think of regulatory changes, when we think of market changes, when we think of consolidation changes.”

Days ahead of her appearances at Inman Connect New York, Forsythe shared her thoughts on artificial intelligence, building trust and resiliency amid tumult, and what seasoned and new agents need to do to thrive.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Inman: Last year was a whirlwind, and honestly, I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything that happened. But I think the stage has been set for a very interesting 2026. What conversations at ICNY do you think will set the tone for the coming 11 or 12 months?

Forsythe: My word for 2026 is reset. I think that we had so much change that happened in 2025, and I think that as we go into 2026, it is just such a great time for all of us, regardless of what our function is in the industry.

That is the mindset I’ve been discussing with our agents. So I’m going into next week with that focus and with that lens of conversations that we’ll have on the Inman stages and in the Inman hallways.

I have your session list in front of me, and the one that caught my eye is ‘Culture Wins Loyalty,’ which will explore how to build and maintain a strong culture amid lawsuits, consolidation and other challenges. How can the industry reset amid so much noise and uncertainty?

I think from a broader view, one of the things that is really important is trust.

Particularly with artificial intelligence, the consumer really wants to know, ‘Is this really my agent? Is this really a leader’s opinion?’ This all goes back to trust, and with AI playing such an enormous part in how communication is happening online, we don’t know if that’s a [deep fake] in the video or if that’s the [actual] person in the video. Is that [content] written by a person, or is that written by AI?

That is an important thing that we all need to be thinking about as we develop our strategies this year.

I did a series of interviews at the end of the year, and no one mentioned AI without discussing how it complicates our digital lives and relationships. At one point, AI-generated content was easy to spot, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult. I’ve definitely been fooled a few times and have taken steps to sharpen my radar.

Yes. It is one of the things that we have talked about in our team. We’ve coined it ‘The Year of the Experience.’ That in-person experience is becoming so important. We use AI to leverage operational efficiency and then take those benefits, especially from a cost savings perspective, to pour into that in-person experience. Being able to build that relationship in real life has become more important than it’s ever been.

What does a reset look like for agents? How would an agent who’s been in the industry 20-30 years approach a reset, and how would a newer agent approach a reset? A lot of people rushed into real estate when it was hot, and now they’re looking at a landscape where deals are harder to come by.

I think for the seasoned agent that’s been in the industry for 15, 20 or 25 years, they’ve been through so many different market cycles. They’ve been through these resets at various times, so they have the muscle to understand different market conditions and pivot their businesses to align with what’s happening. I have a great deal of confidence in those veterans, so to speak, that they understand that pivot that is necessary.

For those newer agents who got into the business [more recently], they’re going to have to learn some new skills. A lot of times, they are joining teams, and they’re relying on those team leaders, who are often those more seasoned agents, to teach them those skills.

To teach them how to prospect, to teach them how to do that follow-up, to teach them how to pivot with the market conditions… And we actually see those agents who join teams have a greater likelihood of succeeding through the changing market and making it in the business.

That’s one of the reasons that we’re seeing teams continue to be such a dominant force in the industry. Those are some of the things that we’re seeing as part of the reset.

How is eXp resetting? I know you’ve spent the past few years building a more professional agent base, hence the ‘where the pros go to grow’ tagline. How are you thinking about pushing the envelope on that this year?

We know that teams are ultimately able to provide an environment for newer agents and agents of all experience levels to be more successful and more productive. Ultimately, our job as their brokerage partner is to provide the infrastructure and platform to operationalize their business, and that’s what we excel at.

We’re doing things like offering a team leader academy, which is one of our eXp University programs that helps our team leaders bring operational efficiencies into their teams, because a team is really a business within a business.

Team leaders want to operate their businesses as efficiently as possible — they’re trying to figure out the right staffing, the right systems and the right growth strategies. We’re working with them in partnership to maximize those opportunities and develop those business plans, and we’re also offering programs such as our AI accelerator course.

That course helps agents understand how to use AI to create efficiency and understand the immense power that AI has to understand vibe coding and what that can unlock for you from a marketing perspective.

So, we continue to lean into leading-edge tools. services, and programs to help our teams and to help our solo agents as well.

Email Marian McPherson

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