By Vincent Wigmans

Artificial intelligence has changed the way people shop for aircraft, and honestly, a lot of that change is good. Buyers arrive better informed, comparison research happens faster, and the overall quality of first conversations has improved in many cases. But there’s a flip side, and anyone selling aircraft today has felt it!

The inbox tells the story

Every day, we receive emails about our aircraft for sale that are unmistakably AI-generated. Not “AI-assisted”, AI-generated. The tone, the structure, the sheer volume of hyper-specific technical questions, all bear the same fingerprint. It’s not that people are asking more questions. It’s that they’re asking questions they don’t actually understand, pulled from a chatbot that has no idea what actually matters in a real transaction.

We’ve had inquiries on a piston aircraft asking about the coolant type used in the engine, these aren’t questions born of curiosity or diligence. They’re questions born of a prompt.

To give you a real sense of what lands in our inbox, here’s an actual excerpt, word for word:

Powerplant & Cooling System Due Diligence (Continental CD-170)

Coolant Specification & Service Baseline:

●     Does this engine currently run natively on G40 (Pink / Si-OAT) or G48 (Blue-Green / HOAT) coolant?

●     If originally delivered with G48, please confirm if the official flushing and conversion procedure to G40 has been fully completed in accordance with Continental/Tecnam service instructions.

Safety Bulletins & Cylinder Head Status:

●     Has the powerplant complied with Continental SB CG 125-1030 (or corresponding EASA Safety Bulletins regarding coolant chemical analysis and cylinder head corrosion)? Please provide records of any laboratory fluid analyses.

●     What is the current Cylinder Head Part Number (P/N)? Has it been upgraded to the latest factory standard (P/N 05-7231-K0243xx or factory-equivalent revision)?

Read that again. It’s formatted like an engineering audit, complete with bulletins, part numbers, and a due-diligence header, send in by a buyer who hasn’t bought an aircraft before, this would be his first aircraft purchase he told me, when i confronted him with more in depth questions why he wanted to know more about the coolant! It reads like diligence. It isn’t. It’s a chatbot pattern-matching “aircraft purchase questions” and dressing them up as expertise the sender doesn’t have.

When “in-depth” stops meaning “informed”

There’s an irony here worth sitting with: the whole point of asking detailed questions is to demonstrate, and build, real understanding before a big purchase. But when the questions are generated rather than genuinely held, that entire premise collapses. We’re left replying at length to inquiries where the person on the other end may not even understand our own answer, because they never understood the question either.

That takes a toll. Brokers want to give every inquiry the attention it deserves. But when a growing share of “serious buyer” emails turn out to be AI-padded noise, the incentive to respond thoroughly and personally to every message erodes, not because we don’t care, but because the signal-to-noise ratio keeps dropping.

The discount request that says it all

Perhaps the clearest example: a 2025 aircraft, 100 hours on the airframe, essentially brand new and within factory warranty, and the inquiry still opens with an expectation of a “big discount because it’s used.” That’s not a negotiating position born of market knowledge. That’s a script, applied without any grasp of context, condition, or the actual dynamics of the used aircraft market.

Where does this leave brokers?

We’re not against AI, it’s a genuinely useful tool for research, first-pass comparisons, and helping buyers organize their thinking. But there’s a meaningful difference between a buyer using AI to prepare better questions, and a buyer outsourcing the entire inquiry to AI without reading the output first.

The aircraft business is still, fundamentally, a relationship business. Real transactions get built on real conversations, ones where the person asking the question actually wants to understand the answer. No algorithm can substitute for that, no matter how many technical-sounding questions it can generate in a few seconds.

So if you’re in the market for an aircraft: by all means, use AI to prepare. Just make sure you’re the one asking the questions, not AI.