Loan Factory CEO Thuan Nguyen on why AI now rivals electricity and the internet as a shift for mortgage professionals
Within a year or two, I believe every loan officer in this country will have a personal artificial intelligence assistant working alongside them. That is not a distant prediction. It is the same shift we saw when electricity replaced manual labor and when the internet rewired how business gets done. Artificial intelligence is moving at that same scale, and loan officers who are not building it into their daily workflow are already leaving production on the table.
I run Loan Factory, and we have spent the past decade building our own technology stack in-house. That gives me a close view of what artificial intelligence can actually do inside a mortgage business today, not what it might do someday. It is a shift already visible across the industry, from UWM's launch of its own AI-powered loan officer assistant to the smaller brokerages retooling their entire workflow around it. The gap between loan officers using it well and those ignoring it is going to widen fast, and it is going to show up directly in closed loan volume.
Where the value is being left on the table
The biggest miss I see is loan officers treating artificial intelligence as a novelty instead of a core part of how they work. An assistant that is genuinely good at handling the tasks you either do not have time for or are not particularly strong at should be doing that work right now, freeing you up to spend your energy on growing production and serving clients.
At Loan Factory, we built an artificial intelligence application tool that has been live for two years. A borrower or loan officer uploads documents, and the system reads them and populates the application automatically. We are now extending that further so the tool can interview the borrower directly, the same way a loan officer would when taking an application. Between document reading and conversational interviewing, we can capture roughly 70 to 80 percent of an application from documents alone, with artificial intelligence gathering the rest through a normal conversation. Consumers are intimidated by long, complicated forms. When the process feels like a conversation instead of paperwork, the borrower experience improves significantly.
"That is the same shift we saw when electricity replaced manual labor and when the internet rewired how business gets done."
We have also built tools that review the 1003 and supporting documents to flag missing items before submission, along with systems that underwrite loans and calculate debt-to-income ratios. These are not experimental add-ons. They are doing work that used to require a person, and doing it in a fraction of the time. That trajectory tracks with a broader look at how AI is reshaping the American mortgage broker, where brokers describe recapturing hours once lost to administrative work.
Build versus buy
Building proprietary technology has worked for us because we have run an in-house engineering team for ten years. That is not the reality for most brokers and lenders, and it should not stop anyone from adopting artificial intelligence. For the vast majority of the industry, the right path is to subscribe to tools built by companies that specialize in this work, rather than trying to build from scratch without the resources to support it.
What separates real adoption from checking a box
Almost everyone in this industry will tell you they are using artificial intelligence. Far fewer are using it at a level that actually changes their output. There is a real difference between opening a chatbot occasionally and building it into a genuine productivity system, whether that means automating email triage and scheduling or setting up agents that handle the repetitive tasks you already know so well that you should not be spending your own time on them.
My advice to loan officers is to stop treating artificial intelligence like a junior assistant handling small errands. Treat it like a teacher, or a master craftsman who happens to know more than any of us individually could learn in a lifetime. Ask it anything you do not understand. Let it guide you through tasks you have never done before. It will do exactly what you ask of it, and at the same time it holds more collective knowledge than any of us possess on our own. That combination is what makes this moment different from every other technology cycle loan officers have lived through. It is also why I would point anyone unsure where they stand toward recent research on AI's impact on loan officer roles, which makes clear how much of the job is already exposed.
The mistake I see most often is loan officers picking a tool at random instead of evaluating what is actually available. Some platforms are excellent, some are not worth the subscription, and pricing varies widely. Take the time to test what fits your business before committing.
The industry has reached a point where using artificial intelligence casually is no longer enough to stay competitive. Loan officers who build it into every part of their workflow, from application intake to underwriting support to marketing, will out-produce those who treat it as an occasional convenience. I would encourage every originator reading this to start now, because the gap between the two groups is only going to grow.
