AI usage is ramping up across many industries, but how are brokers utilizing AI tools?
It’s a well-known fact by now that artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the workplace and raising fundamental questions about how technology will impact and assist a swathe of industries in the years ahead.
But it’s more difficult to say with certainty how many mortgage brokers are using it heavily in their day-to-day work – and how much it’s affected the daily workflow of industry members in recent years.
In the US, a survey this year conducted by more than 250 mortgage brokers by Fort Lauderdale-based wholesale lender AD Mortgage revealed that more than half of brokers are already using AI on a regular basis. Roughly a third described themselves as daily users.
General-purpose tools such as ChatGPT dominate usage there, while mortgage-specific AI applications lag behind, the survey found.
North of the border, hard adoption figures are harder to come by – but it’s clear that AI, unsurprisingly, is playing an increasingly prominent role in the industry. Finastra’s recent State of the Nation survey (2025) found that 64% of financial institutions had recently adopted or improved their AI capabilities, roughly double the share reporting the same in 2022.
And the incentive to build AI fluency is also showing up in compensation data. PwC’s 2025 AI Jobs Barometer found that workers with AI skills earn 25% more on average than peers without them, while LinkedIn’s 2026 Jobs on the Rise report named AI literacy the most in-demand skill across the Canadian finance sector.
From ChatGPT to daily workflow
For brokers who are already using AI, adoption has tended to begin with consumer chatbots before narrowing toward tools suited to daily workflow.
George Macris, a Montreal-based broker and owner within the Dominion Lending Centres Group (DLCG) network, is among that number. “I started off using ChatGPT, like most people did, then moved to Perplexity and now I’m using Claude,” he told Canadian Mortgage Professional.
Macris also credits DLCG with helping adapt brokers to AI through Newton Connectivity Systems’ Velocity, which routes completed mortgage applications directly into lenders’ underwriting systems.
“At Dominion Lending Centres, we use and work with Velocity, and it’s been instrumental in helping us bring AI into our workflows form the very start,” he said. “I haven’t hit any limitations as of yet.”
Industry consensus seems to be clear on where AI will do the heaviest lifting first: document review, flagging missing paperwork, and drafting first-pass lender comparisons.
In April, Teranet senior vice president of commercial solutions Tim Rye told Canadian Mortgage Professional he viewed the role of AI for brokers as mining client databases to identify renewal opportunities well ahead of banks rather than using AI to replace advisory conversations outright.
Macris voiced a similar sentiment, emphasizing that he doesn’t see AI taking over the role of brokers outright. “AI is here to stay and will be integrated into everything we do moving forward, much like the World Wide Web was when it first came out,” he said. But it won’t replicate or replace the tasks that “actually need a human touch,” he said.
No single playbook
That survey of US-based brokers by AD Mortgage showed respondents remained largely split on which tools to adopt next. More than half were undecided, the poll showed, on their next technology investment.
In Canada, that could also be the case. Macris, for instance, cautioned against brokers taking a standardized approach and jumping into AI adoption without a plan. “It’s not one-size-fits-all,” he said. “Each broker needs to figure out what works for their own business, and the only way to find that out is to start.”
Nor should AI be viewed by brokers as a way to cut corners when it comes to building relationships or providing advice, according to Macris.
“AI will speed up the learning process for clients – helping them understand mortgages faster and with more clarity,” he said. “However, at the end of the day, clients will still need the human side for the advisory conversations that guide them through such a major decision.
“The mortgage broker will still be the trusted source. AI is just another tool clients can use. It’ll give them more knowledge about the industry, but in the end, clients still want to speak to someone who can guide them through the largest transactions of their lives.”
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