Over a year ago, I started conducting weekly interviews with technology company executives to find out where technology is driving real change in housing and to stay on top of trends, especially artificial intelligence (AI).
Open AI released the first version of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Mortgage and real estate companies began developing use cases in 2023. But what has happened over the past year, and especially the last six months, is incredible.
AI is changing the mortgage and real estate landscape more than any technology before it. And that impacts everything within the organization, from staffing levels and compliance to cybersecurity and, hopefully, profitability.
Looking back at over 50 interviews for the HousingStack Newsletter, what stands out is how quickly things are moving right now. Every executive I spoke to talked about the speed of change and how it’s both thrilling and unsettling. (Just last week, OpenAI announced a new interface called Canvas that provides a new way to write and code projects.) There’s real potential for first-mover advantage, so there’s less time to sit down and evaluate. But these executives still need to consider consumers and regulators.
Here are some standout quotes from executive interviews over the past few months about how quickly AI is evolving and what this means from an opportunity and risk perspective. All interviews are available on the Housing Stack archive page.
Manish Garg, Senior Vice President of Technology, EarnUp.
“AI allows us to identify security threat patterns that we may not have modeled, allowing us to address security in ways that were not possible before. We need to build predictive models. If so, you have to be able to predict certain things. This means that you are anticipating certain things. However, it is very difficult to assume that new security risks will arise in a year’s time. No one knows that, but with Gen AI, you don’t have to know everything. It can automatically identify new patterns without you having to tell them.”
Henry Lee, Lofty Chief Technology Officer, said:
“AI is a very exciting thing. I think we’ve had to completely scrap our roadmap three times now because technology and technology service providers are making incredible advances. And when we’re talking about AI capabilities, building them doesn’t necessarily mean you have to write code. It’s different from the old concept of building software capabilities because you’re tweaking the AI to give it more capabilities.
Jason Bressler, CTO, United Wholesale Mortgage:
On using AI for loan decisions: “I take the time to make sure I have full verifiable confidence in what I’m doing and what that modeling looks like. If you can test thoroughly and have that comfort level, you can talk to a human because you can show the logic behind what exactly that modeling did and why exactly it did it. It’s like being there.
“And we can actually show you where all the information was found, how it was extracted, how it was calculated. Everything creates a paper trail. People and machines Create a paper trail When it comes to technology, make sure you’re creating a good paper trail that can show why a decision was made to adjust it or justify that decision. Just check.”
Joe Tyrrell, CEO of Optimal Blue, said:
“The way we approach generative AI is, ‘Let me show you this particular problem that we’re trying to solve or this particular opportunity that we’re going to help you take advantage of.’ This generative AI buffet doesn’t really solve anything; it’s a great way to build on what we’ve already done at Optimal Blue and use generative AI to help customers get more and more value. They are leveraging more platforms.
said Sridhar Sharma, executive vice president and chief information officer at Mr. Cooper.
“If you look at other metrics, over the last five years as a company, we’ve grown about 40%. But if you look at our team, it’s been more or less stable. It’s a measure of how we’ve been able to scale and grow while increasing team productivity.”
Read the full interview here.
