The Farm Driveway Test for AI

Most technology rollouts fail not because the technology was bad, but because nobody asked whether people would actually use it.

I have seen this play out more times than I can count. A team spends months building something genuinely impressive. The engineering is solid. The business case is airtight. And then six months after launch, half the people it was built for have quietly gone back to doing things the old way.

That is not a technology problem. That is a leadership problem.

When we set out to build platforms for more than 450 agents across 42 states at National Land Realty, we made a deliberate decision early on. We were not going to measure success by whether we shipped the platform. We were going to measure it by whether agents would miss it if it disappeared tomorrow.

That reframe changes everything about how you build.

It means getting into the field before you write a single line of requirements. It means sitting with agents, watching how they actually work, not how the process chart says they work. It means accepting that the elegant solution you designed in a conference room is often the wrong solution for someone checking a platform on their phone in a farm driveway with one bar of service.

We have not always gotten it right. There are features we were proud of that never got used, and workflows we thought were obvious that confused people in ways we did not anticipate. Those moments sting a little. They also make the next build better.

That filter never goes away. If anything, it gets harder to apply in an AI driven world where the technology is moving faster than most organizations can absorb it.

AI can do genuinely remarkable things right now. But remarkable does not automatically mean useful, and useful does not automatically mean adopted. The same agent in that farm driveway does not care what model is running under the hood. They care whether it saves them time and helps them win the deal.

The question we ask before every AI feature is the same one we have always asked. Will the person least excited about new technology find this obvious and valuable?

If the answer is not clearly yes, we are not ready to ship it.