WGAN at Visual 1st 2026: Pixels, Prompts, and Property

Event: Visual 1st 2026, 14th annual edition | KQED, San Francisco | September 29 to 30, 2026
Session: Speed Insights | Wednesday, September 30 | Pixels, Prompts, and Property: The AI & Visual Tech Revolution in Real Estate
On stage: Tom Sparks, CEO, WGAN Holdings Inc. and Publisher & Managing Editor, We Get Around Network, interviewed by Hans Hartman, Co-chair, Visual 1st and Principal, Suite 48 Analytics

On Wednesday, September 30, I joined Hans Hartman, co-chair of Visual 1st, on stage in San Francisco for a Speed Insights session on how AI and visual technology are changing real estate media.

Visual 1st is a 1.5-day executive conference for the global photo and video industry. The room is full of people from photo and video software and app companies, photo print product providers, camera manufacturers and stock media companies, and roughly 30% of attendees travel in from overseas. Real estate media is one corner of that world, so I was glad to bring the WGAN community's point of view to it. The questions we work through on this forum every day (AI editing, DIY capture, digital twins, honest representation of a property) are questions the wider imaging industry is now asking too.

One interview, one question

Speed Insights sessions are one-on-one interviews, each built around one main question. Mine was how the AI and visual tech revolution is upending real estate. The setup is simple: a high-top table, a handful of slides and a conversation with Hans.


What we covered

Hans steered the conversation through the trends he sees in real estate and visual proptech.

Customer expectations: what agents and property marketers expect from listing visuals today, and how they feel about AI being part of the process.

DIY tools: whether professionals should worry about do-it-yourself capture and editing tools, and how to answer that when you sell a professional service.

Capture: how visuals are being captured now, including what a digital twin is and how the concept is being used.

Curating and editing: choosing the right visuals and editing them with and without AI, including the concern that the final images still honestly represent the property and the legal questions that come with that.

Print: a large part of the Visual 1st audience works in photo print, so we talked about where printed visuals fit in real estate.

Partnerships: Hans asks every speaker which types of companies they would like to partner with, and I was no exception.

Also on the program

I shared the Wednesday afternoon Speed Insights block with Pavel Machalek of Eternity Photos (preserving photos for centuries, not just years), Elodie Mailliet of CatchLight (visual storytelling that empowers communities) and Nick Buemond of Nereus Vision (scalable imaging and AI for ocean research). Wednesday morning also featured a fireside chat with Andy Parsons, Global Head of Content Authenticity at Adobe. Content provenance sits very close to the question our industry faces with AI-edited listing photos: can the viewer trust what they are looking at?

Thank you to Hans and the Visual 1st team for the invitation, and to everyone I got to talk with at the conference.

Stage photos: SpotMyPhotos for Visual 1st 2026

About Visual 1st:
Visual 1st is an executive conference focused on innovation and partnerships in the global photo and video industry, held annually in San Francisco and co-chaired by Hans Hartman and Alexis Gerard. The 2026 conference was its 14th annual edition.

Visual 1st 2026 program: https://www.visual1st.biz/program2026
Visual 1st 2026 photos: https://www.visual1st.biz/photos2026

Topics covered in this session include: Visual 1st 2026, Hans Hartman, Suite 48 Analytics, We Get Around Network, Sparks Media Group, Scan Your Space, AI photo editing, digital twins

How are your clients reacting to AI-edited listing photos? Are DIY capture tools taking work from you, or sending clients back to you? Share your experience in the comments below.