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I started doing weekly interviews with tech executives over a year ago to find out where technology was making a real difference in housing and to keep a pulse on trends — especially artificial intelligence (AI).
Open AI launched the first version of ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022. Mortgage and real estate firms began developing use cases in 2023. But what has happened in the past year — and especially in the last six months — is incredible.
AI is changing the mortgage and real estate environment more than any technology before it. And it affects everything else in an organization, from staffing levels and compliance to cybersecurity and — hopefully — profitability.
Looking back over more than 50 interviews for our HousingStack newsletter, what stands out is how fast things move now. Every executive I’ve interviewed has mentioned the pace of change and how it can be both thrilling and worrying. (Just in the last week, OpenAI launched a new interface called Canvas that offers a new way to write and code projects.) There is a real possibility of first-mover advantage, so there’s less time to sit back and evaluate, but these executives still have to consider consumers and regulators.
Here are some of the standout quotes from executive interviews over the past few months on how fast AI is evolving and what this means in terms of opportunities and risk. You can find all of the interviews on our Housing Stack archives page.
Manish Garg, senior vice president of technology at EarnUp:
“AI has enabled us to address security in ways that was not possible earlier, by helping us identify security threat patterns that we may not have modeled. If you have to build a predictive model, it has to be able to predict certain things, which means you are assuming certain things. But it’s very hard to assume new security risks that will come a year from now. Like nobody knows that, but with gen AI, you don’t have to know everything. It can identify new patterns on its own without you having to tell it to do that.”
Henry Li, chief technology officer at Lofty:
“AI is very exciting because we’ve had to completely tear down our road map, I think, three times at this point, because the technology and the technology service providers are making tremendous progress. Because technology is evolving so fast, we have to evolve with the technology. And when you’re talking about AI features, it’s never a complete feature. Building AI features is different than the old concept of building software features because it’s not necessarily that you’re writing the code. You are tuning the AI to give the AI more capabilities.”
Jason Bressler, CTO at United Wholesale Mortgage:
On using AI to make loan decisions: “If you took the time to make sure that you have fully verifiable confidence in what you’re doing, what that modeling looks like, and you’ve tested it to death and you have that comfort level, it’s almost like talking to a human because you can show the logic behind exactly what that modeling did and exactly why it did it.
“And then you can actually point to where it found all the information, how it extracted it, how it calculated — all of it. Everything creates a paper trail; people and machines create paper trails. It’s just making sure that when it comes to technology you’ve created the proper paper trail to be able to show why the decisions were made to either adjust it or justify that decision.”
Joe Tyrrell, CEO of Optimal Blue:
“The way we’re approaching generative AI is going to be, ‘Let me show you the specific problem we’re going to solve or this specific opportunity we’re going to help you capitalize on.’ It’s not going to be this generative AI buffet that really doesn’t solve anything — it’s going to be very specific use cases, building upon what we’ve already done in Optimal Blue and using generative AI so that customers get more and more value as they leverage more platform.“
Sridhar Sharma, executive vice president and chief information officer at Mr. Cooper:
“If you look at another metric, over the last five years as a company, we have had about 40% growth. But when you look at our team, it’s been more or less steady. That’s an indicator for how we’ve been able to scale and grow while keeping our teams more productive.”
Read all the interviews here.
