Wild Dog Digital uses AI for its website, not client service
David Filipi is founder of Wild Dog Digital, a Las Vegas real estate media provider serving the market since 2013 with photography, video and 3D services. This conversation shows how AI is helping with website changes and a custom CRM, while client service remains deliberately human.
Use AI where it can take on work without constant oversight, as Wild Dog Digital has with website changes, and keep human service where personal interaction matters. Listen to clients and focus on what improves the result, not just the equipment or techniques.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
My wife and I started this business out of necessity when our previous startup idea failed. It started growing by word of mouth, slowly taking over our attention from other things until we fully committed to real estate photography within a year. We hired our first editor, photographer and later a dedicated scheduler. Since we haven’t spent anything on marketing or advertising, I have to assume that clients keep coming back for our quality, consistency and fair prices. Unlike much of the competition, we also don’t limit how many photos we deliver.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Word of mouth and repeat clients. Some new clients come through our website.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I took the slow approach and only started using AI when it proved where it can be used without needing for constant oversight. For that reason we still haven’t replaced, and aren’t planning to replace our client service team with chatbots. We like the human touch and want to keep it that way. However, this year I finally eliminated the need for a developer to make changes to our website. I can do basic HTML, but any changes to our order form script needed an experienced developer. After 10+ years of running the website on WordPress and having to find a new developer every couple of years only kept adding layers of new code and new plugins. I redid the whole website with Claude Code and now can do any modification within minutes. Now I am building a custom made CRM for our business with features I couldn’t find in a commercially available one, even when they were focused on real estate photographers.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
There are some clients who mentioned AI suggested us, but it’s not much different from a Google search. ChatGPT and others just makes it more curated and faster but we didn’t have to change much in order to be mentioned in there.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Listen to clients what they want and find a way to deliver it, without telling them how it can’t be done. Be honest and admit mistakes and offer fast solutions. I would ignore chasing the best equipment and techniques which add little to the final result. Clients hire you or your company, not your camera.
Thank you to David Filipi and the team at Wild Dog Digital for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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