Zillow Discontinues AI-Powered Division Due to Predictive Pricing Tool's Limitations: A Cautionary Tale for Trustworthy AI

November 2, 2021

The AI-driven predictive pricing tool Zestimate at Zillow reportedly struggled to forecast housing prices accurately, leading to a three-to-six month lag in the market. This challenge ultimately resulted in the shutdown of Zillow Offers division and job losses for several thousand employees. This AI incident underscores the importance of responsible AI governance and safe and secure AI practices, as well as the role of Project Cerebellum's Govern function in HISPI Trusted AI Model (TAIM) to prevent such harm. Ready to help shape responsible AI? JOIN US
Alleged deployer
zillow
Alleged developer
zillow-offers
Alleged harmed parties
zillow-offers-staff, zillow

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/149

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.