Both opportunities and challenges are evident, according to company VP
Beyond streamlining workflows, the most valuable potential contributions of artificial intelligence to the mortgage space lie in consolidating disparate pieces of information and facilitating a more comprehensive understanding across all parties involved in every transaction.
“The more we can bake-in trust to the application, the faster we can get approvals and accurate pricing to our customers,” said Richard Paterson, vice president of innovation at Intellifi.
“The recent improvements in AI show the need to be able to quickly adopt for systems and processes to be able to take advantage of some of these things that could now be automated.”
Utilizing AI in such a manner would significantly boost business for mortgage professionals, Paterson predicted.
“If you think about the ability to help customers understand the product – the processes through chatbots and guided applications – I think it’s going to increase direct consumer engagement and success,” Paterson said. “AI-guided application processes can make sure that we’re asking people the right questions, not asking them to repeat things, and not asking them things they think we should already know.”
At the same time, Paterson acknowledged the possibility of a “kind of an arms race,” in that while data validation would indeed become more efficient with the mass deployment of AI platforms, the same technology can also be used in the generation of falsified information.
Such concerns have long been held by analysts such as author and futurist Bernard Marr. In a contribution for Forbes in 2019, Marr said that things can rapidly spin out of control when AI decision-making on areas such as mortgage applications, job interviews, or law enforcement becomes routine.
Marr cited the example of high-level corporate positions and the unintentional bias that AI might hold.
“An algorithm might pick a white, middle-aged man to fill a vacancy based on the fact that other white, middle-aged men were previously hired to the same position, and subsequently promoted,” Marr said. “This would be overlooking the fact that the reason he was hired, and promoted, was more down to the fact he is a white, middle-aged man, rather than that he was good at the job.”
The recently publicized advancements in AI has fuelled concerns of privacy violations, bias, and misinformation among the highest levels of government in the world’s most developed economies.
In the United States, the White House has invited executives of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris and top administration officials to discuss key artificial intelligence this week.
The invitation to the CEOs seen by Reuters said that US president Joe Biden is holding “expectation that companies like yours must make sure their products are safe before making them available to the public.”
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