The mortgage industry’s AI problem is not what you think it is

Every conference I go to right now has the same conversation happening in every room. AI is going to transform the mortgage industry. AI is going to eliminate jobs. AI is going to make everything faster, cheaper, smarter. And maybe all of that is true, eventually. But I keep sitting in those sessions thinking we are spending a lot of energy on the wrong question. The question everyone is asking is: How do we adopt AI as fast as possible? The question worth asking is: What has to be true about your business before AI actually helps you? When the market tightened in 2022, the conventional wisdom was to cut. Trim the operations team. Outsource processing. Run lean and wait for things to turn. It was a rational response to a brutal environment, and a lot of companies did it. But here is what that decision actually produced: companies now patching together workflows across multiple vendors, training new staff from scratch and trying to deliver a consistent client experience through a system never designed to hold under pressure. The overhead went away for a while. The problems came back compounded. The companies best positioned to use AI well are not the ones that moved fastest on techn...