Edmund Bogen, a broker-associate with Douglas Elliman Real Estate, published a full book using Claude and AI transcription tools, proving that artificial intelligence workflows now extend far beyond their original purpose into professional publishing and strategic planning. His approach, documented by the Florida Realtors organization, shows how professionals in non-creative fields are assembling custom AI toolkits that span writing, content creation, and business strategy.

How Did a Real Estate Professional Turn Meeting Notes Into a Published Book?

Bogen's process began with a decade of recorded insights. For the past ten years, he has hosted mastermind meetings on Zoom where guests share marketing, artificial intelligence, and social media strategies. Rather than manually reviewing hundreds of hours of content, Bogen used Otter.ai, an AI-powered transcription platform, to capture and transcribe every episode. He then fed all this transcribed content into Anthropic's Claude, a large language model (LLM) designed to process and generate text, and asked it to synthesize the most valuable pieces into a cohesive book structure.

The resulting book, titled "Prompt to Close: The AI Playbook for Real Estate Professionals," represents what Bogen calls "a ghost-written book without a human ghost." Rather than stopping at Claude's first draft, Bogen took an iterative approach. He asked multiple AI chatbots, including Claude.ai, to provide feedback and rate the manuscript. He continued refining the text until the chatbots consistently scored it at least 8.9 out of 10. Finally, he self-published through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and created a companion website with additional resources.

What Other Business Applications Are Professionals Using AI For Beyond Image Generation?

While Midjourney is primarily known as an image generation tool, Bogen's case reveals how it fits into a larger ecosystem of AI applications that professionals are using to solve real business problems. His toolkit extends well beyond image creation. Bogen has found unconventional uses for AI chatbots as strategic advisors. He instructed Claude to create a simulated advisory board using publicly available data about well-known business leaders. According to Bogen, these simulated advisors "tear me apart and tell me what is wrong and what is right." He then uses a "coach" personality within the same system to synthesize the feedback and make a final recommendation.

For content creation, Bogen relies on AI chatbots to generate ideas for his weekly email newsletter. He describes his process simply: "I talk with my AI about what's in the news that might be interesting." This approach addresses a common pain point for professionals who need to produce regular content but lack dedicated writing staff. For Bogen, the value of these tools is not about replacing expertise. Instead, he uses them to organize ideas, refine thinking, and tackle projects that might otherwise remain incomplete.

How to Build a Custom AI Workflow for Your Professional Needs

• Transcription and Content Aggregation: Use AI transcription platforms like Otter.ai to capture and organize large volumes of meeting or interview content, then feed that structured data into language models for synthesis and analysis.
• Iterative Refinement with Multiple Tools: Rather than accepting a first draft from any AI tool, use multiple AI systems to critique and rate your work, setting clear quality thresholds before finalizing output.
• Simulated Advisory Boards: Leverage language models to create personalized advisory systems based on public information about business leaders or experts in your field, using them as sounding boards for strategic decisions.
• Content Ideation and Brainstorming: Integrate AI chatbots into your regular content creation routine to brainstorm newsletter topics, social media ideas, and marketing angles based on current events and industry trends.
• Multi-Tool Ecosystems: Combine specialized AI tools for different tasks rather than relying on a single platform; Bogen uses transcription tools, language models, image generators, and video editing software as complementary components.

Bogen's complete toolkit demonstrates the breadth of AI applications now available to professionals. Beyond Midjourney for image generation, he uses Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Genspark, and Grok for language tasks. For video and audio work, he relies on Captions, Runway, HeyGen, Speechify, and ElevenLabs. For knowledge management, he uses Notion AI. This layered approach reflects a broader trend in which professionals are no longer choosing a single "best" AI tool but instead assembling custom workflows tailored to specific business needs.

What Does Midjourney's Business Model Look Like in 2026?

Understanding Midjourney's financial position provides context for why the platform continues to attract professional users like Bogen. Midjourney reached an estimated $200 million in annual recurring revenue as of 2023, entirely without accepting outside venture capital funding. The company remains self-funded since its founding in 2022 and is run by David Holz. This bootstrapped structure is genuinely rare in the current AI market, where most companies at similar scale have raised institutional investment.

Midjourney serves roughly 20 to 21 million registered Discord users across subscription tiers ranging from $10 to $120 per month, based on GPU usage and feature access. The platform maintains an estimated 1.4 million paying subscribers, with daily active users clustering between 1.2 and 2.5 million. The company operates with a lean headcount, with estimates placing employee count between 60 and 107 people, generating revenue per employee in the millions of dollars.

One significant development affecting Midjourney's future is a federal copyright lawsuit filed by Disney and NBCUniversal on June 11, 2025. The lawsuit accuses Midjourney of producing unauthorized copies of copyrighted characters, including Darth Vader and the Minions, without permission. Disney's chief legal officer stated the company remains "bullish on the promise of AI technology" while maintaining that "piracy is piracy," regardless of the technology used. The case remains unresolved as of September 2026, with no trial date confirmed publicly.

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In contrast to the Disney lawsuit, Meta announced a licensing agreement with Midjourney on August 22, 2025. Meta's Chief AI Officer described the deal as licensing access to Midjourney's "aesthetic technology" for use in Meta's own future models and products. This arrangement represents a different approach from litigation; Meta is paying to license Midjourney's underlying technology rather than challenging it in court. The financial terms were not disclosed publicly, and importantly, Midjourney remains fully independent with David Holz retaining complete equity.

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How Does Midjourney Compare to Competing Image Generation Platforms?

As of September 2026, Midjourney faces increasing competition from other image generation tools with different design philosophies and pricing models. Midjourney V8.2, the current default version since July 24, 2026, has focused on refining the moody, painterly aesthetic that built the platform's reputation. The V8 line represented the platform's biggest codebase rewrite since V5, with V8.1 adding native 2K HD output and stronger detail retention before V8.2 emphasized aesthetic tuning and personalization.

Google's Nano Banana Pro, officially known as Gemini 3 Pro Image, has positioned itself as a competitor emphasizing photorealistic accuracy and text rendering. Unlike Midjourney, Nano Banana Pro is built API-first, meaning developers can integrate it directly into applications. It is accessible through the Gemini API at published price points and represents Google's higher-fidelity option compared to the faster Gemini 3.8 Flash family. Grok Imagine 2.0, built by xAI, takes a third approach by chasing developers who want a cheap, scriptable API. Grok Imagine ships with full, documented API pricing from launch and is distributed through xAI's developer API and third-party inference platforms.

A critical difference between these platforms is API availability. Midjourney remains accessible only through Discord and its web app at midjourney.com and still has no first-party generation API, a limitation that has persisted since the platform launched in 2022. This design choice shapes everything from pricing model to target audience. Midjourney's per-image cost is not directly comparable to competitors because the platform does not offer an official API. Nano Banana Pro charges $0.134 per image at 1K or 2K resolution and $0.24 at 4K. Grok Imagine charges a flat rate of $0.04 per image with no resolution tiers, making it the cheapest option on a per-image basis.

For commercial use, Midjourney requires businesses generating over $1 million in annual gross revenue to subscribe to the Pro or Mega tier. This tiered commercial requirement reflects a pattern seen across several AI image tools, where higher-priced tiers bundle stronger commercial usage rights alongside higher usage limits. Midjourney also offers video generation at 480p SD and 720p HD resolution on Standard, Pro, and Mega tiers in Fast mode, a capability not yet confirmed for Nano Banana Pro or documented in Grok Imagine's current API documentation.

The market share estimates for Midjourney within the broader AI image generation category cluster around a quarter of the total market, despite the emergence of these competing platforms. Bogen's choice to use Midjourney as part of his professional toolkit reflects the platform's continued dominance in community size and integration, even as competitors offer different trade-offs around API access, pricing, and image quality.