Rocket CTO Shawn Malhotra on how lenders should weigh AI

Rocket Cos. Chief Technology Officer Shawn Malhotra directs the tools that fuel his company’s industry-leading mortgage machine. That includes artificial intelligence-powered outreach responsible for 2.8 million texts, 4.5 million phone calls and 900,000 chats a month, messages that help Rocket’s individual loan officers reach 40% more clients. 

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National Mortgage News sat with Malhotra in September at the Digital Mortgage conference to learn how Rocket is specifically maximizing its AI, and why lenders need to put dollars outside of their tech stack. 

• How AI is specifically improving conversion: “We can get you that pre-approval letter if you qualify, all without having to talk to a human. Forty percent of those happen outside of business hours… Those clients convert 33% higher than those who come through other channels, and 10% of all of our pre-approvals now, even at our scale, are done with that agentic AI chat.”
• Will AI fully replace human originators?: “Many of them do want to talk to a loan officer. This is a really emotional, really important decision for a client. So there is always going to be some who do want to talk to a human, and so we’re all about choice, we want to give them the choice.”
• On the perfect balance between AI and LOs: “I don’t think there’s going to be a fixed percentage. … Will we find that happy medium? I think so, I think we’ll learn more and people will get more comfortable with it, but we have to kind of go on that journey with them as opposed to forcing them into one or the other. 
• The key area to not overlook: “Understand what proprietary data do you have, and is it being stored and is it being maintained in a way that it can power AI agents and AI systems? That’s number one is invest in that, because that is your differentiation. That is what’s going to set you apart. And that’s been a big part of our thesis.”
• Where to invest around AI: “A lot of people take AI and replace a part of their business or automate with it, but really what you want to do is reinvent parts of your business. Focus on the data, focus on the things where there’s a lot of human touch, things like prospecting, things like pipeline prioritization.”

Source: www.nationalmortgagenews.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.