Revolutionising ‘moving home’ with AI: In conversation with Ross Nichols, Just Move In

Jim Clark: Ross, great to catch up over this call today. You’re co-founder of Just Move In and you’ve recently launched J. I’ve seen it all over LinkedIn in various news and press releases. I’m curious — what does it actually do and what can you do now that you couldn’t before?

Ross Nichols: Thanks, Jim. Just Move In started as a moving home platform to help consumers — whether they’re renting or buying a house — to set up all the essential services they need as they move into a property. We’ve been doing that full time since 2018, but the company actually started ten years ago. We have a great track record: we’ve got the highest Trustpilot score of anybody in our space, 4.9 stars out of five from over three and a half thousand reviews.

Ross Nichols: We realised last year that with everything happening with AI, we needed a new product to really capitalise on it. So J is the revolution we’re going through as a business — I’d describe it as moving from 1.0 to 2.0. With that, we’ve moved towards agentic commerce, which is a significant emerging market. J is not just helping somebody with their move, which is what we’ve been doing for a very long time, but also helping them manage their home. Managing the move is the entry point in somebody’s life, but then we give them an incredible experience that connects them to different services they may need — not just energy, broadband and home insurance, which is our bread and butter, but also financial services, potentially pensions, loans, and a whole range of things you’ll need once you get into that property. J is going to be the conduit managing that experience.

Jim Clark: You mentioned going from 1.0 to 2.0, so it’s fair to say you’ve really rebuilt the core product around AI. It’s definitely not a bolt-on.

Ross Nichols: Definitely not. I wish it was as straightforward as that. We’ve completely rebuilt our infrastructure from the ground up and we’re still going through a period of transitioning parts of the business from old to new. Getting the foundations right for this next phase was critical. We’ve been building this since the beginning of last year.

Jim Clark: You were already doing significant volume before the launch of J. What really sparked your decision to rebuild rather than just keep iterating on what you had?

Ross Nichols: The business now processes about 20,000 home moves a month. Our model is that we partner with companies already managing home moves — estate agents, mortgage brokers, anyone interacting with a mover. Getting that experience right has been our main focus over the last decade and it’s in a really good position. But it was very clear that if we wanted to move beyond our core services, we’d have to use AI to do it, because managing relationships through traditional digital and phone channels can only take you so far. If you want to build a more meaningful relationship with a customer from the very first interaction all the way through to settling and managing services beyond the move, you need a large human operation. That just wouldn’t be efficient from a cost perspective. So we’ve been thinking hard about how AI interacts with our human team to assist customers in the best way possible.

Ross Nichols: Some of the services we help people with are regulated products — we’re regulated by the FCA, directly authorised to sell insurance. You have to make sure you’re doing that properly, and people still have questions. They’re happy to be served by AI up to a point, but there will be a threshold — a particular question about a medical condition, or something expensive that needs insuring — where they still want to speak to a human. So how do we build that customer experience between the two and make sure they’re working together efficiently?

Jim Clark: That must have been a fairly easy pitch to investors for the rebuild — or was it not the case?

Ross Nichols: We concluded our Series A investment at Christmas 2024, just as we were starting to think about these big AI decisions. Our investors are incredibly supportive — we’ve been through a lot together over the years: COVID, the energy crisis, various challenges. But there’s a balance you have to strike between delivering against your current plan and making it clear you see the direction of travel and are operating to that new bar as well. So we’ve been carefully managing resources and costs to achieve both.

Ross Nichols: There will naturally be some scepticism around AI, and I think even consumers who tried some of the models a couple of years ago and haven’t used them since would be astonished at how fast things have changed. If you aren’t looking at this regularly, your perception of what AI can do might be stuck in the past. We’ve got to make sure we’re taking our investors on a journey and staying at the front of the pack, not the back.

Jim Clark: Customers expect to be served in the right way, when they want it. How does that play out?

Ross Nichols: People are happy to speak to a chatbot until it goes wrong. And then they want a human immediately — as fast as possible. If you can’t bridge that gap, you’re going to run into issues. As long as technology feels effortless and you’re getting the outcome you expect as a customer, you’re happy to deal with whatever the experience looks like. But from a cost perspective, you’ve got to make sure the two naturally sit together. That’s why I think AI plus humans — at least for now — is the practical formula. This may change in five years, but at the moment, we know from dealing with customers who are moving house that they do have questions, it is complicated, and you can’t do everything online today. But we’re building for a world where that does become possible within a very short period of time.

Jim Clark: You mentioned the team you assembled to bring J to life. What skills did you need to bring in quickly?

Ross Nichols: The biggest skill you probably need is actually attitude. Especially in this world where things are changing so quickly. You have people who are very experienced — maybe ten or fifteen years of industry experience as a product manager or engineer — and their worlds have completely changed over the last year. We now need people who are coming in to think AI-first, rather than AI-last or AI-next. It has to be AI-first now: AI builds the code, humans check it. From there we can just build and deploy much faster. Yes, you get bugs. Yes, you get more issues. And that’s something we manage very carefully, especially in regulated services. But that is the direction of travel. Pace, execution and velocity are the absolute key words for us.

Jim Clark: How do you show people within the business what’s now possible?

Ross Nichols: I’ll give you a good example. I’m not an engineer at all. Over the last week, I built a complete website — not just a vibe-coded website. A proper website with a front end, a back end using databases, payments, an admin area, an area for partners to sign up and manage things. All done on my own. That wouldn’t have been possible a year ago, even six months ago. And now it’s already live and people are already using it. That’s the best example I can give of what’s possible for a non-engineer. So don’t be afraid of it. Lean in, make mistakes, share in public. We’re now getting people to share what they’re working on in our Slack channels. I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time for people to feel like they can do anything they want and actually make it happen, just with some prompts.

Jim Clark: You’ve built a lot of empathy into the model. Can you explain that?

Ross Nichols: Not every move is a happy move. You might be getting divorced, or there could be a bereavement — lots of different reasons. The AI can pick up on that. So as you’re having an interaction at the beginning, through voice, and telling us about your move, we’re picking all of that up. As a result, the interactions you have will be different to the interactions I have. We’re creating personas. We’ve probably got over two dozen different personas we can categorise someone into — are they a first-time renter, a downsizing retiree moving into rented accommodation for the first time? Getting that experience right and building out a dynamic checklist for each individual is really key so that we can build a long-term relationship, not just for the move, but for the duration.

Jim Clark: You switched on the AI at Christmas. What were the early interactions like?

Ross Nichols: From mid-December, all our customers go through an AI journey at the beginning of the interaction. We initially disabled all commercial services being sold and have been adding them back in one by one, with energy being the first to go live. That’s an agentic experience. You have a co-pilot flow where you’re asking questions, J is making recommendations about what you should do next, and you’re deciding on energy as a service you need to manage. We then do the change of occupancy — notifying the incumbent supplier that you’re moving and making a recommendation for a new supplier. By the end of Q1 we expect to have insurance and broadband turned on as well.

Ross Nichols: One thing that surprised me was the number of international customers we have. I knew we had a decent percentage, maybe ten to twenty per cent. But the fact that someone can suddenly interact with us in their native language with the AI is really powerful. If your first interaction is in your mother tongue, that’s an incredible touchpoint. And if you know you can have a conversation in your own language in a new market, you’re naturally going to lean towards that product for whatever else you might need after the move.

Jim Clark: On the build vs. buy question — it sounds like you went full into build?

Ross Nichols: We’ve built the core foundations around what we’re doing ourselves. There are tools we’ve tried on the back-office side, like a call-listening product doing AI analysis. What we found is that these tools are amazing and there’s incredible analysis and insight you can get, but they’re only as good as the humans on the other side making decisions about what they’re looking at. That’s been where we’ve fallen over in certain areas.

Ross Nichols: From a foundational layer, building J and all the experience around it is all proprietary technology. It still uses LLMs at the heart of the product, but the defensibility we have is around the data we have access to — the property information, the supply data — and the customer experience at the heart of the flow we’ve built.

Jim Clark: One final question. Given everything you’ve done, what’s the one thing ambitious mid-market CEOs shouldn’t underestimate?

Ross Nichols: It’s really got to come from the top. If you want to go and do this, you have to believe it. You have to commit to it. It isn’t straightforward. It isn’t easy. We’re still figuring it out ourselves as we go. We don’t have all the answers. I don’t think anybody does. But here’s the thing that will give people comfort: this is evolving so quickly that even if you haven’t started yet, if you committed to it today — if you went into a room and just started exploring and researching yourself, as the leaders in your businesses — you can in a month become the leader in your field. That’s how fast things are changing. There’s never been a better time to start, and today is the day. Don’t hide away from it. Lean in. You’ll make mistakes, but it will certainly be a ride.

What is J and how does it differ from a standard chatbot?

J is Just Move In’s agentic commerce layer — a fundamentally different product to a standard chatbot. Rather than simply answering questions, J anticipates customer needs, executes tasks on their behalf and builds a long-term relationship beyond the move itself. It connects customers to energy, broadband, insurance and a growing range of other services, personalised to their individual circumstances. Just Move In rebuilt its core infrastructure from the ground up to support J, rather than bolting AI onto an existing product.

How does Just Move In balance AI and human customer service?

Just Move In operates on a human-AI collaboration model. J handles the initial stages of every customer interaction and manages straightforward service journeys. When a conversation reaches a point of complexity — a regulatory question, a sensitive personal circumstance or a service the customer wants to discuss in detail — J hands off to a human specialist. The company is regulated by the FCA and directly authorised to sell insurance, so this handoff is built deliberately into the product design, not treated as a failure mode.

What does agentic commerce mean in practice for home movers?

Agentic commerce means the AI acts on behalf of the customer, rather than simply providing information. In practice, this means J can identify what a customer needs — sometimes before they ask — make tailored recommendations, and execute actions such as notifying incumbent energy suppliers of a change of occupancy and recommending new ones. The goal is to remove friction from an already stressful process and anticipate decisions the customer hasn’t yet considered.

How did Just Move In approach the build vs. buy decision for AI?

Just Move In’s default position was to build its core product capabilities in-house, particularly anything that forms part of J’s proprietary experience. The defensible advantage lies in Just Move In’s data — property information, supply data, and a deep understanding of the customer journey — none of which can be replicated by an off-the-shelf vendor. For back-office functions, the company has tested third-party tools but found that their value depends heavily on having the right internal resource to act on the insights they generate.

How fast can non-technical leaders build with AI tools today?

Ross Nichols built a fully functional website — with a front end, back end, database, payments and a partner management area — in under a week, without an engineering team. Tasks that previously required a product team and months of development can now be prototyped and deployed in days. For mid-market leaders, this matters because it dramatically reduces the cost of testing new ideas before committing significant resource.

What are the cultural challenges of moving to an AI-first engineering approach?

Shifting to an AI-first approach — where AI builds code and humans audit the results rather than the other way around — requires a significant cultural change. Experienced engineers and product managers may have developed strong working habits over many years that are now being challenged. Just Move In has found that attitude matters more than technical background. New joiners are expected to think AI-first from day one, which in turn helps the wider organisation understand that this is the direction of travel, not an experiment.

Why is leadership commitment so critical to AI adoption?

Ross Nichols’ view is direct: AI adoption has to come from the top. Leaders who are not personally committed — who are waiting for a perfect strategy before engaging — will fall behind organisations that are learning as they go. His argument is that the pace of change is so rapid that a leader who starts exploring today can become the leading voice in their sector within a month. The risk is not making mistakes; it is waiting too long to start.