An Interview With Chad Silverstein
There is also our AI offer prediction tool, which has been a game-changer. It analyzes recently sold properties in the area and predicts what offer you would have to submit in order to win that property, with about 97% accuracy. A lot of our buyers use it to come in under asking in a competitive situation, and still end up landing the deal. Since rolling it out, we’ve seen a 15% increase in accepted offers compared to before.
In the ever-evolving and never-ending landscape of business, staying ahead of the curve is a prerequisite for success. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone from being a futuristic concept to a daily business tool that executives can’t ignore. In this interview series, we would like to talk with business leaders who’ve successfully integrated A.I. into their operations, transforming their companies in the process. I had the pleasure of interviewing Nabeel Rushdi.
Nabeel Rushdi is the Co-Founder and Head of Product at Zown, a real estate fintech platform transforming the way people buy homes across North America.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! To set the stage, tell us briefly about your childhood and background.
I was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Canada when I was three, so I was raised in Toronto. From a young age, I was always exploring new interests. I was a big sports player growing up, which taught me a lot about teamwork, leadership, and resilience. These are traits that still shape how I operate today. Outside of sports, I was constantly teaching myself new skills like guitar, photography, and graphic design. That curiosity eventually led me to start my own creative business. I went to business school, but most of my learning came from launching self-started ventures and figuring things out along the way. My path wasn’t traditional, but it gave me a deep appreciation for building things from the ground up and solving problems in unconventional ways.
What were the early challenges you faced in your career, and how did they shape your approach to leadership?
One of the biggest challenges early on was learning to navigate ambiguity. In a startup, especially in real estate and fintech, there are way more unknowns than knowns. I used to think leadership meant having all the answers, but I’ve learned it’s more about creating clarity when there isn’t any, and helping your team feel confident even when the path forward is messy. I think a lot of that mindset goes back to playing competitive hockey growing up. You’re constantly adapting to fast-moving situations, learning how to lead through action, and trusting your teammates to play their role. Those lessons around resilience, communication, and staying composed under pressure have carried over directly into how I lead today.
We often learn the most from our mistakes. Can you share one mistake that turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?
One of the early mistakes we made at Zown was building a tool for home sellers that, while it was polished and functional, didn’t get much traction. We spent almost two months on it, but it didn’t hit initially because it wasn’t solving a deep or urgent problem. That experience taught me something foundational: product hit rate is everything, and to get that right, you need to fully understand the problem, not just what users say they want, but what they actually need. Most clients don’t actually know what they need. It’s on us to listen closely, ask the right questions, and dig beneath the surface. If you don’t get to the root of the problem, you risk building something that looks great but doesn’t move the needle. That mistake reshaped how I approached the product. Now, we only build if we can clearly tie the solution to something real, painful, and repeatedly heard from our users.
A.I. is a big leap for many businesses. When and what first sparked your interest in incorporating it into your operations?
We started leveraging AI right from the beginning. Even in the early days, we understood that AI wasn’t just a trend, it was where the world was headed. The use cases are endless, whether it’s data analytics, LLMs, or even something as simple as staying organized. While AI’s capabilities weren’t nearly as advanced back then as they are now, we made a conscious decision to start early. That gave us time to build internal systems, processes, and workflows around AI that could scale with us. Looking back, that early investment made a huge difference. It helped us use AI more effectively as we grew and put us in a strong position to adapt quickly as the technology evolved.
AI can be a game-changer for individuals and their responsibilities. Can you share how you personally use AI and what are your go-to resources or tools?
I use AI daily, it’s become a core part of how I operate. ChatGPT is my go-to for brainstorming, deep work sessions, mapping out workflows, and even debugging. I also lean on Notion AI for organizing ideas and Figma’s AI features to speed up design work. I’m a big believer that in the right hands, AI can make someone operate at a completely different level, almost superhuman (I also use Superhuman, the email one.). If you learn how to prompt, train, and interact with AI properly, it shifts how you think and work. It’s not just about speed; it’s about unlocking new ways to approach problems and making better decisions faster. I don’t treat it like a magic tool, I treat it like a junior teammate I’m constantly collaborating with.
On the flip side, what challenges or setbacks have you encountered while implementing A.I. into your company?
One of the main challenges was over-reliance early on. We tried replacing too many human touches with AI before understanding the emotional weight of a home buying decision. So we had to pull back and re-integrate real human moments, such as 1:1 chats, local knowledge, to maintain trust. Another challenge is compliance, especially in real estate and mortgage. We’ve had to build tight guardrails to make sure AI enhances, not endangers, the user experience.
Let’s dig into this further. Can you share the top 5 A.I. tools or different ways you’re integrating AI into your business? What specific functions do they serve and what kind of result have you seen so far?
1 . One of the most useful tools has been our AI Agent on WhatsApp. It gets added right into group chats with clients and handles everything from answering questions to sending listings based on their preferences, and even booking showings. What’s great is that it doesn’t feel like you’re talking to a robot. It’s conversational. I remember one client who started chatting with the bot late at night, and by the next morning, they had five listings and a showing booked before anyone on our team had even stepped in. That kind of speed and responsiveness keeps over 75% of our active leads engaged in the chat.
2 . Then there’s our AI caller, which we use to follow up with clients who get qualified through our funnel. It’ll call them, walk them through what comes next, answer basic questions, and try to get them to book a call with one of our real advisors. One case that stands out was a client who qualified late one evening, the AI called, they booked a follow-up call for the next morning, and within 48 hours they were actively looking at homes. That one tool alone accounts for about 15% of our booked calls each day now.
3 . We also built an offer writing bot, which has saved our agents a ton of time. It scrapes through client chats and emails, pulls the relevant info, and drafts the offer docs automatically. Our agents just review and send. One of our agents went from writing maybe two or three offers a day to reviewing and finalizing six or seven. That one shift gave us a 200% lift in offers written per agent per day.
4 . Our AI home matching system is another big one. It watches what kind of homes a user is engaging with, the ones they’re liking, swiping on, or spending more time viewing and uses that to fine-tune future recommendations. There have been cases where a client would come in looking for condos in Scarborough, but based on their behavior, the system started showing them condos downtown with a waterfront view, and that’s exactly what they ended up buying. It just reduces the time people spend aimlessly browsing before they find the right fit.
5 . There is also our AI offer prediction tool, which has been a game-changer. It analyzes recently sold properties in the area and predicts what offer you would have to submit in order to win that property, with about 97% accuracy. A lot of our buyers use it to come in under asking in a competitive situation, and still end up landing the deal. Since rolling it out, we’ve seen a 15% increase in accepted offers compared to before.
There’s concern about A.I. taking over jobs. How do you balance A.I. tools with your human workforce and have you already replaced any positions using technology?
We don’t see AI as a replacement for people; we see it as a way to help people work smarter. For us, it’s really about giving our team better tools so they can spend more time doing the things that matter, like building trust with clients or solving real problems. AI takes care of the repetitive or time-consuming tasks in the background, so our team can move faster and be more effective. It hasn’t replaced anyone, if anything, it’s made us more efficient and freed up our people to do higher-value work. That’s how we’ve always approached it: use AI to amplify human potential, not remove it.
Looking ahead, what’s on the horizon in the world of AI that people should know about? What do you see happening in the next 3–5 years? I would love to hear your best prediction.
If you look at how fast things have moved in just the last year with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, it’s clear we’re just getting started. In the next 3 to 5 years, I think we’ll move beyond using AI as just a tool or assistant. It’ll become more like a thinking partner, able to hold context over long periods, proactively make decisions, and adapt to your unique way of working. We’ll see personal AI agents that know your preferences, your communication style, even how you think, and they’ll help you across everything from work to life logistics. It won’t be about replacing humans, but about creating a kind of second brain that lets people operate at 10x. You’ll see startups and individuals do what used to take entire teams. And the biggest breakthroughs probably won’t come from a flashy new model, they’ll come from how AI gets quietly embedded into everyday systems and workflows, making people way more capable than they were before.
If you had to pick just one AI tool that you feel is essential, one that you haven’t mentioned yet, which would it be and why?
One tool that’s had a big impact for us recently is Vercel v0. We’ve been using it to streamline our product design workflow, especially for brand standardization across platforms as part of our Zown Design System. The AI-driven prototyping is incredibly fast. It lets us turn rough concepts into a production-ready UI that aligns with our system components, saving hours of design and dev time. Since integrating it, we’ve seen a 60% increase in design velocity. It’s made our product and engineering collaboration tighter and helped us ship polished experiences way faster.
For the uninitiated, what advice would you give someone looking to integrate AI into their business and doesn’t know where to start?
Start with a single bottleneck. Don’t chase hype, chase ROI. Pick one pain point where your team spends a lot of time on repetitive tasks, and try an AI tool to cut that time in half. Once you see results, build from there. AI isn’t magic, it’s muscle memory.
Where can our readers follow you to learn more about leveraging A.I. in the business world?
You can follow me on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/nabeelrushdi, or check out our work at zown.ca. We also write a monthly newsletter called The Financial Zown, where we break down home buying, tech, and the AI tools that are changing the game.
This was great. Thanks for taking time for us to learn more about you and your business. We wish you continued success!
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience as a Founder and CEO. While attending Ohio State University, he launched his first company, Choice Recovery, Inc., a nationally recognized healthcare collection agency — twice ranked the #1 workplace in Ohio. In 2013, he founded [re]start, helping thousands of people find meaningful career opportunities. After selling both companies, Chad shifted his focus to his true passion — leadership. Today, he coaches founders and CEOs at Built to Lead, advises Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator.
Nabeel Rushdi Of Zown: How We Leveraged AI To Take Our Company To The Next Level was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.