At VB Transform 2026, Zillow's engineering chief said AI ROI numbers only hold up if you measure before you build

Source: ventureBeat July 20, 2026 · 09:38
Zillow, the real estate technology company, doesn't get one conversation with its customers. They move from a phone screen to a loan officer to a real estate agent, sometimes over months or years, and expect the context to follow them. A single chatbot could never carry that thread.At VB Transform 2026, Zillow SVP of Engineering Toby Roberts and Glean co-founder and CEO Arvind Jain described how they built AI architecture meant to carry context across that entire journey — and why context, not raw data, turned out to be the harder problem to solve. Zillow's products touch roughly 80% of U.S. real estate transactions each year, and the company has been using AI long before ChatGPT existed."We pretty quickly identified that we were going to need a persistent context layer that was going to m…

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